ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

After you’ve had a successful launch of the Diet Coke rocket, try it again with different beverages, such as Diet
Sprite, seltzer, etc., or different objects dropped in. What is the difference between these reactions?
Albert Antoine - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Sparking an Interest: I believe that my interest in chemistry particularly was sparked when I was in
junior high school and some of the descriptions of chemistry and chemical reactions were just fascinating. And I
was interested in science in general. Yes. I liked math and we had physics in high school, no laboratories but we
had physics as a course and…I believe I just enjoyed the, that grouping of studies, math, physics and chemistry.
And when I was in college, why, anyone who was studying chemistry and biology, let’s say, why, the expectation
was that you would be going to medical school. The idea of doing chemistry as a career was something that
was foreign to our neighborhood. I didn’t know any chemists…Again, people that I knew who were going to
college and going on, most of them were thinking of going into medical school…So the idea of chemistry as a
career was not fi rmly rooted in my mind ‘cause people would say, “Oh, well, what are you gonna do with your
studies?” I’d say, “I don’t know, be an educated bum maybe,” but I didn’t really mean it. But I did not know of
chemistry as a career and what one would do with with chemistry. I fi gured I would worry about that when after
I fi nished, after I graduated.
Clip 2 - Desegregates a Lunch Counter: When I was in service in Columbus [Ohio], one day we heard a buzz
going through the community, “Oh, did you hear about those soldiers that desegregated a place up on High
Street?” And so we heard all this and found out they were talking about us, a group of us who had gone into a
place on High Street and we were heading back to campus. This was when I was at Ohio State [University] in
the service, in the Army Specialized Training Program. And we stopped at this place on High Street and ordered
something to eat or drink, I don’t recall. And the place was a small place. They had a few seats, and they had
some stand-up counter. And anyway, we ordered our food and drink and rather than take it out to campus, we
decided to eat it there. And so we did and didn’t realize this was a fi rst and evidently the providers were
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Chemistry