Reagents from scratch, Part 1.

you look up thing-you-want in lange's handbook, and then synthesize it.

there are these huge books in libraries on synthesizing 'basic' reagents. mostly in chemical journals from the industrial revolution. very basic stuff, but it took cavemen 6000 years :^) to figure out

for instance preperation of ether is rather 'simple' but it is talked about in an almost alchemical way.

>>8457731
Well, here's the thing. I understand that I can use reference books to look up procedures and such, and I'm sure that once the "lab" got to a certain point, I would have to do that unless I want to reinvent the wheel. However, I often see many of these procedures require other reagents that one would have to either already have or have to buy.

I want to know how it's possible to start from a certain place, like say, dig up some dirt in the back yard and isolate stuff, and go from there, or something like the production of urea and then synthesize things from there. You know what I mean?

If we had to restart a chemistry lab from scratch post apocalypse, how would one go about doing it?

>>8457731
To go off your example, the preparation of ether would require ethanol and sulfuric acid.

Ethanol, we could just use basic fermentation to acquire some and separate it by distillation.

How would one make sulfuric acid to do this?
Well, reacting sulfur with oxygen and then carrying out other reactions and such.

Where would one get this sulfur? Could one extract it from the ground? Could they maybe salvage some from car batteries? Etc...

>>8457754

rocks + industrial revolution ----> H2SO4
where your rocks would be something like sulfur you find in the ground, and potassium nitrate you also find in the ground

i don't know the exact process, something like this in alcohol
2 NO2 + H2O → HNO2 + HNO3
SO2 (aq) + HNO3 → NOHSO4
NOHSO4 + HNO2 → H2SO4 + NO2 + NO
SO2 (aq) + 2 HNO2 → H2SO4 + 2 NO

>>8457801
That reaction would require NO2, how do we make that?

It also requires nitric acid and nitrous acid, so how do we make that?

See what I mean? How far down the rabbit hole do we go?

For the SO2, I was thinking we could acquire hydrogen sulfide from a rotten egg and then react it to generate SO2 and SO3. But what about the nitric acid and no2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Reagents_for_Organic_Synthesis

>>8457819
idk from looking up the ksp of saltpeter and just arbitrarily mixing it in, hoping the yield for the next phases are good enough

so2 is made from the convection ovens processing sulfur

consider that it took 1000s of people fucking around with giant industrial bins of chemicals to figure this out

>>8457745
It's possible but it would be a lot of work for not much gain.
I guess a youtube series of this could be popular though