As teenagers, my friends and I started our "project" innocently enough. Fill a balloon with acetylene and touch it with a sparkler and you get a nice mushroom cloud filled with soot (carcinogen). I was taking welding at the time, and suggested we mix some O2 in with that. We took a balloon (sausage shaped), filled it with the mix, and thought hey, this is going to be more powerful so why don't we tie it to a brick and sink it into a 5 gal bucket full of water. I don't really recall why we thought that was safer. This wasn't a large balloon, only the tip was showing above the water. No mushroom cloud this time! Just a white flash and a spray of water. The bucket was split cleanly in half. Next we used a kitchen garbage bag, and quickly "graduated" to black trash bags. We'd fill a bag and tie it to a 12' sapling we'd cut down. Then light a candle and use the sapling to drag it over the candle. Wow!!!! It's like the bang only fire works on the 4th of July but only 12' away. The memory of the white flash would last a couple of minutes when you closed your eyes afterward. The bags would be reduced to tiny pieces. This was over 30 yrs ago. I think if one were to do this today, the cops would be there quite quickly.
