MIT undergraduate mercury fulminate fly-catcher

Tom's personal undergraduate-era anecdote. Contact-explosive demonstration. Personal/biographical reference.

You want to make a contact explosive — this is something you probably shouldn't do at home, because if you don't know what you're doing it may go off before you want it to. For all you terrorists out there, I'm telling you some ways to terrorize the neighborhood using contact explosives. I remember as an undergraduate here, in the living group I was in, one guy got into mercury fulminate, which is a contact explosive. He would take some straight pins by his wooden desk, stand them up, put a grain of sugar on top of the head of the straight pin, then put a drop of mercury fulminate on top and let it dry. That made a contact explosive. The sugar would attract the flies — this was during the summer — and this was his fly catcher. The fly would come up, and boom, blow up the fly. A different MIT approach to fly catching.