hello youtube today I'm gonna be making a very interesting chemistry device called a storm glass it's used to predict the weather based on differences in solubility that are caused by differences in temperature and pressure so what I've got here on the left is 40 milliliters of ethanol 200-proof ethanol 33 milliliters of distilled water on the right and the chemicals that I have are 2.5 grams of potassium nitrate that we made in a previous video 2.5 grams of ammonium chloride that we made in a previous video and 10 grams of natural camphor these will be made into two different solutions solution a on the Left will be the ethanol and camphor and solution B is everything else on the right so all we need to do is dissolve everything in the appropriate solutions the water solution should be fairly easy to make because both of the chemicals are very soluble in water but the ethanol and camphor solution might be a bit harder so what I'm gonna do is use my magnetic stirrer / hot plate that I got for Christmas so we'll toss in a stir bar and let that stir and then everything dissolve appropriately you may have to heat it slightly as well to dissolve everything so I'm gonna do that and I'll put that on low heat while that's stirring I'll just mix up the other solution manually and once everything is dissolved then we can combine both of the solutions together all right everything's been dissolved in both the solutions so now the next step is to just combine them I'm going to do that while the thing is still stirring just to ensure that I get even mixing and this is actually pretty interesting because you can see once the the two are combined it immediately forms a precipitate and that's sort of the key to the workings of the storm glass the idea is that solubility of chemicals changes based on factors such as temperature and pressure so when those change it should change the precipitation that goes on in the storm glass and it'll form different patterns based on what the approaching weather is supposed to be like from what I've read these are able to predict the weather about 24 to 48 hours in advance and I've seen a number of different really interesting precipitates happen like stars or so it almost looks like snow in the glass it's really really neat and also when mixing these you're likely going to need to heat the solution a bit just to get rid of all the precipitates so really you want to have a clear solution so that when you pour it into your final container you don't want to leave behind any precipitates so I'll just heat this up until the the cloudiness goes away all right now everything has been dissolved completely and the solution is cleared up so I'll turn off the heat in the stirring and then we'll pour it into this jumbo test-tube that I have here and this will be the container for the strong glass and the final step of this is to seal the test tube with I'm gonna use a stopper and some electrical tape but I don't want to do that until the thing has cooled down to room temperature because I've done this before and if you seal it before it cools down it sets up a pressure differential and that's actually caused the test tube to crack so I'm gonna wait until it cools down to seal everything up so I've let everything cool down to room temperature and sealed it up you can see that I just have a the blue stopper is in there and I wrapped some duct tape around it to further seal everything and prevent it from popping off I had a little bit extra too so I put it in that smaller test tube next to it you can see that there's already some precipitates forming and it's making the larger test tube look rather cloudy with a lot of really small dots and the smaller ones actually behaving a little bit differently and you can see that that the the shape and size of the container actually makes a significant difference in what this thing looks like so that's actually pretty interesting the smaller one looks like snowflakes almost a lot of small stars are actually pretty beautiful so here's another view of the difference between the two so the best place to put this would be either outside or in a non air-conditioned room like a garage or a screen porch or something like that yeah so that's what I'm going to do so I've left both my storm glasses out overnight and as you can see the majority of it has crystallized completely I think that's mainly due to the temperature as it's 40 degrees right now and I'm sure it got quite a bit colder overnight and it seems to me that temperature has the largest effect on these things I've seen this do a number of much more interesting patterns in the crystallization but I just haven't gotten any on tape yet so I hope to update this video in the coming months you