Modern Mechanix >> The Gas That Makes You Laugh

Once, on an episode of MythBusters, they attempted to build a single-stage rocket using technology that existed back during the Civil War. At one point while thinking about potential fuels, they took ILM-alumus whipping boy Grant and assigned him the task of making (making, not finding) nitrous oxide.

Nitrous oxide is laughing gas. Since The Discovery Channel obviously wants to avoid any potential lawsuits, they went ahead and bleeped out the relevant chemicals and the overall process. The end result was uninformative pictures of things being heated, and then bubbles of gas sliding up water-filled tubes.

I guess the legal department was just being cautious, because it turns out that Popular Science spilled the beans in 1949, and from the illustrations it is very clearly the same type of apparatus Grant used on the show.

So if you've got any ammonium nitrate and a lot of chem lab equipment laying around, go nuts.