Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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In this video I show my journey to turn styrofoam into the incredibly expensive and futuristic chemical rubrene through a ton of interesting organic chemistry reactions while creating an assortment of tars and trying to grow as a chemist.

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Also, excuse me for my poor speaking, English is not my native language, so I have some trouble with pronunciation - in case you don't understand something there are always subtitles made by me.

0:00 Intro
0:16 What's the deal with rubrene?
5:18 Making styrene from styrofoam
8:30 Making dibromostyrene
10:38 Making phenylacetylene
15:44 Preparing for the Grignard
19:34 The Grignard reaction
23:05 Purifying the cursed alcohol
25:47 Making rubrene (damn you Vogel)
30:54 Rubrene experiments
34:09 Outro

#chemistry
#experiment
#beautiful
#demonstration
#science
#interesting
#cool
#reaction
#glow
#fluorescence
#organicchemistry
#future
#technology
#led
#amazing