Video: Make your own wildfire with science! (Or maybe don’t)

Ever needed to fill your catapults with wildfire in order to defend your city from your invading relatives? Have no fear, science has an answer for you, as revealed in a video from YouTube channel NurdRage. Wildfire has been used to great effect on two occasions on Game of Thrones: once by Tyrion to destroy Stannis’ fleet in “Blackwater,” and again when Cersei used stockpiles laid under the Sept of Baelor by the Mad King Aerys to eliminate everyone who ever betrayed, hurt, or just mildly annoyed her in “The Winds of Winter.”

We are led to believe, on both the shows and in the books, that the secret recipe for wildfire is a closely guarded secret of the Alchemist’s Guild, but modern science we have cracked it. Obviously, the real-life version of wildfire isn’t nearly as combustable as the Westerosi one—mostly, it’s just green flames—but still, a disclaimer: this will actually create fire. Fire burns things. Do not attempt to create this under anything but the most controlled circumstances. And by that we mean don’t be an idiot and burn down your house, apartment, or other domicile. If you have trouble boiling water, this isn’t for you.

That second batch our benefactor creating seems much more impressive than the first, and more in line with what we see on the show, although hopefully it still can’t do this:

This is hopefully too tricky for most to recreate, but adding 200 grams of borax to 650mL of methanol, along with 100g of sulfuric acid, followed by chilling it for 10 hours at 54 degrees Celsius will give you something approximating the magical substance feared throughout the Seven Kingdoms. Again, however, we must stress that unless you want to end up like Lancel Lannister, do not attempt to brew your own wildfire.

For a demonstration, the good folks at NurgRage lent a bottle of their homebrewed wildfire to the other good people at Pixel Litch, who made a little model of the Sept of Baelor, and then…

h/t Nerdist