Colorful Campfire

Yesterday we talked about the beautiful bright red color of Bull’s Blood Beets.  It got me to thinking about a recent fire we built in our fire pit in the backyard.  Quite often we will gather up all the sticks that fall out of the trees in our yard and we'll burn them in our fire pit.  We will place our patio chairs around the pit, light it up and enjoy just sitting around the fire, visiting and staring into the flames.

But why did the bright color of Bull's Blood Beets get me thinking about a fire in the fire pit? 

Benjamin stoking the fire

Benjamin collects metals of all kinds, including aluminum, brass, and copper.  He'll gather up a bunch of it and take it to a recycling center in Lake Charles to redeem for cash.  If you look at the 3 o'clock position on the fire pit below you'll see a coiled up piece of copper.  That's not part of a moonshine still.  He was seeing if he could make the copper melt, but we determined that copper melts at 1,984 degrees Fahrenheit.  A campfire will only get about 930 degrees.  So while he found that he couldn't melt the copper, he could sure get it soft enough to hammer it all out flat.

Heating up copper

As he heated the copper we started to notice something odd, though.

See anything strange?

First a little bit...

Green Flames

And then a lot!  The flames leaping up out of the fire pit above where he had laid the pieces of copper were a beautiful green color!

Why is this happening?  Why does burning copper cause green flames?  Well, Google told me that green flames are caused by burning copper.  Now I barely remember these terms from high school chemistry, but apparently when you burn copper, you free valence electrons and make ions.  The energy that the electron gives off in this process is emitted as a photon in the color of green.

It sure was pretty, but I'm not going to pretend I still remember what an ion or photon is!  Sure is pretty though.