I'm pretty sure it has to be copper metal. I believe it plays an important roll in dissolving hydrogen, or something similiar to that.. though I am not totally sure that is how it works.

Start looking into orbitals and you will find why they change colors the way the do Prepuce. As the electrons change energy levels and bind to other atoms to fill those levels they will alter the wavelengths of photon they absorb.

Sad thing is I know the answer to your question and a much better explination is on the top of my head but I can not seem to recall it no matter how hard I try

Don't do drugs..... at lest not the ones the doctor gives you....Those ones could fuck you up big time

Just as an aside, I can assure you there are MUCH better ways to create or just obtain formaldehyde but the experiment is helpful in that it will help broaden your/our understanding of the corpus of chemistry in general.

BTW, KMnO4 in warm H2O will almost assuredly created formaldehyde.

Okay I will do my best to respond one by one but promise nothing as I was about to sleep and, in retrospect mistakenly, allow the affects of carisoprodol and clonazepam take their effect.  But I will fight it off to try to make some clarifications.  I might need to pick this up tomorrow but in all the textbooks I've ever read the Birch reduction was just like you described.  It was a solvated electron provided by an alkali metal.  In the ghetto clandestine arena lithium is used but the Birch is generally done with Sodium as an electron donor.  Solvent is ammonia and the co-solvent, and this is where the difference comes in, is the use of some alcohol (generally EtOH).  The difference is that the thing reduced is a conjugated double bond, as in a double bond in the resonance structure that is the phenyl ring.

"Birch Reduction


The Birch Reduction offers access to substituted 1,4-cyclohexadienes.

I was unable to copy the image.  I'm just not very knowledgeable when It come's to computes.  But here's an excellent link to show you what I mean:

http://www.organic-chemistry.org/namedreactions/birch-reduction.shtm

Another good explanation occurs in wikipedia:

The Birch reduction is the organic reduction of aromatic rings with sodium and an alcohol in liquid ammonia to form 1,4-cyclohexadienes. The reaction was reported by the Australian chemist Arthur John Birch (1915–1995) in 1944.[1][2][3][4][5][6] This reaction provides an alternative to catalytic hydrogenation, which usually reduces the aromatic ring all the way to a cyclohexane (after the initial reduction to a cyclohexadiene, catalytic reduction of the remaining (nonaromatic) double bonds is easier than the first reduction).

Lithium and potassium can substitute for sodium, and alcohols are ethanol and tert-butanol.

An example is the reduction of naphthalene:[7]

In an instance, if you add an alcohol to the reduction of ephedrine you will not get methamphetamine but some 1,4-dichydrcyclohexane derivative.

Notice that "Chem Guy" called his article "Birch-Like Reductions"

I have to admit to not having the concentration to read the whole thing just now but read the JOC article Chem Guy added and it states:

"... In the course of this paper we are reporting the effects of water and alcohols on the course of the [Li-amine] reduction." "We found that, in the presense of alcohol, the Li-amine combonation can be used quite sucessfully to form dihydro aromatics."

In that experiment they used the typical Birch Reduction to reduce isopropylbenzene to 2,5 dihydroisoproplylbenzene.

Anyway, you are right about the KMnO4 but I have some thoughts on the matter I might add in the next post.  As for the Birch, I might be splitting hairs here but I am under the understanding that it is always used to reduce conjugated double bonds.  At least that's how it reads in every text I have ever read, even Vogel.

Moriarty

P.S.  Note, the spelling mistakes were Chem Guy's, not my own  .

Check this out Prepuce http://www.teatimechemistry.com/index.php?cmd=demos simular to what your looking for except they used Acetone and you want Methanol here. Either way this is what my old chemistry books demonstrated. My guess would be you could have a copper "steel wool" attached to a lid which you heat up and quickly seal off. Feed air in thru one side and collect the off gas on the other.

I may just make something like this to A show how it can be done and B produce acetaldahyde for further oxidation to AcOH.

Sedit, Moriarty, I'm really and humbled by, not to mention envious of, your knowledge of chemistry. From reading the discussion I could ask a hundred questions, but I'll spare you and everyone else. What I will say is that the solvated electrons sound like a fascinating subject to study. I knew that the method of reducing E with AA nd lithium was arguably not a true Birch, but had no idea that the details would be so interesting. I"ll have to look it up in one of the 100 e-books I've got.

I did try out my idea of copper sulfate in water, and used KMnO4 as the oxidizer. I couldn't see that it did anything. (I might mention that I was hoping that whatever formaldehyde was created would be absorbed by the water, otherwise I'd have a hard time containing it.)

I tried it once more with H2SO4, and that didn't make any formaldehyde either.

That was when I started worrying again about the possibility of causing an explosion, so that was where I stopped.

PP

Hey... wait Prepuce... Perhaps check the latest little tidbit in my random experiment thread. It gives a few little details of a problem Im having but it may just be exactly what you need. I am looking for Acetic acid but due to the volatile nature of acetaldahyde it expells itself from the reaction before it gets to the carboxylate I am looking for. Basicly its just nitric acid created insitu as the oxidising species. I tryed to heat it to push the reaction along faster and more complete hoping a reflux would solve my problem but I am still having the same issues.

I will start looking into oxidation of alcohols to aldahydes with Nitric acid tommorow to see what I can pull up. It may just be a winner for simple volatile aldahydes.

Well I have been hoping that the heating took off but it never did .... Why the nitric esters don't form has got me stumped about this whole reaction in general. I have to read more on Magpies thread to find out how this all works. My nitric has never been concentrated though. I formed it with 45% H2SO4+NaNO3 one time and 34%HCl + NaNO3 the other time. Either way its not of extream concentrations and it could just be the problem Im having. But in Prepuce's case its just what he wants. To form the aldahyde and move on.

Well the synthesis that Magpie follows.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=12832

Calls for 70-80% HNO3 IIRC yet Magpie followed thru with only 68% Nitric. Still all in all I can't see why esters are not formed in this reaction but it is what it is and carboxylates are the end product of the oxidation.

I will open a whole threed soon as I want the input of the community before I release my current method for making glacial acetic acid from an (aq)solution of AcOH.

I'm nothing if not stubborn. I tried once more with copper and MeOH. I used a deeper container and instead of a wire I used a piece of 1/4 inch copper tubing. It made a big differnece. As soon as the red hot pipe hit the MeOH it started sizzling, and formaldehyde started pouring out of the other open end of the pipe. It was so strong I had to leave the area until it aired out.

Then I got the brilliant idea to bend the tubing and insert the open end into a flask of water as the hot end entered the MeOH, hoping I'd catch the formaldehyde as the water took it up.

This last didn't work well, though. There wasn't much pressure behind the vapor apparently, so I tried keeping the open end just above the water. I know a little came over but couldn't tell from looking at the water, and dripping some acid into the water didn't do anything. It did smell like formaldehyde, though.

I still can't get from here to self sustaining reaction, however. I admit that when the hot copper was inerted into the MeOH flask that it sizzled away for significantly longer than it would if I was sticking it into water, for example. But it didn't continue. every time it would stop, and I could tell when it was about to do so. The sizzling would get suddenly louder right before.

I thought that was interesting, but something else was even more surprising to me. I heated up a steel nail and put it in the MeOH, and it had the same effect as the copper. I also tried a piece of aluminum, which did nothing. I was going to try zinc but by then the air was getting hard to breath again so I stopped.

Sedit, I'll have to take a look at  your random thread. It sounds like an interesting possibility.

I want to thank Heisenberg for warning about the explosion potential. I hate those.

PP