This was a teenage co-worker in a laboratory. He had read in a book that nitrogen tri-iodide was so unstable that if you touched it with a feather it would explode (it's those little brown crystals that kids pup on floors and doorknobs that made cracking noises when touched).
Anyway, Don what what we called a 'bucket chemist'. Instead of making a gram or so, he took a liter beaker and made half a beaker full of soggy crystals. There must have been about 1/4 kg of the shit. He tipped the soggy mess onto a huge sheet of filter paper and left it on the top of a low shed in the sun to dry. He left the (mostly) empty beaker with it.
The top of the shed was about head height after a while, he estimated that it was dry, so he took a broom handle and fastened a feather on the end, and proceeded to waggle it around on the seemingly dry crystals. Nothing happened. He waited longer and tried again, nothing! He proceeded to hit the stuff with the broom handle, still nothing.
After several more attempts, he gave up. Picked up the piece of filter paper and contents and dumped all th crystals back into the beaker, well I say dumped, but the dump never completed, there was a flash, a load scream and a purple haze. Thank God Don had instinctively closed his eyes and kept them closed. His entire front, shirt, lab coat, face and hair were now a dark brown from the iodine and purple iodine vapor was pouring off his face. He was smokin'! For real, purple smoke.
He was rolling on the ground in agony. The iodine kept vaporizing off his face, his eyebrows, lashes, front of his hair was gone, everyone tried to help him, but we has no fucking idea, what we could do other than carry him on a stretcher to our company can and **** him to hospital.
He was off work for 3 or 4 weeks, I don't exactly remember, but apparently it was a miracle that he wasn't completely blinded for life. I understand his throat and lungs were also damaged because he had inhaled some of the vapor whilst screaming in pain.
We did a lot of dumb things in the 1950's and 1960's, but that was probably the dumbest I ever saw!