We had a bowl of ice the other day for some reason. We also had some salt for some reason. Maybe we were making ice cream? In any event, we thought it would be neat to see how cold it actually is (because it feels really, REALLY cold).
Salt + Ice = Cold
Here are some chemical details
Here are some pictures!
Salt! Looks pretty cool up close.
We were using a bunsen burner hooked up to a propane tank to heat a spoon, and the salt in the spoon, red hot in order to melt the salt.
According to the wikipedia article on salt, the melting point is 1474 °F. See further comments after this picture…
It took a while, but we did get it to melt. I “poured” it onto a metal surface, and you can see it still glowing here:
And for reference, here is what a Sodium Chloride crystal looks like up close:
The Gahooa Perspective 