from Hacker News

The Long History of Nitrous Oxide

by sksxihve on 4/16/25, 3:01 PM with 16 comments

• by EncomLab on 4/19/25, 4:20 PM

  As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in St. Louis - nitrous "whippets" were sold in every grocery and convenience store. I never considered myself a drug user when I was a teen - because every drug I enjoyed (nitrous, cough syrup, caffeine pills) were all legally available....unlike those dirty hippies and their marijuana!

  It's been decades since I hit a balloon - but man those moments when I did were incredible.

• by chuck8088 on 4/19/25, 6:08 PM

  Sorry for the horribly off-topic post, but as a car enthusiast, nitrous used to be one of the cheapest ways to make your car faster. However, recent price fluctuations (and making sure nitrous is reserved for medical uses first), along with the advent of a market flooded with cheap turbos from China, have made nitrous not worth the investment.

  One promising technology that may gain some traction is compressed air [https://casupercharging.com/]. It's still a forced induction method and relatively simple to install compared to procharging or supercharging. That said, forced air has some major drawbacks — a very large tank, for one.

• by analyte123 on 4/19/25, 6:50 PM

  >While Hadland says it would take a lot of repeated heavy use of nitrous oxide to see these effects, over time such use could also cause permanent neurological issues.

  This is not a could. Repeated abuse of nitrous, perhaps as little as daily use over 2 months, does cause neurological issues, including spinal cord damage and paralysis [1].

  [1] https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31625167/

• by gcanyon on 4/20/25, 12:09 PM

  I used nitrous oxide just one time, and it wasn't to get high: this was before the web, and I had read somewhere that the feeling of the need to breathe is not a result of lack of oxygen, but a buildup of carbon dioxide. My friends were doing whippits, and I figured that nitrous oxide wouldn't allow for the production of carbon dioxide, so if I breathed it -- no sense of need to breathe, right?

  So I breathed out as much as I could, breathed in a full lungs-full of nitrous, and held my breath. I wish I had timed it, because I have no idea how long I held my breath, but at least 15-30 seconds, because I held my breath for a bit, then I was talking a bit (not breathing in, just out) somewhat, then holding my breath again and thinking.

  My whole body went numb. I was giddy. My vision closed in and started to dim. And through it all I felt no need to breathe at all. As my vision was going away I was idly thinking, "Hmm, still no need to breathe. But my vision is going away, so I should probably breathe. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, no need to breathe but I should breathe anyway. What was that? Oh yeah, breathe before I lose consciousness because these idiots are all high and if I just died here, they'd let me. What? Oh, breathe, moron." And I breathed.

  Like I said, I didn't time it, so I don't know how long it lasted. I idly breath-hold for fun, and I can easily go two minutes with no prep, but obviously that's with oxygen in my lungs, so it could have been anywhere from 20 seconds up to a minute or more?

  I did the counter-experiment a bit later: we had dry ice, so I put some in the sink and let it build up to a foggy unspecified concentration. I breathed all the way out, carefully lowered my face in, and breathed in.

  Or, I tried to. My entire body was instantly on fire, and I violently coughed it out in a split second. Hypothesis confirmed! :-)

• by woleium on 4/19/25, 4:11 PM

  “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” Psychologist and philosopher William James, under the effects of nitrous oxide.

• by drivebyhooting on 4/19/25, 5:05 PM

  I had hoped this was going to be about N2O as an oxidizer for rocketry.