A TikTok star is attempting to make chemistry cool — enticing young viewers with videos of experiments narrated with his street slang verses.

“Aight? Boom! Right here, man’s got some pure silver metal. Ya get me? Now pure silver is not magnetic, however it can conduct an electrical current, and dat, y’a know what I’m saying? Aight? Cool,” intones Big Manny, aka Emanuel Wallace.

“Now what we’re going to do, yeah, is melt down the silver, ya know what I’m saying. We’re gonna slap it into the furnace, and dat, then we’re gonna bust on the power, ya get me?”

Wallace’s films range from exploring the electromagnetic field of silver, to making brass — or seeing what happens when you replace the nitrogen in Nike Air trainer soles with oxygen. With 1.7 million followers and 28.2 million likes on TikTok, he has become a celebrity chemist, with appearances on Blue Peter, a book deal, talks at schools and conferences and teachers using his videos in class.

Wallace has a degree in biomedical science and was working as a school lab technician when he noticed that students’ science knowledge had dropped after the pandemic. He started posting the videos in 2021 with his trademark commentary that mixes Jamaican patois with street slang (both of his parents are Jamaican).

“I don’t speak in a conventional way. It’s quite conversational. I speak to the students as if I was speaking to a friend. It’s quite friendly, it’s informal. What I aim to do is deliver the science in a way that is as simple as possible and I try and break it down into bite-sized chunks.”

He is not alone. This week research revealed that 67 per cent of language teachers surveyed by Trinity College London said they included slang in their lessons.

“I had a lot of students approaching me and saying they saw my videos. And during the exams, they use my videos to answer the questions and record the information. And they said that it was helping them with their homework and generally just motivating them and inspiring them to take their science lesson seriously,” Wallace said.

In 2022 he gave up his job to focus on the videos full-time, and now has a string of blue chip brands wanting to work with him from Google, Meta, Ray-Ban and Intel, as well as Idris Elba’s charity DSYF (Don’t Stop Your Future) and the Francis Crick Institute.

He feels he could become a role model for those not ordinarily drawn to science. “When you think of a chemistry teacher, or a science teacher, typically we think of an older person in their lab coat, speaking using very complex scientific terms. You don’t really think of somebody who looks like me, somebody who comes from my background and talks the way I talk.

“What that’s going to do is to show people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, people who are possibly underachieving at schools, that if this guy looks like me, and he can achieve that … then what’s gonna stop me from me doing it?”

Wallace, 26, grew up in Dagenham, east London, and studied at the University of East London. Both his mother and sister work in the NHS as nurses, his brother is a teacher and his father works in a music studio.

He feels that young black pupils are not encouraged to do science as much as white and Asian children and fears that adults judge them because of the way they speak, adding “there may be a racial element as well”.

“People think that the way you talk defines how intelligent you are, but that’s not the case.”

He wants black scientists talked about more in school, like James Andrew Harris, a nuclear scientist who was the first African-American to contribute to the discovery of new elements.

“I feel like the reason why they don’t want to go for it is because of how it’s portrayed … it just doesn’t seem like something that is for young black people. Because we don’t really see any black scientists, we don’t really hear of any growing up. When we’re taught in schools, we are only taught about scientists that are not black. The representation of scientists … and that’s why I’m trying to change the face of science.”