Making copper (I) oxide using Fehling's solution

This is a pretty OTC way of making cuprous oxide. Sodium hydroxide is easily found as lye drain cleaner, Rochelle salt can be made from cream of tartar (there are many vids on YT showing how to do this), copper sulfate is available in hardware stores as a pond algae control product, and sucrose is table sugar. I suppose one could use this procedure as a method for producing copper metal powder by substituting glucose intentionally, but it's easier to just drop zinc dust or iron filings into a copper sulfate solution.

When I mentioned mechanical loss of the cuprous oxide product, I probably lost a few points, 0.1-0.2g, since it's such a dense powder.

If it wasn't clear, 100g of sucrose was also used.

Glucose is oxidized to gluconic acid, fructose (assuming the hydrolysis of sucrose takes place) is tautomerized to one of several aldoses, which is then oxidized to the respective aldonic acid. Fructose is a ketose, an α-hydroxy ketone, and in basic solution, it's converted to an aldose through an enediol intermediate.

The paper that cites the 1941 book* that mentions hydrolysis of sucrose with strongly alkaline copper reagents: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jf60...

*I thought it was a paper cited, not a book, so I'm incorrect when I say "1941 paper" in the video. The book is "Physical and Chemical Methods of Sugar Analysis," 3rd ed., p. 787, Wiley, New York. 1941, by Browne, C. A. and Zerban, F. W.