brilliant as silver

When I was young my Dad bought me some mercury home from work.. I loved how it moved when I shook the bottle and the weight of it.

When I had my own kids I didn’t want it around, so our local council had set up a event where you could dispose of household liquids like old paints and solvents, so I took it down. When I drove up, the guy asked me what I was disposing of so I said mercury. It was bizarre. I was told to stay in the car and a guy came out of a shed in a full hazmat suit with one of those pairs of metal tongs to retrieve it from me.

I remember Dad telling me that miners used to collect gold pan tailings in mercury and then of a night they would hollow out a potato and put the mercury in, and then put that in the camp fire.. it would burn off the mercury and leave a little ingot of gold.

Probably because they didn't know WHICH type of mercury you had. Organic mercury can kill on touch with a single drop. Best not to take chances.
- I had to search for "organic mercury", it's dimethylmercury and it doesn't look like mercury at all. Do people really call it "mercury" or "organic mercury"? It's on par with pounds as a measure of mass, weight, and force by the amount of confusion, I'd say 🤔
  ::: spoiler sad story that was in the top of search results about dimethylmercury:
  sad but also a bit ironic fate 🫡 that's why I prefer not to do dangerous things even when protection and/or safety is in place.
- Yeah. Elemental is mostly harmless if you aren't around it for long and don't inhale vapors.
- Source? I'm not sure who to believe. People on the internet who claim it's safe enough that you can pick it up or people on the internet who claim kills you if you touch it.
  I'm not going to go swimming in a mercury pool any time soon either way.
Out in the edge of the lower mainland of BC by Hope, where there was a mini gold rush a long time ago you can find lots and lots of mercury sitting below the water levels when the streams dry out during the summer.
It is all left behind from the miners back in the day.
- That sounds like it would look really lovely. Got any pictures?
It's actually harmless if not ingested. They were being weird.
- Its also harmless, generally, when ingested as the gastrointestinal absorption of elemental mercury is negligible. It is inhalation that is most concerning with elemental mercury.
We also had an innocent looking little (maybe 100ml or 200) bottle of mercury at school. Mostly for the startling weight when it was passed around to demonstrate density.

Nine out of ten hatters recommend that you don't do this. The tenth hatter purple monkey dishwasher.

(Victorian-era hat makers were notorious for going mad because they used mercury to treat felt cloth.)

I wondered what the Mercury actually did with the felt, as I couldn't think of anything from the top of my hat:
Mercury made the felting process in hat production more efficient. The compound used to moisten the fibers was Mercury Nitrate, a process known as carroting. It produced a superior-quality felt, which in turn, resulted in higher-quality hats
- Mercury Nitrate
  Which, should be noted, is not the mercury show in the picture. Mercuric nitrates are a white/yellow dry powder that is the result of mixing mercury with nitric acid. The process of making mercuric nitrates, and carroting itself, both result in rather toxic fumes that you really should not breathe in.
  Handling liquid mercury is basically almost harmless as it absorbs through the skin really slowly and doesn't produce much vapours. Putting it in acid, heating it up, and putting the cloth treated with it in an oven is not.
Is this the origin story of The Mad Hatter? 🙄
- Could have been. I know Lewis Carroll liked to lampoon issues of the day in his writing.
- I think the original idiom was "mad as a hatter" which was eventually shortened to "mad hatter", possibly due to the Alice in Wonderland character.
I wonder what secondary compounds this was creating. Elemental mercury is pretty much fine, but if it was reacting with other things to create wacky fun times...
- they chewed the leather to hides to soften them, IIRC. so it wasn't just getting on their hands, they were ingesting it.
- I think it was mercury nitrate. Much more soluble.
Sneaky Simpsons reference here for those who didn’t notice.
I thought it was the vapours from using mercury inside that got them.
It's so much harder believing in six impossible things before breakfast when you're allergic to quicksilver.

If anyone else was reminded of that video of a 110lb anvil floating in a tub of mercury, here you go. Don't try this at home.

didn't they use to use shitloads of mercury for floating the lenses on a lighthouse, letting it turn without too much in the way of friction?
- Anyone who’s studied high school physics will also remember one of the biggest blunders of modern experimental physics: the Michelson-Morley Experiment which infamously attempted to prove the existence of the aether but rather gave them a pretty clear confirmation of a lack of the aether. It actually ended up helping form one of the basic tenets of Einstein’s Special Relativity, which is that the speed of light is constant within an inertial frame of reference.
  They floated their interferometer setup on a sandstone slab measuring 1.5m x 1.5m x 0.3m in a giant circular trough of mercury in order to provide near-zero friction and reduce vibrations.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
- That's right, I often forget about that.

From the same issue:

Is, uhh... Is he floatin' on a pool of mercury?
- That he is. Looks like fun, right?

Pure mercury metal is pretty chill, just done fuck with organic mercury compounds

Vapours too.

Metallic elemental mercury (what you see in the picture) is relatively harmless to touch. Arguably, it’s more dangerous to rub a lead ingot, for example. However, mercury vapours (and mercury does evaporate slowly but consistently) absorb quite easily when you breath them with a ton of undesirable effects, often related to central nervous system, which is never a nice thing. Broken mercury thermometer won’t kill you. Playing with the puddle inside a non-ventilated room might kill you in several decades. Working in the non-open-air environment where mercury is always present will slowly worsen your health as mercury accumulates.

Organic compounds of mercury are what actually is nasty. A short contact with a few millilitres of that — and you will have to recover for a long-long time, if ever. However, the scary stories about methylmercury rarely mention that there are other organic compounds that are just as toxic or worse. I wouldn’t get close to any organic cadmium compound, for example, and would be extremely wary of its inorganic salts too. The thing is it’s extremely unlikely that you encounter any of these chemicals ever in your life, and if you do encounter them, then you are likely a professional who knows exactly how and why you are to deal with them.

Metallic murcury can't actually be absorbed through the skin, and it can theoretically be handled without protective equipment if you know what you're doing. Not that I would recommend it.
See the crazy stuff that Cody's Lab does on YouTube, and he hasn't gotten poisoned yet:
https://youtu.be/m8KzmlIEsHs
- Mercury poisoning isn't all or nothing. I love love love Cody but also that boy probably has a little mercury poisoning at this point ngl.
- My friends Dad showed us one time handling it in his hands, he said you just have to be absolutely certain you have no cuts or injuries that would let it get to your bloodstream. That was a long time ago now, today's parents would probably freak.
- Ooo I forgot about Cody. Gotta see if he is back to posting videos
Mercury can absorb through the skin, but it takes a very long time. (Generally safe to touch it, but still wouldn't recommend it)
Nah, it's the vapor that's dangerous with elemental mercury. Touching it is basically fine. Just no open wounds and be in a well ventilated area
There are far more toxic forms of mercury you shouldn't mess with though
Is it more the inhalation than the skin absorption that would be toxic? Not too familar with mercury poisoning.
- You're correct