What happens when you spill mercury all over your school bus

Silent switches have mercury in them?! That is so cool to find out.

Heavy, metal, heavy. :wink:

Density of mercury near room temperature is 13.354 g/cm^3.
1lb is 453.59 grams.

453.59g/13.354g/ml=33.97ml

33.97 ml in fl oz is 1.14866 fluid ounces of mercury per pound near room temperature. Not that much really. Like, just slightly more than a 3/4-filled US single shotglass.

My dad was an old weather service guy, he had an old professional grade mercury barometer. It had 10-15 pounds of mercury in it. The people at the hazardous waste place we took it to about had heart attacks as it was more than they normally collected in entire years.

3 Likes

Possibly a hobby gold panner/recovery enthusiast or a jeweler/metalworker using mercury for gold or other metals amalgamation?

1 Like

My dad did a chemistry/physics experiment at school (this would be in the 50s I guess) where the whole class had to find the boiling point of mercury. Each pair had a Bunsen burner, a thermometer, and an open beaker of mercury. They seemed to survive.

2 Likes

Last week, two of my friends who are teachers had kids ask them what a VCR was on the same day, Iā€™m guessing a few more than that have seen film cameras, but not by much and not for long.

Also the authorities wouldnā€™t want people making explosive mercury fulminate, the stuff in bullet primers.

Eh, it was why I used the word ā€˜remindingā€™. Oh, and thanks for the vid. Havenā€™t seen it in ages!

35mm Fuji film came in translucent plastic canisters. I have at least a dozen that are going on 20 years old. Iā€™m loathe to throw them away because theyā€™re such useful little containers (not just for Hg) and where would I get replacements?

Donā€™t dispose of mercury if you have any! That stuff is pretty hard to come by, especially these days. Keep it safe, in plastic vessel (the heavy liquid can shatter glass containers if it is sloshing inside during transportation), possibly under a layer of water to keep the vapors down, well-sealed. Ideally, put the container into a bigger container with some mercury-absorbing material (zinc or copper powder or fillings, powdered sulfur, etc.). If it is sealed in glass (switches, etc.), keep it in there and package the thing to avoid breakage. Then you are on the safe side and all that remains is the mercuryā€™s coolness factor.

People worked with this stuff for decades and survived. Many things arenā€™t as dangerous as they are said to be.

Dimethyl mercury, on the other hand, is something to run away from, screaming. Just something to keep things in perspective.

2 Likes

In summer camp around 1968 up near St. Helena, (northern Cali) we took a hike up the mountain to explore, get this, a mercury mine! We went underground a few dozen feet, etc. All the machinery was in place for trapping mercury from rocks and we played with little puddles still residing in the oven thingies. Does this mean Iā€™m doomed?

Mineral oil is a better cover than water. Thatā€™s how we kept it in the labs I worked in, depending on what it was for.

Oh, and dimethylmercury ā€“ interesting stuff, if you get even a slight whiff of it you will taste metal for days. (worked with it and fluorinated derivatives in grad school)

1 Like

not sure if you are intending hyperbole, but that very thing happened near here last year!

2 Likes

Ebay can provide you with a few sources of them :slight_smile:

If you want all of the melty metallic Hg fun with none of the unfortunate side-effects, do what I did and buy yourself some gallium. Be forewarned though that gallium alloys with aluminum rather quickly (then again so does mercury), so keep it away from your pet 747.

Modern silent switches might not because modern building codes tend to frown upon small glass vials of mercury in newly constructed residential housing, but yeah, old silent switches used mercury.

Flourinated dimethylmurcury? Can I say ā€œno thanks?ā€

I actually donā€™t know if it is actually dangerous, but adding extra fluorine to something hideously poisonous just sounds bad on paper. Plus, I donā€™t want to be the guy who has to bubble fluorine through dimethylmurcury at 500C or whatever it takes to make the stuff.

1 Like

The old thermostat in my parents house had what appeared to be mercury in a glass tube with a couple of wires in there. I thought it was ingenious, using the natural expansion of the metal to form the contact. It will probably never wear out.

That said, a chintzy plastic cover was all that was protecting the fragile glass tubes from kids carelessly swinging a stick around or something. We never had an issue with this, but its not hard to imagine scenarios where something hit the thermostat and broke it.

1 Like

Buy 35mm film.