uses for pure mercury?

Jeeze, when I was a young kid (pre-1950) we used to rub mercury on the then real silver US coins with our fingers and it would grab onto them and make them look REAL shiny for about a day, before all the mercury got amalgamated - then they'd look like "s**te".

So how come I and all the other kids are still here to tell about it?

Jeff (Who turned in his last little vial of mercury during our town's "thermometer drive" about five year's ago.)

Then someone got clever and they developed those pendulums where the "shaft" was a zig zag of alternating brass and steel rods cleverly arranged so the summed temperature induced length changes canceled to zero.

We've got a replica "Regulator" pendulum clock hanging in our kitchen, and it's temperature sensitive to the tune of about a minute a day between summer and winter. I keep meaning to play around with attaching a little srip of bimetal (swiped from a defunct thermostat) to the backside of the pendulum which could raise and lower a tiny weight in response to temperature. Maybe I'll get to it this year...

Jeff

Well, since no one's mentioned it yet, there are huge numbers of wall thermostats still in use all over the place which have tilt actuated mercury switches in them. I've got two in my home and two at the office.

See:

Anyone know if they are still selling ones like that?

Another old time use for mercury was in the manufacture of felt hats, I'm not sure just HOW it was used. Since so many of the folks working with it started going nuts, it gave birth to the expression "Mad as a hatter", as in the "Alice in Wonderland" character, "The mad Hatter".

Just as bad was the radiation sickness effects on those poor ladies who used to paint the numbers on luminous watch dials year after year using radium activated paints. They "put a point on" their tiny paintbrushes with their lips hundreds of times in a workday.

Jeff

Honeywell still makes a *lot* of Round thermostats:

The machine that makes them is supposed to be pretty impressive - I didn't make the time to get a tour while I worked at Honeywell and I regret that now.

Pete

(Stop me if I'm wrong here...) One of the original experiments Faraday performed: you place a magnet in a pool of mercury and dangle a rod in the pool. The mercury keeps electrical contact with the rod as it rotates around the magnet from the field thus produced. Also works backwards, with the rod fixed and the magnet swinging around in the mercury.

Tim

-- "I've got more trophies than Wayne Gretsky and the Pope combined!" - Homer Simpson Website @

Mercuric chloride, I forget what for; fixing color or stiffening or something?

...Last mercury thread we had here, someone said mercury wears off over time. Thus mad hatters get better after taking a few months off work. Who said that?

Tim

-- "I've got more trophies than Wayne Gretsky and the Pope combined!" - Homer Simpson Website @

undetermined while this reference claims it to be true there are 23.899 more possible answers

Just because it looks cool (and going by 20 year old memory):

If you get some silver chloride in distilled water, it makes a nice clear solution. One drop of mercury metal in the liguid and silver crystals start forming (look like little spears). Other than the fact that the liquid has changed to mercuric chloride (a nasty again), the siler crystals could make a cool display if you can seal off the whole thing.

Koz

williamhenry wrote:

Wind a small coil of small gauge wire (copper works best) - it should look like an open spring. Suspend it and let the lower end touch a pool (drop) of murcury. Send a DC current (one 'C' cell will do it) through the coil - murcury is connected to cell and coil is connected (at the top) to opposite polarity. Interesting demonstration of the magnetic fields set up in a current carrying wire. RegardsKen (who 'invented' this demonstration waaaaay back)

I used to run mercury porosimetry tests on catalytic converter substrates-great fun!

I remember seeing an article in National Geographic about mercury mining. They showed a guy sitting on a pool of mercury. When you were first hired, you signed your name on a card. When your signature deteriorated enough it was time to retire....

So could you walk on a pool of mercury? Mercury is so dense you would probably on "sink" in about knee deep. Maybe toxic but it sure sounds like fun.

That reference tought me what the hatter's mercury was used for, thanks.

************************************************************************* A complicated set of processes was needed to turn the fur into a finished hat. With the cheaper sorts of fur, an early step was to brush a solution of a mercury compound?usually mercurous nitrate?on to the fur to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process called carroting because it made the fur turn orange. Beaver fur had natural serrated edges that made this unnecessary, one reason why it was preferred, but the cost and scarcity of beaver meant that other furs had to be used. *************************************************************************

Jeff

My father in law, who passed away a couple of years ago, once described getting a "through" of calomel as a child in West Texas! Jumping Jehosophat! It obviously didn't kill him, so I asked him to describe the circumstances.

Apparently his sister and he both got disentery when he was a child. The good country doctor prescribed the "through of calomel", which was some small dose of Hg2Cl2, chased with about a quart of castor oil. The net effect was the poison sterilized his digestive tract, and the castor oil guaranteed that the poison didn't linger long enough to be absorbed in a fatal dose. Apparently, it worked. He said he still remembered the day in the outhouse.

Pete Keillor

Calomel was a treatment for syphilis before antibiotics. The sailor's phrase was "One night with Venus, six weeks with Mercury".

Kevin Gallimore

, this was headed to a landfill before I got my hands on it , and it would be disposed of as hazardous waste when and if I am through with it , , as to use for it there are quite a few , especially in the home , which is where the machines I got this out of usually reside

If a person is about specific gravity = 1 and mercury = 13.6, only 1/13.6th of you needs to be submerged, or at least below the untouched surface. If you had uniform cross-section, that's 5.3 inches - obviously your legs or hands represent less than your torso, so I'd expect as much as a foot deep. If you could even maintain balance. You can walk on a pool of mercury as well as you can walk on a pool of water (given the extra bouyancy needed).

Tim

-- "I've got more trophies than Wayne Gretsky and the Pope combined!" - Homer Simpson Website @

The felt mat was treated with lye to solvate the hair (keratin), making it sticky. When the wet mat was formed to a wooden waxed mandrel or form (Sych as for a het) the molded item was then placed in mercuric chloride ("Corrosive sublimate of Mercury"). Mercury like some other metals, is a powerful protien coagulant that crosslinked the protiens in the felt, making the molding "permanent". Mercury has an affinity for sulfur compounds, with tragic results in the brain and nervous system. Organothiols are still called "Mercaptans" (Commonly used in odorizing fuel gases, and the n-Butyl compound is used for defense by skunks). If a victim of mercury poisoning could be dosed with mercaptans, it locked the Hg up as the insoluble sulfide.

Up to a point, and if removed in time they might recover somewhat. The halflife of Hg in the body was at one time reported to be 77 days. I had mercury poisoning decades ago, an acute industrial exposure. I was fired from that job, due to uncontrollable rage...which probably saved my life. No one realized what was going on, till one clueful doctor called for a Heavy Metals test. It's (trust me) really really bad. If you want to screw around with a room temperature liquid metal, buy some of that gallium eutectic. Stay away from mercury. And to the guy who wants to bring an Hg project to a school: I am sure you can do it safely, but in this tort environment, all you need is one kid to go home and tell his lawyer parent about it, and you'll hear "Reckless Endangerment", in which case, just go home and light your curtains. Of COURSE it can be handled safely...but facts have nothing to do with some people.

I'm sure there are plenty of them, perhaps millions, installed and in use even if they are not being manufactured. They are all sealed systems with the mercury not coming onto contact with persons through direct handling. When they need to be replaced they should be disposed of properly:

There are plenty of things that could be done with the mercury but personally I don't think the risks in handling it are worth the fun of the activity in this case. YMMV.

Mark