• @[email protected]
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    1304 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1164 months ago

      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.

      • lad
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        584 months ago

        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 🤔

        sad story

        that was in the top of search results about dimethylmercury: Wikipedia excerpt: Karen Elizabeth Wetterhahn (October 16, 1948 – June 8, 1997), also known as Karen Wetterhahn Jennette, was an American professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, who specialized in toxic metal exposure. She died of mercury poisoning at the age of 48 due to accidental exposure to the extremely toxic organic mercury compound dimethylmercury (Hg(CH3)2). Protective gloves in use at the time of the incident provided insufficient protection, and exposure to only a few drops of the chemical absorbed through the gloves proved to be fatal after less than a year. 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          274 months ago

          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

          No, I doubt it. There aren’t very many uses for dimethylmercury due to its potential lethality. I would assume the people who actually use it in a lab setting are going to call it dimethylmercury, especially considering organic mercury usually refers to methylmercury, or one of the other less harmful organomercury compounds.

          I think the confusion probably stems from the original article about the scientist who passed. Dimethylmercury is made from a reaction of methylmercury, and they are both organomercuric compounds.

          • lad
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            34 months ago

            Forgot about that, this certainly adds insult to an injury spices it up

      • Neato
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        304 months ago

        Yeah. Elemental is mostly harmless if you aren’t around it for long and don’t inhale vapors.

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          Chemist (and biochemist) here. Organometallic compounds of Mercury are primarily dangerous because Mercury ions bond fairly strongly to soft ligands like sulfhydryl groups found near the active sites of enzymes. This can result in the displacement of the metal ions or otherwise disrupt the structure needed for enzyme functionality. Mercury metal OTOH is considerably less reactive. It is not safe to breathe in for prolonged periods of time but it is no where near as toxic as its organometallic derivatives are. Dimethyl Mercury for example, is extremely dangerous. A single drop has 100+ times the organomercury content needed to kill someone.

        • @[email protected]
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          164 months ago

          I think they are saying it depends what you mean by “mercury” because some compounds are both toxic and readily absorbed through the skin.

          • @[email protected]
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            174 months ago

            Exactly that. Elemental mercury (ie: the liquid metal form) doesn’t readily absorb through the skin. It gives off vapors which are harmful with extended or repeated contact, but generally it’s not super dangerous to be around.(Not totally safe though)

            Organic mercury compounds (eg: methylmercury) are extremely toxic because they can be absorbed through the skin, and can traverse the blood brain barrier

          • @[email protected]
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            64 months ago

            Regular liquid mercury is relatively safe to handle, but I would still wear gloves. It won’t get through undamaged skin, but is dangerous if you have even a small skin laceration it can get through.

        • FuglyDuck
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          4 months ago

          you can always consult the Material Safety Data Sheet

          For comparison, dimethyl mercury

          Elemental mercury is not going to kill you if you touch it- wash hands and call a doctor. they’ll probably be like, “Take two asprin and call me int he morning so I can bill you twice.” you definitely don’t want to inhale it, but outside of something like a fire or being heated, adequate ventilation is sufficient; if ventilation isn’t possible a respirator is a good idea. Dimethyl on the other hand… is nasty.

    • @[email protected]
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      194 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          Except eating paint chips with lead made a lot of kids dumb. Lead based paint held up awesome, but it was banned due to injection. Not inhalation. Even now, 40+ years later it’s still the leading cause of lead poisoning in children.

            • @[email protected]
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              24 months ago

              Oh, fuck me. Lol. I commented last night and then responded back today and in between my mind totally flipped to thinking it was about lead.

    • @[email protected]
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      44 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1014 months ago

    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.)

    • @[email protected]
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      244 months ago

      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

      • JohnEdwa
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        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        74 months ago

        Could have been. I know Lewis Carroll liked to lampoon issues of the day in his writing.

        • @[email protected]
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          44 months ago

          I’m kind of guessing the mad as a hatter phenomenon was known then, but don’t really know.

      • @[email protected]
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        44 months ago

        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.

    • Troy
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      124 months ago

      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…

    • @[email protected]
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      54 months ago

      It’s so much harder believing in six impossible things before breakfast when you’re allergic to quicksilver.

    • FuglyDuck
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      264 months ago

      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?

      • Instigate
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        264 months ago

        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–Morley_experiment

  • @[email protected]
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    294 months ago

    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.

    • Justin
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      664 months ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        124 months ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        104 months ago

        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.

    • Katlah
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      324 months ago

      Mercury can absorb through the skin, but it takes a very long time. (Generally safe to touch it, but still wouldn’t recommend it)

    • @[email protected]
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      234 months ago

      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

    • Dr. Wesker
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      164 months ago

      Is it more the inhalation than the skin absorption that would be toxic? Not too familar with mercury poisoning.

  • @[email protected]
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    134 months ago

    I’ve played with mercury when I was a kid. Hopefully it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass when I’m old.

  • @[email protected]
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    64 months ago

    Dads old mercury filled carburetor sinch worked much better than the oil filled one ever did.