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I'd keep it just to play with - suitably sealed of course. Don't play with it like I did when I was a kid, putting my hand in a big flask of it.
If that was today, my parents would be suing the school....
That would have been a good thing.
Found a bottle of it at a school I used to work in. The technician looked up all the relevant guidelines and asked some official-sounding people and we got to keep it. We kept it in a V strong transparent container that was held in place inside another bottle so that pupils could handle it to feel the weight. Really cool.
This was only about 5 years ago.
Saccades - Member
Get rid of it - nasty, nasty stuff.Kills you and the environment.
It [i]is[/i] a naturally occurring element that can be found in the environment, along with a whole bunch of other nasty poisonous and radioactive materials that can kill people very effectively, meanwhile 'the environment' carries on its own sweet way.
I think you'll find volcanoes do a much better job than a couple of kilos of liquid mercury.
Just don't take it onto a plane.
I had a mate with a mercury maze toy
Me too. 😀
Well hard to control it.
I'm obviously getting no-where with all the experts who played with in back in the day.
Well to be fair, you've not really presented much in the way of fact as opposed to anecdote. We all know its not good to handle but what happened to your mate could have been down to any number of things.
When I was in sixth year, there were only three of us doing Physics so we got to sit in the store room between the two physics classrooms.
We were bored one day so started playing with a bottle of mercury rolling a ball of it around a desk. We dropped it on the floor and started to try and get it back in the bottle. Well the head of physics walks in and was apoplectic with rage.
Not because we dropped the mercury on the floor, but because my mate was trying to pick it up with a magnet. Doh!!!
I found a large glass valve of some descrictiption in an old substation attached to the building inside the valve was Mercury sloshing around.
Sounds like a mercury arc rectifier, I had the job of collecting the mercury from a number of them at an old power station that was closing down, ended up with half a bucket full of mercury which was about £18000 worth at the time (early 80's).I hate to imagine the H&S implications to do the job now.
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My mum found a pair of duelling pistols in the loft when she was clearing out my grandmother's house. The family had lived there for over 100 years.
Apparently they can be kept and don't even need to be on a firearm certificate as they are a historic firearm.
@dibbs yep looked a lot like that, was inside a wooden crate packed with straw was all a bit raiders of the lost arc/Frankenstein labaratory. Should have took the lot really but that would be cluttering up the cellar too. Better I took the Mercury than the outfit I was working for poured it in the canal behind the job
I changed a few faulty ones when the station was still running, lifting a big heavy fragile vacuum bulb containing several pounds of mercury into a small compartment was definitely squeaky bum time.