MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Do thermometers still use Mercury?
Are there other readily available sources of Mercury?
Cheers,
Carl.
Who are you poisoning.?
Prey tell...
Me - probably .....
Nothing sinister - honest!
Chemical suppliers, try yellow pages/ google. Some thermometers do still contain mercury.
What do you want it for? Barometers used to be the classic application think that mercury barometers are effectively 'banned'
old mercury tip switches maybe? hard to come across though in all probability. I'm dead curious as to what you want it for...
Sink U bends in 6th forms and undergrad chem labs arevalways a rich source too
Difficult enough to get hold of. I assume this is for your photography again. Try Aldrich. Oh, and you'll probably be flagged up at GCHQ.
mercury switches or tilt switches, old ones, have a bit in. You'll find them in old executive cars or old thermostats. Mercury is insanely toxic though, do you really want anything to do with it?
Old Mercury barometers could be a source but it would mean breaking them.
Can see me being arrested creeping around the school labs. Anyone know if school labs are allowed to store it?
What do I want it for? Get me some and I'll show you! 😉
Most modern thermometers use alchol now, modern barometer use aneroid chambers too so no joy there. You need an old glass tube barometer from an antique shop. As above Mercury is nasty stuff. The reason the Mad Hatter was mad was because hatters used to use mercury to prepare the felt for hats and got poisoned by the fumes.
what quantities are we talking here then? If tiny (like a grain of rice) then one tilt switch would easily do it, but if you want quite a bit then i think you'll be stuck
I think it's heavily controlled
some EU directive
The video with an old metal iron floating in a pool of mercury was pretty cool IMO.
Well ..... as much as I can get hold of but any quantity would suit my purpose.
yep its effectively been outlawed in evey lab in the country, including in thermometers, it really is very toxic
your best bet is to get hold of an old thermometer
break into a lighthouse, climb to top, drill hole in lightbase.
well it would have worked years ago ............
haha, the more you say the more dodgy it sounds plant! 😀
So how do I dispose of about 2 thimbles full of mercury?
You give it to me!
I'm sure royal mail will love that going through the postal system.
How would they know?
If you're serious, where are you?
I believe it's mercury vapour that's toxic. Mercury itself can't be that bad - we used to piss about rolling blobs of it around petri dishes in chemistry lessons when I was a lad. Also, most people my age 40+ have got it in their amalgam fillings.
Maybe you could take up grave robbing and melting down fillings?
I'm Northamptonshire. My old man use to use it where he worked. The Sodium he brought home was a lot more fun to play with 🙂
I watched a documentary about the Emperor who built the great wall of China, his physicians told him to take mercury balls as it will prolong his life. All it did was make him paranoid and slowly killed him.
Mercury boiling point? It's low isn't it.
Liquid mercury is not that toxic - low bioavailability. The vapour is more toxic, not something you would want to consistently inhale. It's the organomercury compounds that are really dangerous - a drop of methylmercury on the skin can and has killed people.
I reckon most schools and universities would have plenty of spare mercury sitting around. It's being phased out of pressure devices so there's loads around - no one is going to give it to a stranger though, you'd likely need to know someone working in the lab.
Try this Emperors Qin Shi Huang tomb 100 rivers made with mercury, representations of 'the heavenly bodies', Modern archaeologists have located the tomb, and have inserted probes deep into it. The probes revealed abnormally high quantities of mercury, some 100 times the naturally occurring rate, suggesting at least part of the legend can be trusted.
Not even the Chinese government will dig it up as the legend is China will fall if they do.
Last time I looked we had several kg of mercury in one of the poisons cupboards at work. My lab gets periodically tested for the stuff. I have a wonderful parquet floor that is kept nicely sealed thank you very much because whilst I don't us Hg thermometers I'm certain that my predescessors did do so and that a number were dropped over the years.
[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury(II)_fulminate ]Is this what you want it for?[/url]
We used to have jam jars full of the stuff from disposing of old pressure transmitters and level switches at work, ( more for the hassle of the paperwork getting rid of it than the novelty value). The plant has now been pulled down though, about 6 years ago, and i'd have though most of that age were going the same way.
In the early 80s I worked in an analytical chemistry lab that was involved in a nationwide mercury alert after someone dropped a thermometer down the back of a drying oven......
A couple of years ago I was doing visits to some tunnels about 30 metres below parts of London which had mercury arc rectifiers in a cupboard - oh, and enormous amounts of UV as well.
i remember getting right boloking from th elab supervisor at uni for having a droplet (litteraly half a grain of uncooked rice) left in the bottom of a reaction (its used to carry out reactions using metals in their "liquid" state without stupid temperatures, by puting them in solution). Thats how toxic it is.
And dont wory about the distinction between mercury and methylmercury in terms of toxicology, bacteria will hapily turn one into the other.
We used to play with it at school - let it run across our hands etc. & chase it across the bench
uplink, thankfully the 'elf'n'safety nanny state prohibits that kind of stupidity now, allong with washing your hand in benzene to get rid of paint.
Absolutely - if it wasn't for all these new regs, who knows how dead I'd be by now?
it makes me shiver thinking about it 😉
Whatever you want it for can't outway the H&S issues!! I can use some pretty toxic chemicals in my job 'This causes cancer' is often seen on the tins 🙁 but I wouldn't want to be handling mercury without proper protective measures. If it gets into your body through the skin or via injestion its there for good and damaging you all the time.
Assuming this is linked to your thread about wanting to take pictures of immiscible liquids, Mercury is a really bad idea health wise and almost certainly unsuitable for what you want.
It's very dense, so will sink to the bottom and just puddle at the bottom of the container.
It's also interesting stuff if your lab catches fire. The basic advice is strip the building interior back to concrete/brick shell and start again. The vapour gets everywhere.
"break into a lighthouse, climb to top, drill hole in lightbase.
well it would have worked years ago ............ "
I know of at least one lighthouse that still floats its friscnal lense in on a mercury bearing. Best part of 4 tons of glass too!
I know of at least one lighthouse that still floats its friscnal lense in on a mercury bearing. Best part of 4 tons of glass too!
that sounds SOOOOOO coool, its positively icy.
I think you can get mercury [url= 
]here[/url]
Does a unit of one mercury = one faggott?
(runs and hides..........)
NHS fillings ?
I have loads but your not getting any.
Tuna
How's your snorkelling Plant? In the 19th Century a ship carrying mercury met its doom in a storm near the Seven Sisters cliffs in East Sussex.
Local divers used to talk of pools of mercury to be found in the potholes on the seabed of the now submerged wave-cut platforms charateristic to the local sublitterol chalk geology of the area. Of course, it could've just been an old sea-dogs tale 😉
scrap yards can be a good source i used to keep about a quarter of a ton under the stairs most of it is now sold but other scrap yards may have some