I've written before about the website Boing Boing. I always find something there to delight and distract me from the woes of the world (or sometimes it helps me see something from an entirely new and different perspective.) Here is a link to a video about freezing mercury. Hmmm ... I'm looking for fun projects to occupy my kindergartners in the last week of school.
Seriously, I remember being in about 2nd grade when the scientist father of one of my classmates brought in mercury for us to play with. Yes, we handled it. It was cool how it broke up into many small blobs and then came together again into a big blob. Back in those days it was not known how toxic mercury was.
A few years ago when we were getting my parents' house ready to sell, I had the job of emptying the rusting metal shelf in the garage and disposing of the various tubes, cans, old mayonnaise jars, etc. of substances that my father had amassed over the years. (A physician by trade, he was a tinkerer by avocation, dabbling in chemistry, mechanics, physics, you name it.) So I loaded it all into the back of my station wagon and (a year or so later, after it sat piled in my driveway) hauled it over to the county "Clean Sweep" site for disposal. The woman working there was very efficient, sorting the stuff I could put out with the trash at home from the stuff they would dispose of. Then she picked up a little glass spice jar with a rubber stopper and said, "I wonder what this is? Oh! It's mercury!" I'm sure that was one she enjoyed telling at the dinner table that night!
Gosh, if I had only kept it, I could have made frozen mercury fish and turtles like in the video.
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6 comments:
I can't believe you had a bottle of mercury and got rid of it! Bummer!
I couldn't very well say, "Oh, I'll keep that!"
In the book Uncle Tungsten, the physician Oliver Sachs relates how he had his very own chunk of radium. He got it as a birthday present as a child! he also had a room in the basement, with a special box where he could blow things up. All I ever got to do was play with mercury (and pet timber wolves.)
Okay, I didn't really pet timber wolves. That was my brothers who did that.
That video was pretty neat. I have to admit I dont think I have seen real mercury or if I have its been a while.
You could have built all kinds of things with that stuff. The mercury in our yard is probably mixed in the soil and therefore no fun.
HazMatMan is a little torn by this -- a little fascinated by the idea of making mercury fish and turtles, but wanting to get on my soapbox about it's hazards.
Good find!
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