Floating Anvils...

[ruffdog]

Cool video! I had heard that when kids drop mercury in a carpet and then mom vacuums the carpet, the mercury will get aerated and blown all over the house...not good.

 

[Botaskinner]

Mercury is extracted from Cinnabar ore by heating it to a high temperature. Not a good occupation standing over a smelting furnace.

Funny thing, I had a science teacher in 1967 who had the baby food jar full of mercury to pass around the class so we could stick our fingers in it and coat pennies with it.
He suggested we cut the ends off flourescent tubes to collect it if we wanted to have some at home.

He spent lots of time typing up lab experiments while chain smoking Tareytons in the back of the classroom, taught us how to make fireworks, testing them on a cable that stretched from the back porch to the baseball backstop 300 ft downrange.

It didn't seem to hurt him any, he died at 92 some years back.

 

[ultrarunner]

^^^ Same here in grade school... jars of mercury.

As for uses... the mercury bulb boiler pressure switches and home light switches lasts a lifetime... being sealed they contacts don't wear out like the modern points that arc all the time when engaging and disengaging...

Made a car alarm with mercury switches for motion sensor.

 

[dragoneggs]

I can't imagine what the guy had to pay for that much Mercury. Stuff ain't cheap!

 

[dstig1]

Dave,

Sorry but I don稚 believe that story. When I was a kid the elementary school had a pickle jar full of mercury in the classroom. Teacher would pour it on a large table to teach us about surface tension and the kids would play with it. We almost all kept smaller jars at home to coat dimes with and play with.

Mercury vapor is poisonous when you?*e exposed to it over a period of time but the residual amount that might have been left on a woodstove from a broken fluorescent light isn稚 going to instantly kill anyone.

I wouldn't swear by it, but it sounds plausible enough given the toxicity of Hg vapor. It came up during a discussion at work regarding a coworker that took home some mercury thermometers that were going to be disposed of. He was a bit of a loon and this was ~15-20 yrs ago. Well they got broken in the car and so he tried to clean it all up. We have Hg sensing equipment at work. He tore out carpet and got every bit he could find, but the Hg levels in the car stayed high as it would rool around and get into inaccessible parts of the frame. When I said he was a loon? He was still driving it. He would put on a respirator with Hg vapor cartridges on to drive it. The goofiest thing you would ever see going down the road. He contacted the state EPA (whatever it is called) and in the end they ended up taking the car from him as hazardous waste since he could not get it clean. It was old so no big value to it. These discussion were among a group of engineers and chemists who are fairly knowledgeable in the area.

Hg is extremely toxic, especially in vapor form. Fact. That we all managed to get away with handling it in high school chem (me too) actually helps illustrate that in liquid form it is not as bad. Knowing what I do now, I would not mess with it much without precautions.

 

[MossRoad]

Cool video! I had heard that when kids drop mercury in a carpet and then mom vacuums the carpet, the mercury will get aerated and blown all over the house...not good.

Yeah, you shouldn't use a regular vacuum on mercury. I found this out about 20 years ago. The gas company wanted to move their meter from inside of our house to outside of our house. They did. I came home from work and went to the basement to inspect their work. I found what looked like a puddle of mercury in a divot in the concrete where the meter came out. I'm familiar with mercury, so I didn't touch it. I called the gas company and told them what I found. They said don't touch it, and for god's sake don't try and vacuum it up, as that'll atomize it and spread it all over your house, and contaminate everything. The next evening, under the cover of darkness, an unmarked white van pulls into our driveway, two guys in hazmat suits come in and clean it all up with specialized hepa vacuums with massive filtration that remained in the truck and only the hoses came into the house. That way, non of the mercury was atomized inside of the house.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Anvils should be shot, not floated.

 

[k0ua]

Yeah, you shouldn't use a regular vacuum on mercury. I found this out about 20 years ago. The gas company wanted to move their meter from inside of our house to outside of our house. They did. I came home from work and went to the basement to inspect their work. I found what looked like a puddle of mercury in a divot in the concrete where the meter came out. I'm familiar with mercury, so I didn't touch it. I called the gas company and told them what I found. They said don't touch it, and for god's sake don't try and vacuum it up, as that'll atomize it and spread it all over your house, and contaminate everything. The next evening, under the cover of darkness, an unmarked white van pulls into our driveway, two guys in hazmat suits come in and clean it all up with specialized hepa vacuums with massive filtration that remained in the truck and only the hoses came into the house. That way, non of the mercury was atomized inside of the house.

You forgot to tell us what the relationship of mercury (which is/was used in thousands of products) is to a gas meter. That I have never heard of.

I have seen pictures of people sitting in vats of liquid mercury. It used to be used in the making of munitions, (mercuric primers) but I don't think so any more. Of course fluorescent bulbs, mercury wetted relays and contacts/switches of all kinds. tanning processes, in gold extraction (the old time miners used it as a gold "sponge". I can remember a particular sunken WW2 German submarine sunk in the baltic polluted after a few decades the baltic sea with several thousands of lbs of mercury in steel flasks. This is commonly how it was/is shipped in flasks. Too bad someone didn't try to salvage it before it polluted the ocean. Of course it was used in those nasty Mercury vapor lights. I always hated those things, and the Sodium vapor lights are even worse. Glad to see LED's replacing those nasty things. Mercury rectifiers in radio sets were common back "in the day" They had such a pretty blue glow when operated. Of course a 3 cent silicon diode is much better than those things. There were a million uses for Mercury, but fortunately we are moving away from them at a rapid pace.

 

[k0ua]

Anvils should be shot, not floated.

Rgr that!.. way more fun. and safer too!

 

[stingray1]

Thanks.