Mercury
Today I am thinking about mercury. There was quite a lot of it around when I was a kid. I remember holding a little bead of quicksilver in my palm, watching it scoot around much faster than it seemed like it should. It was a marvelous thing. One of my favorite toys was a little blue plastic maze with a clear plastic top, containing a fairly sizable blob of mercury. The point was to get the entire blob into the center. It wasn't easy. All of our thermometers contained mercury, and when we busted one, we would save the mercury to play with.
Too bad the stuff is so damn poisonous. One of my friends said that she played with mercury so much when she was kid that her extremities began to go numb.
When I was in college, there was a story about a retired professor who had spent his academic lifetime studying mercury compounds. When he retired, the story went, they remodeled his lab. When they lifted the linoleum off the floor, they found a virtual lake of mercury metal underneath.
When I was teaching college chemistry, I always started the class by passing around all the elements I could find in the stockroom. I wanted my students to see and get to know at least some of the entities they would be studying all year. We had chunks of bismuth, lead, tin, magnesium, iron, manganese, chromium, zinc, aluminum, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, graphite, sulfur, silicon and copper, a coin for silver, iodine in a jar, a little bottle of bromine under the hood, some barium, sodium, potassium and lithium in oil under the hood, and some cruddy-looking calcium metal. I told them to look at someone's jewelry for gold, and to look at the air for nitrogen and oxygen. And I had a nice little bottle of mercury metal, carefully sealed up with parafilm and marked "HIGHLY TOXIC! DO NOT OPEN!" The little bottle was impressive in its shear heaviness. (The wicked assignment that went with this show-and-tell was for them to come up with at least one physical property that all these elements have in common, so you could tell by looking what is an element and what isn't. Wicked, because there's no such thing.)
This all went very well until one year when I had student X in my class. I could write a whole novel about student X, but for now I will just tell you that on this occasion, student X unwrapped the parafilm from the bottle and poured some mercury out on his desk. This desk was one of those kinds where the little table can fold up or down, and the surface isn't level. You can't keep a pen from rolling off a desk like that, and needless to say, the quicksilver was bounding off and scattering in an instant. It got all over the clothes and shoes of student X, and all over the floor.
You would not believe the paperwork involved in a mercury spill and cleanup. And the effort of a team of people crawling around on the floor with little squeeze bottles to suck up all the droplets.
Sometimes my students would ask what the point was of learning about chemistry. I would tell them the story about the teenagers who broke into an old paper mill and found bottles of mercury. Not knowing what it was, but thinking that it was really cool, they stole it. Then they dipped cigarettes in it and smoked it. And they would have been alive today if they had learned about the toxicity of mercury in chemistry class.
I once visited a high school on a Pacific Island which I shall not identify here... but it is an extremely impoverished community. Some kind and generous business had gotten rid of its toxic waste problem by donating all its poisonous chemicals to the high school on this island for use in science classes. The chemicals sat in corroded and often unlabeled containers on two tables in the back of a classroom. Among them were compounds of mercury, chromium, lead and so forth, as well as red phosphorus and concentrated sulfuric acid (into which the students had dropped pens and other objects to watch the reactions). And in the teacher's desk, in the drawer where she kept her purse, was a large quantity of mercury metal, just little beads loose in the drawer. I told her to tape that drawer shut and never open it again. The only thing saving these people was that the windows in the classroom had no glass, so the wind blew through freely. As we were going through the chemicals, one guy casually asked me, "Will these chemicals kill fish?" I said, "Oh, yes." And then I figured out why he was asking, so I quickly added, "And they will kill anyone who eats the fish afterwards."
Too bad the stuff is so damn poisonous. One of my friends said that she played with mercury so much when she was kid that her extremities began to go numb.
When I was in college, there was a story about a retired professor who had spent his academic lifetime studying mercury compounds. When he retired, the story went, they remodeled his lab. When they lifted the linoleum off the floor, they found a virtual lake of mercury metal underneath.
When I was teaching college chemistry, I always started the class by passing around all the elements I could find in the stockroom. I wanted my students to see and get to know at least some of the entities they would be studying all year. We had chunks of bismuth, lead, tin, magnesium, iron, manganese, chromium, zinc, aluminum, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, graphite, sulfur, silicon and copper, a coin for silver, iodine in a jar, a little bottle of bromine under the hood, some barium, sodium, potassium and lithium in oil under the hood, and some cruddy-looking calcium metal. I told them to look at someone's jewelry for gold, and to look at the air for nitrogen and oxygen. And I had a nice little bottle of mercury metal, carefully sealed up with parafilm and marked "HIGHLY TOXIC! DO NOT OPEN!" The little bottle was impressive in its shear heaviness. (The wicked assignment that went with this show-and-tell was for them to come up with at least one physical property that all these elements have in common, so you could tell by looking what is an element and what isn't. Wicked, because there's no such thing.)
This all went very well until one year when I had student X in my class. I could write a whole novel about student X, but for now I will just tell you that on this occasion, student X unwrapped the parafilm from the bottle and poured some mercury out on his desk. This desk was one of those kinds where the little table can fold up or down, and the surface isn't level. You can't keep a pen from rolling off a desk like that, and needless to say, the quicksilver was bounding off and scattering in an instant. It got all over the clothes and shoes of student X, and all over the floor.
You would not believe the paperwork involved in a mercury spill and cleanup. And the effort of a team of people crawling around on the floor with little squeeze bottles to suck up all the droplets.
Sometimes my students would ask what the point was of learning about chemistry. I would tell them the story about the teenagers who broke into an old paper mill and found bottles of mercury. Not knowing what it was, but thinking that it was really cool, they stole it. Then they dipped cigarettes in it and smoked it. And they would have been alive today if they had learned about the toxicity of mercury in chemistry class.
I once visited a high school on a Pacific Island which I shall not identify here... but it is an extremely impoverished community. Some kind and generous business had gotten rid of its toxic waste problem by donating all its poisonous chemicals to the high school on this island for use in science classes. The chemicals sat in corroded and often unlabeled containers on two tables in the back of a classroom. Among them were compounds of mercury, chromium, lead and so forth, as well as red phosphorus and concentrated sulfuric acid (into which the students had dropped pens and other objects to watch the reactions). And in the teacher's desk, in the drawer where she kept her purse, was a large quantity of mercury metal, just little beads loose in the drawer. I told her to tape that drawer shut and never open it again. The only thing saving these people was that the windows in the classroom had no glass, so the wind blew through freely. As we were going through the chemicals, one guy casually asked me, "Will these chemicals kill fish?" I said, "Oh, yes." And then I figured out why he was asking, so I quickly added, "And they will kill anyone who eats the fish afterwards."