Less exciting than gold fever
My intuition told me that stringing glowing-orange-hot live wires around my basement workshop was a Bad Idea. But my conscious mind took precautions against burns, electrocution, and house fires, and missed a subtler danger.
The next morning, I had a headache and an increasingly bad stomachache, which I attributed to lack of sleep, maybe a flu. It wasn't until this evening that I dimly remembered zinc fever, aka metal fume fever, and looked it up. Yup. Flu-like symptoms including headache, fatigue, nausea, and diarrhea brought on by breathing in zinc vapor. I'm lucky I didn't get hit with a larger dose. Usually lasts 24-48 hours, no real long term effects unless you do it as a career. One remedy is milk, which binds to the zinc metal in the body. I drank a large glass.
The wires were galvanized (i.e. zinc-coated) steel; I was prepping an experiment for a thermodynamics demo for Balticon. Heating the iron up to orange-hot was enough to boil off some zinc as vapor. Ironically* when I did the actual demo with plain steel wire, didn't work nearly as well. The unprotected steel oxidized and burned through before it could heat up to glowing temperatures.
*No elemental pun intended.
If I try anything similar again I'll remember to use better ventilation.
The next morning, I had a headache and an increasingly bad stomachache, which I attributed to lack of sleep, maybe a flu. It wasn't until this evening that I dimly remembered zinc fever, aka metal fume fever, and looked it up. Yup. Flu-like symptoms including headache, fatigue, nausea, and diarrhea brought on by breathing in zinc vapor. I'm lucky I didn't get hit with a larger dose. Usually lasts 24-48 hours, no real long term effects unless you do it as a career. One remedy is milk, which binds to the zinc metal in the body. I drank a large glass.
The wires were galvanized (i.e. zinc-coated) steel; I was prepping an experiment for a thermodynamics demo for Balticon. Heating the iron up to orange-hot was enough to boil off some zinc as vapor. Ironically* when I did the actual demo with plain steel wire, didn't work nearly as well. The unprotected steel oxidized and burned through before it could heat up to glowing temperatures.
*No elemental pun intended.
If I try anything similar again I'll remember to use better ventilation.