Please explain this for me… do you mean that whatever was in the sealed bottle caused the glass cabinet to become etched?? What the hell was in the bottle? 
I assume he meant hydrofluoric acid (HF). It attacks glass, flesh, and it is poisonous too. Don’t sniff it!
He said right in that post that it was H2FI2. Which is not a substance I’m familiar with, but would presumably release the same glass-etching fluoride ions as HF.
Another gem from that linked thread:
…His task was to go into the factory lab and do some presorting of the chemicals for disposing. It worked like a triage and some simple categories were used. During the sorting he found two 1 L brown glass bottles filled with a liquid and he put the label “likely solvent” on them and the bottles were removed for off-site storage. Fortunately every single container of chemicals was tested afterwards. Two days later he received a phone call and was informed that his “likely solvent” was 2 kg of pure Tabun. His heart stopped beating for a while…
I wouldn’t blindly odor-check a bottle in a facility without having some idea of what sort of work was done there.
No, you shouldn’t take a big old snort of random bottles in a nerve agent factory, but in most cases an odor check is fine if you use proper precautions.
The lethal dose for humans is apparently 0.01 mg/kg, so for a 100 kg human it would be 1 mg. So 2 kg would be enough to kill 2 million people! What the hell were they doing with so much?!
The “proper precautions” in question would involve knowing what the substance was already. Or at least having a definitive shortlist of what it could possibly be.
Good question, right? German Wikipedia says (forgive my lazy auto-translate):
In 1979, in response to inquiries made to the Hamburg authorities, Leuschner said that he intended to close the company on December 1, 1979. The end of the company should come even sooner, however. On September 6, 1979, there was an explosion near the CFS in the basement of a house on Lüdersring, in which one child died and two others were injured. It turned out that the children had experimented with chemicals. They had apparently found them on the CFS premises, which they had been able to enter due to the lack of security. This accident went down in Hamburg’s history as the second Stoltzenberg scandal. The subsequent investigations uncovered the extent of decades of regulatory failures in controlling the company. During the inspection of the site, a large number of toxic substances were found and on the day of the accident over 75 tons of these materials were removed by the Bundeswehr. The discovery of warfare agents was particularly explosive: a total of 35 liters of tabun, most of which were filled in eight grenades, four liters of nitrogen mustard, two liters of thiophosgene, two kilograms of chloropicrin, 12 steel bottles with phosgene and chlorine, 50 kilograms of bromoacetone and ten Kilograms of white phosphorus. How these substances got onto the site has not been clarified. The investigator appointed by the Hamburg Senate in the Stoltzenberg scandal, Dr. Peter Rabels, in his report of September 18, 1979, came to the conclusion that the authorities involved had only insufficiently fulfilled their tasks and that incorrect assessments, inadequate tests and failure to take preventive measures had created the danger that would have led to the accident. [28]
Stolzenberg himself seems to have had a long and interesting involvement with chemical weapons since the early 1920s.
Can’t say the investigators were overly cautious for not sniffing the unlabeled chemicals when it came to that factory.
Why would “not an organometal” be an improvement, anyway? Dimethylmercury is an organometallic compound. You don’t want to sniff that.
Hydrofluoric acid and it is H2F2, IIRC. It is used to etch glass and cannot be stored in a glass bottle. It is stored in a paraffin-based bottle and even tightly sealed enough had leaked out over the years to etch the glass in the cabinet. And do not even sniff it or it will etch your lungs.
Just to put things in perspective, the OP is talking about stuff like Mercury Fulminate (the stuff Walter White from Breaking Bad uses to detonate Tuco’s place) while H2F2 is the stuff Walter White uses to dissolve human bodies.
Per Mythbusters, the mercury fulminate maybe real, the H2F2 is not.
Hydrofluoric acid was memorably used by Walter White in Breaking Bad to dispose of inconvenient bodies. However, Mythbusters demonstrated that wouldn’t really work. Lye (NaOH) is better for dissolving bodies.
Concentrated solutions of hydrofluoric acid begin to form dimers and HnFn. “HF is a weak acid in dilute aqueous solution but the acidity increases rapidly as the water content of the solution becomes small.”
Incidentally, Walter White’s high school was shown to have 6 one-gallon bottles of hydrofluoric acid in the stockroom. This would be an enormous quantity of such a dangerous chemical for a high school lab to have.
Is it really plausible that a high school lab would have any hydrofluoric acid?
Considering how dangerous it is, I doubt a high school lab would have any.
Also, although they handled it using gas masks and some protective gear they also had left some exposed skin that could have absorbed the fumes, resulting in burns and poisoning and maybe death.
But ironically, not a car wash. See, e.g., this paper from the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. I’ve no idea what quantities or concentrations they use. I did though, about swallow my tongue when our own @FoieGrasIsEvil mentioned they used a lot of it at the car wash he operated. I guess it works…
The poster mentioning University laboratories got ahead of me, but I was going to mention community college laboratories as another ‘Gulp!’ inducing moment. The long standing CC I attended 30 years ago, had a lab stocked with chemicals from the 40s. Or earlier. One was hydrazine, which I distinctly remember having to do something or other with as a student. There were other, evidently more dangerous chemicals in stock. When the elderly lab supervisor retired, his successor performed an inventory and damn near had a coronary right then, so goes the story. Whatever they found was turned over to the bomb squad, who performed a controlled demolition in the middle of the football field. This was a suburban campus, and I guess the EOD guys used enough dynamite. Windows were busted in houses near the campus, hilarity ensued.
My other university chemical safety tale involved the idiot who didn’t examine the waste bottle labels in the back of the lab (and the lab tech was negligent in emptying the bottles—they were rather full.). S/he promptly dumped the remnant residue of some P. Chem lab experiment into the wrong waste bottle. And then didn’t close the lexan area cover. Boom! Busted glass and a few students cut up and covered with chemical waste. The initial culprit was injured quite badly, I understand.
I’m glad I figured out quickly that a career in the lab wasn’t for me.
The most dangerous thing my high school chemistry had was a chunk of metallic sodium, which was stored in a can of mineral oil because it’s so reactive with water. When we were alone in the lab and the chem teacher wasn’t there, the biggest thrill was shaving small bits off and throwing them in water so they would ignite. Fun times.
In the 80’s, it was not a rare occurrence to have the bomb squad come remove dried out picric acid from teaching labs, including from my high school. Don’t ask me why they had it in the first place.
Picric acid has uses in some blood tests. In explosives PA in a more solid form as an ammonium salt is Explosive D or aka Yellow D (a strong dye). Wiki is some what incorrect in its comparison with TNT. Explosive D is less sensitive to shock than TNT. For US munitions, it was primarily loaded in Naval Armor Piercing and High Capacity rounds. The lowered sensitivity allowed the projectile to penetrate the enemy vessel/bunker before a base fuze detonated the round. The Explosive D was press loaded unlike TNT which is generally cast in place after the feedstock is melted.