School goes into lockdown and hazmat crew called over a thermometer.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I’m another who played with mercury as a kid. It was fun to chase it around a tabletop, hold it in your hands, and so on.

My high school science lab used mercury thermometers. If you broke one, you were expected to pay for it. And you’d have to clean it up, which involved collecting it in a dustpan, and putting it in the trash. A few thermometers broke in class; they were cleaned up and paid for.

Having played with mercury as a kid, as I did, and not suffering from mercury poisoning right now, I’d suggest calling in a Hazmat Team for an unbroken mercury thermometer, is overkill.

42

I broke a mercury thermometer in highschool and the teacher just gave me paper towels to clean it up. I ended up keeping the little bead of mercury in a clear film canister…I wonder where that ended up… Anyway, that was in 1997, so clearly this mercury mania is a really new phenomena.

43

No, because I am not old :wink: We have one digital one, and when that craps out we buy a new one.

44

Does that thermometer even contain mercury? I’ve read (in Mad Science, I think) that new thermometers don’t use mercury, they contain a gallium alloy instead. Here, look: Galinstan - Wikipedia

Also in Mad Science, the author said schools are evacuated over a broken thermometer, and I was wondering how common this was.

In school the teacher had a beaker of mercury with an inverted test tube inside to simulate a barometer.

45

I thought this as well. Even if the kid brought a jar of mercury to school, you think the reaction would be for the security to take the mercury to the office and have it disposed of properly and tell the kid what a dumbass he is.

But a thermometer??? Didn’t anyone (the security, the principal, the 911 operator, the police, the Hazmat officer, anyone?) stop and say, “Wait, we aren’t sending the army to the school over a fucking thermometer!”?

I guess not.

46

Why, what an odd thing to say. You must be mad as a hatter!

47

We had one of those in our high school chemistry lab. Ours didn’t just simulate a barometer though; it was an actual barometer–a glass tube full of mercury had been inverted in the beaker, and there was a scale beside it, so you could watch and track barometric changes.

But ultimately, it was a beaker of mercury, exposed to the open air inside a classroom. Nobody complained–on the contrary, we were fascinated by our barometer.