One of the people I know got some mercury on her gold ring. My father and I were watching a gold prospecting show (Gold Fever to be exact) and they had a similar problem. They mentioned an acid, but my dad and I forgot the name. Any of you know?
Could you please clarify a little?
Mercury is very toxic; how did your friend end up with some on her ring?
I don’t have a cite, however my room mate used to work at Homestake Gold Mining Company.
According to him you do one of two things to remove mercury from gold: use a Nitric acid wash (probably what you’re looking for) or boil it off (mercury boils at 650f, gold at either 1965f or 1995f) and draw it off with a vacuum system.
Hope this helps. Somebody should be along shortly with cites.
1 Get your friend to take off her ring
2 Get her to a poison control center http://www.aapcc.org - merucry is wickedly dangerous
3 DO NOT attempt anything with the ring. Go see a professional.
It’s not that bad, guys. The mercury is forming a very tenacious bond with the gold, and not much is going to come off into the skin. Yes, to be safe she should not wear it, but you needn’t call 911 yet.
Whatever. Mercury isn’t really that dangerous at the quantity and exposure we’re talking about here, trying to lick it off. Of course you don’t want to wear the thing around.
(incidentally, where mercury is really nasty is Alkyl mercury compunds)
and that should read
I don’t know how toxic it could be, both my parents got it poured in their hands when they were in high school. But, thats a different story…
These people found this rock, (in a box or something) they didn’t know what was, so they took it to work and let everybody see it. The people at work didn’t know what it was, so the owners took it to a jewler, and the jewler didn’t know what it was. The owners daughter was talking on the phone with her mother, and noticed that the back of her ring was silver. That led us to the conclusion that it is mercury.
I understand that time is of the essence as the mercury will continue to eat at the gold until it is removed.
In addition to Xgemina’s suggestions it can also be buffed off.
Soaking the ring in nitric acid worked for me. It’s been 12 years, and the ring is still intact.
Yes,nitric acid usually works best.Use moderately diluted.Don’t use aqua regia because that’ll dissolve the gold as well,like salt in water.
Aqua regia = mixture of concentrted nitric and hydrochloric acids.Either one alone will not dissolve the gold.The latter won’t dissolve mercury either.
–slight diversion
“aqua regia”…trying to remember High school Latin. That’s a strange name for a mix of acids (“Water of Kings”?)
How did that come about?
You’re close.;).It means ‘royal water’ because the stuff can dissolve the royal/noble metals-gold,silver and platinum.
Just a note on mercury poisoning - one of the reasons it’s nasty is that it’s cumalative. Another is that liquid mercury vaporizes. There are very few pathways for the body to get rid of mercury or other heavy metals. As suggested by other posters, small unrepeated exposures to the free metal aren’t that dangerous. But it’s best not to mess with the stuff on general principal, and also because it has a nasty habit of finding ways to accumulate in out-of-the-way places and vaporize if not contained. That’s why spillage is so dangerous. In general, it’s best that people think of it as “dangerous - do not touch”, rather than “oooh - look at the pretty liquid metal”. The last attitude would lead to people keeping a container of it on their desk as a novelty, for instance.
If that is mercury on the ring, and it got there from the rock, the rock (presumably red or orange) must be a chunk of cinnabar.
Now I’m curious as to how SO MANY people apparently got mercury on their rings as to be experienced with removing it.
Just touch the Philosopher’s Stone to the ring. This will turn the base metal, mercury, to gold.
Have we learned nothing from alchemy?
We all recognize mercury as a toxic substance nowadays but it wasn’t that long ago, that is, in my lifetime (I repeat – NOT THAT LONG AGO!), that it was considered mostly harmless, at least by the general public.
The most common source of elemental mercury was broken thermometers. Every family has a thermometer to tell if a kid has a fever. When I was a kid these routinely used mercury as the operative fluid. They were glass. They got dropped. And then we got to play with the mercury. If I had been old enough to wear a gold ring I’d have gotten it on my ring. We used to rub it on dimes (which were once silver – NOT THAT LONG AGO!) to make them shiny.
Mark Twain (in Roughing It) tells of working at a gold mill in Nevada where they used mercury to “fetch” the gold from the ore. They’d pass the ore through a trough full of mercury, which would dissolve any elemental gold in the ore. They would then boil the mercury off leaving the gold behind. (Can you spell “toxic fumes”?) He said it “fetched” the good gold ring he was wearing at the time.
Yeah, that was a very common industrial gold mining technique - as we’ve been alluding to, the affinity of mercury for noble metals is amazing. There’s a park called Almaden Park in San Jose which used to be a mercury mine, among other things - if you hike up to where the old furnace is, a sign on it explains how they used to refine mercury from the HgS in the ore by heating it, and apparently just venting the sulfur to the air. Lots of nice red rocks in the vicinity.
To second pluto…anyone remember Calder’s mercury fountain? Yes, the stuff is not good for you. But it is not a sudden-death drop dead kind of thing. Just that it will accumulate in your body and could eventually cause some health problems. Acute mercury exposure isn’t a big deal, although of course it should be avoided if possible. Chronic mercury exposure is bad.
Note: When you buy a jug of mercury, don’t get the kind with a picture of Pikachu drinking the mercury.
[sub](Yes, I stole that from The Onion)[/sub]
Part of the kit of gold panning prospectors is a bottle of mercury. When they’ve washed the contents of their pan down to the heavier grit and there are flecks of gold in the pan, they pour in a little mercury and it absorbs the gold. At night, by the campfire, the prospector then hollows out a big potato, puts the mercury with the dissolved gold in it in the center of the potato, wraps the potato in wire to keep the two halves together, and puts it in the fire, perhaps on the blade of a shovel. After a while the mercury boils off and the gold can be retrieved. No, you don’t eat the baked potato.