And it smells like victory.
For those interested, here’s a link to the Gallium MSDS: http://www.acialloys.com/msds/ga.html
The people of Choropampa, Peru know how Mercury looks, feels and tastes after a truck leaving the nearby gold mine spilled Mercury on their streets. I saw a sad documentary about it yesterday on Deutsche Welle TV. They thought it was a precious metal. Some people picked it up and took it home.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGEEBP23Q1.DTL
If you ever did some soldering, the hot liquid droplets of silvery soldering tin look and behave like drops of mercury. But of course, they’re much hotter.
Mercury exposure has been a big issue for back-country gold miners, or used to be. Apparently mercury can be used in a very low-tech setting to “sop up” gold that’s hard to extract otherwise, but in the process the miners get a heavy dose of the stuff.
Of course, there are alternate opinions about handling mercury …
I had about a cup of the stuff to play with back in the 70’s-80’s. One of the neat things about it was that steel nuts and bolts would float on it.
There is a very unique feel to it. I would push several fingers into it and they would feel wet, but then when I pulled them out they were completely dry. Make a pool in a plate and chase it around with your finger or cut it into parts with a playing card and watch it flow back together.
I love this message board!!! Thanks to everyone who shared.
The opportunity to legitimately play with those awesome silver blobs is the ONLY reason I learned how to solder. 
But of course, they’re stupidly hot, so I didn’t ever intentionally touch one, and when I unintentionally touched one, I was hardly systematically exploring my perceptual intake. I was too busy going, “Jeeezus! Hothotohtdamnhot!”
Okay, bonus round questions: Does mercury exist in its liquid, elemental state in nature? Are there vast silvery lakes, glistening in underground pools somewhere deep in the heart of the mountain?* Or is it so reactive that it gloms onto other atoms wherever it can and is only found as molecular compounds? And, if the later, then why does mercury poison our environment - why doesn’t it recombine with other atoms to form harmless substances again once we throw it into a stream or a mountainside?
*Y’know, that image is so darn cool that I almost don’t want to know if the answer is no…
I took Stained Glass in high school.
A huge portion of that class consisted of me and my buddies heating up giant balls of solder and then breaking them up into smaller ones, mixing them with flux, etc, frequently sending the hot little globs of molten metal flying in every direction. I got hit by so many little balls of hot solder it was ridiculous.
I don’t know, but it IS a cool image!
The problem is that many mercury compounds are MORE toxic than elemental mercury, not less. Some of them are easily absorbed as well.
Native mercury can occur, but it is extremely rare. The most common mercury ore is cinnabar, which mercury sulfide (HgS).
Almaden Quicksilver, a park I hike quite often which is the site of a former mercury mine:
A nice county park now, particularly for one located so close to city limits. There are remains of the former mining operation all over the park, including the rotary furnace:
The way that thing operated gives one pause:
Vented the sulfur to the air … lovely.
Holy crap, that’s awesome. It’s a tad expensive, but if I had an office that would definately be the toy I’d want on my desk. I’d buy molds and turn it into different shapes each weak, and when a new client came, I’d hand it to them. And when they would ask me if it’s poisonous, and this is the best part, I’d cock my eyebrows and say “not obviously so.”
Spread oil on the palm your hand and cup it, place a teaspoon of cold water in your cupped hand - it feels like that, only heavier.
Mercury feels cool like a metal ball, if you hold some that’s at room temperature, though it warms up to be the temperature of your skin.
It feels a bit like a bubble, a strong one, because of the surface tension. It runs around like molten solder - I don’t think I could tell the difference between them except for the temperature.
It doesn’t feel lubricious, slimy, or clingy.
It feels like its viscosity is similar to water, though it’s hard to get a good feel for this because the density is so high.
It is surprisingly hard to put your foot down into a deep puddle of mercury. I once spent an hour or so in a manometry room at a tank farm. That is, the water supply for an area northwest of Philadelphia had several very large storage tanks (they looked more like the tanks at a refinery, not the really tall ones; these tanks were for storage, not for maintaining pressure too). They used glass U-tube manometers to monitor pressures in various parts of the system, and had these in an underground room that was probably 20 by 30 feet or so. The walls were packed with manometers that were about a half inch in diameter, and these damn things were always breaking, so they had big flasks of mercury to replenish them. And the concrete floor was very rough and uneven and there were areas where the mercury was a couple inches deep and several feet in diameter. Trying to walk on these is uncanny - the stuff pushes you back out, because displacing it is so hard at that density. But as it pushes you out, there’s no traction at all, so whichever way your foot starts to swing, it gets popped out of the puddle in that direction. Very, very odd.
It was unspeakably cool to jump in these puddles. You know the perfectly glossy and silvery reflector in a flashlight? Well, stomping fast and hard into one of these puddles creates a shape like that, some feet in height and diameter, with you where the bulb goes. But it breaks up into tiny droplets too fast to really see, and they scatter everywhere, going paff! paff! paff! when they hit things.
Liquid mercury has the lowest kinematic viscosity I think you’ll ever experience firsthand. This is the viscosity divided by the density, and it’s a measure of a liquid’s tendency to resist deformation through its inertia versus through its internal friction. Liquids with low kinematic viscosity dance and shimmer and are all full of themselves, as opposed to the other extreme, which we usually just think of as viscous.
It’s the devil, too, to hold on to. It finds the spaces between your fingers and goes farting out the bottom of your hand. It finds cracks. It doesn’t want to deform into small dimensions, but it is eager as can be to fall and its vigorous motion helps it find places to slip through. That’s why they call it “quicksilver”.
Yes, it is. Because it’s so close to the sun, it’s really hot and you could be badly burned.
OK, I guess I could have worded that better! It just strikes me that in all this time nobody has been injured enough by this stuff for it to be labeled toxic, but the safety mavens still aren’t willing to say it’s safe.
I guess it’s possible folks just haven’t been exposed to Gallium enough for problems to turn up. Or maybe it’s always used in conjunction with more dangerous things (e.g., Gallium Arsenide). It’s like asking if the Thespians at Thermopylae were tough at all; I don’t know, because folks only talk about how much tougher their allies the Spartans were.
Gallium is classified as an eye irritant, etc. (So, I believe, is pencil lead.) If I had some Gallium, I’d wash my hands after playing with it, just to be safe. I’m guessing it’s safer than, say, fishing weights.
Using Gallium to mold things sounds like a really neat idea. “Hey, you melted my antique toy soldier!”
Oh, but it expands a lot when it solidifies. Maybe use a flexible mold. Also it tends to supercool, so you might need to keep a small solid chunk handy to drop in as a crystal seed. Sounds like a fun experiment.
The tomb of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of a unified China, was said by later historians to contain “100 rivers of mercury”. No idea if it would have leached into the soil or recombined with other elements in the 2200 years since, although testing in the area has apparently revealed fairly high amounts of mercury in the soil.
Can’t have a discussion like this without mentioning this pic.
Now I do wonder what this feels like (but I’m not about to volunteer.)
Have any of you seen the mercury fountain at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona? Pretty damn cool.