Tonight's "weakest strike ever" award...

The ( normally amateurs) small time gold miners call it Artisanal refining, lot of how-to-do-it ( or damage yourself) videos on Youtube and certain prospectors forums.

 

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Hope your dad is careful. Mercury can be used to extract and purify gold in a way that is safe for the operator and for the environment. Main safety technique is to capture all vapors and condense them back to liquid mercury. Many small operators don't know that they should or don't know how or don't care.

Cal

 

Touching mercury most likely won't hurt you. It doesn't absorb through the skin much.

However, mercury fumes and toxic mercury compounds like dimethylmercury can very easily poison you.

 

OK...fun science time. Mercury is toxic, but is not easily absorbed into the body. Water soluble compounds are another matter. For example, a mercury "amalgam" is still used to fill teeth. The amalgam is a mixture of mercury and silver. It is quite plastic when freshly made and can be forced into the drilled holes in teeth to fill them. After awhile it sets up and becomes more solid. I have several little timed release capsules of mercury in my mouth and have had for several years.

 

For mining, the mercury is used to coat a copper sheet and a sand of gold bearing ore is washed over it. The mercury amalgamates the gold and the miners periodically squegee it off and place the gold/mercury amalgam in an iron pot with a long pipe as a neck. The pot is heated in a fire with the mouth of the pipe in a barrel of water to condense the mercury. The pot is left with a gold sponge in it.

 

One more to get all the mercury out of my system... The term "Mad As A Hatter" originated with the nervous disorder Victorian hatters seemed to be prone to and has been ascribed to mercury poisoning. If you ever wondered what mercury would have to do with hat making, read on. Top hats were made from felt. Felt is what is known as a non-woven fabric, since it is just a mass of fibers packed together much in the manner like paper is made. The finest felt came from beaver hair. Beaver hair is not smooth, each hair has little hooks on it so they catch together and make a strong waterproof fabric. To get beaver hair you had to have Jim Bridger go out and trap beavers (Oh...that's why they trapped them), obviously an expensive proposition. Rabbit hair (or fur) is much softer and much cheaper (Elmer Fudd works for peanuts) but the felt is poor since the hairs are smooth and slip over each other easily. Someone found out that hair exposed to water soluble mercury chloride would split, making lots of sites for entanglement, just like the hooks on the beaver hair. So, to make a felt for hat making, take a bunch of rabbit hair, put it in some water with some soap to help wet it and add mercury chloride to make it split. Have your assistant haul out dripping armloads of this and spread it over nets to drain and dry while the assistant is dripping wet with a mercury chloride solution. After a few years of this, the assistants REALLY had some nerve damage. BTW, nerve damage has nothing to do with mental disease.

 

Nerve damage ... no. Neuronal damage ... yes, in some cases. Cal

 

Correct @Kentucky. And just to add, mercury is still being used, and killing mine workers, in 3rd world countries. Its an easy, quick and cheap way to separate silver and gold from unwanted fine debris after the larger material is sluiced away.

I've even heard stories that mercury was so valuable back in the "mad hatter" days that corpses were dried out then burned and ashes washed away just to recover the relatively large amounts in their bodies

 

And now you know, the rest of the story.....

 

Metallic mercury isn't dangerous, it's the vapors and compounds that will do you in. If handling mercury was harmful everyone of us over 50 or so would be a raving idiot by now. As a kid I handled lots of the stuff, coating dimes and quarters and there's nothing wrong with me. By the way, that pound of Hg on ebay for $85 seems high. Scrap dealers pay $4-18 per pound.

 

Have to a very long flight. Metallic mercury has a very low vapor pressure. A tiny droplet of mercury could take many MONTHS to evaporate.

 

I was under the impression that, with all the regulations now in place, you have to pay to get rid of the stuff.

 

My kind of Mercury:

 

There is an active recycling market for mercury. Problem for some folks is that their quantity of mercury is too small or in the wrong form for a recycler to be interested. Or recycler is too far away. Some community waste agencies will accept small amounts of mercury from households for free; things like mercury batteries, thermometers, fungicides, antiseptics, etc. Better than having it go in a landfill.

Cal

 

Unless there's a scrap dealer near you who's willing to take mercury, you'd have to ship it out and the shipping charges would kill most of the profit you'd otherwise make.

 

If I come across any, I'm keeping it. I read too many Science Magic books as a kid full of neat tricks you can do with it.

 

Yeah. You can float your 1804 silver dollars on it. Cal

 

Even if they're lead copies.

 

I think I have a small container out in the garage.