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Mercury Will Devour Your Gold If You Let It
(nerdist.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Chemistry
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Look, if the mercury eats your gold it’s no biggie. All you have to do is hit the amalgam with a blow torch. It’s hot enough to vaporize the mercury, but not the gold. Besides, a little mercury vapor never hurt anyone.
I feel the need to say this because some people may not know this. The above statement is true except mercury vapor being harmless. Mercury vapor does hurt people. Just listen to the S-Town podcast. It literally makes you insane.
"Mad as a hatter!"
(Hatters were using some mercury containing colors or other stuff, leading to the saying)
Pewter actually, if memory serves me, which it usually doesn't.
Absolutely! From what I understand elemental mercury is pretty much harmless. You can swallow it and poop it out. But, if you heat it and breathe the vapors. It is evil stuff.
If you haven’t listened to that S-Town podcast. It’s pretty good. It’s about a guy from Alabama that was believed to have a genius IQ. He was kind of famous amoung people who collected really old clocks. Well, there are these really old clocks that were gilded by painting them with a gold mercury amalgam. Then you burn the mercury off leaving the gold. He even did that service for people.
Anyway, that’s just part of the story, but it’s kind of believed that he was so weird because of mercury.
Edit: He was famous for fixing really old clocks because sometimes they were missing parts and he could make the missing parts and make them work like when they were new. But he also gilded clocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormolu