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brilliant as silver
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Nine out of ten hatters recommend that you don't do this. The tenth hatter purple monkey dishwasher.
(Victorian-era hat makers were notorious for going mad because they used mercury to treat felt cloth.)
I wonder what secondary compounds this was creating. Elemental mercury is pretty much fine, but if it was reacting with other things to create wacky fun times...
they chewed the leather to hides to soften them, IIRC. so it wasn't just getting on their hands, they were ingesting it.
I think it was mercury nitrate. Much more soluble.
Is this the origin story of The Mad Hatter? 🙄
Could have been. I know Lewis Carroll liked to lampoon issues of the day in his writing.
I'm kind of guessing the mad as a hatter phenomenon was known then, but don't really know.
I think the original idiom was "mad as a hatter" which was eventually shortened to "mad hatter", possibly due to the Alice in Wonderland character.
Sneaky Simpsons reference here for those who didn’t notice.
I thought it was the vapours from using mercury inside that got them.
It's so much harder believing in six impossible things before breakfast when you're allergic to quicksilver.