Keep It Shiny

So, you say your quicksilver is looking dull and dingy?   ….the beads and droplets you are playing with lost their luster after years of chasing them across the table?  Well there is hope!   For the mercury, anyway….maybe not for you if you have really been playing around with mercury in this manner…you, yeah, well…you are hosed.  Mercury is toxic.  You probably felt the sore gums.  Maybe the tremors.  Or maybe your internal exposure has been so high that your mental faculties have been impaired to the point that you are “Mad as a hatter.”  (Hatters of old sometimes used mercury in their processes to make felt…and now you know where that expression comes from.)  Worst of all, in extreme cases, it is possible that you could be so screwed up that someone might mistake you for a seeker of political office, or worse maybe even vote for you.  No, if you have been eating, breathing, or using mercury as a skin treatment, I can’t help you.  You are hosed.

But if your problem is simply that some mercury in your lab has gotten a few minor contaminants and you wish to freshen it up a tad, that is possible.  The best advice for this is to send it out to a proper refiner who can place it in an appropriate retort and distill it.  But, if you are still reading, clearly following good advice is not for you…and clearly you have some curiosity. Well, here I shall reward some of that curiosity with an explanation of an old method.

This old piece of lab equipment is called a Mercury Oxifier.  It was made by Bethlehem Apparatus (who also made a lot of scientific glassblowing equipment)   This device is intended to cleanup mercury.

This device consists of a set of rotors with holes through them.  In principle, when spun in the container of mercury they “chop” it up as they go around.  In so doing, a larger surface contact with the air is made.  In practice, the mercury would be placed in there and the unit allowed to run for about a week.

Afterward, the mercury would be placed to settle in a separatory funnel which would allow the oxides to float to the top.  Next, some 1M  HClO4 is added (carefully!) and air bubbled through it by way of a sintered glass dispersion frit for a few more days.  Then the mercury is washed with distilled water and dried with filter paper.  Lastly, it is “pinholed” twice through filter paper by placing a small pinhole at the bottom of the filter paper in a filtering funnel and allowing the mercury to slowly drip through.  The small particulates, HgO, and other oxides will be trapped and the mercury further dried by the filter paper.  The cleaned mercury is then collected and stored for future use.

Now, the above…while interesting…is still not something I’d recommend doing at home.  Because, let’s face it…..you’d find a way to poison yourself.  And even if you exercised care and every safety precaution, if anyone found out you were doing this they would completely freak out because while mercury IS toxic, the hysteria over it in the eyes of most people is magnified tenfold.  People.  They’ll freak out about lead in glass or mercury in a fluorescent lamp….they’ll freak out about a chunk of uranium ore in a rock shop.   Then after they’ve ruined your day freaking out about that stuff, they’ll go power down three Big Macs, jumbo fries, and a gallon of soda for lunch….because clearly, being healthy is such a big concern of theirs.  Maybe THEY are mad as a hatter.