When I was young my Dad bought me some mercury home from work.. I loved how it moved when I shook the bottle and the weight of it.

When I had my own kids I didn’t want it around, so our local council had set up a event where you could dispose of household liquids like old paints and solvents, so I took it down. When I drove up, the guy asked me what I was disposing of so I said mercury. It was bizarre. I was told to stay in the car and a guy came out of a shed in a full hazmat suit with one of those pairs of metal tongs to retrieve it from me.

I remember Dad telling me that miners used to collect gold pan tailings in mercury and then of a night they would hollow out a potato and put the mercury in, and then put that in the camp fire.. it would burn off the mercury and leave a little ingot of gold.

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.)

If anyone else was reminded of that video of a 110lb anvil floating in a tub of mercury, here you go. Don't try this at home.

From the same issue:

Pure mercury metal is pretty chill, just done fuck with organic mercury compounds

Metallic elemental mercury (what you see in the picture) is relatively harmless to touch. Arguably, it’s more dangerous to rub a lead ingot, for example. However, mercury vapours (and mercury does evaporate slowly but consistently) absorb quite easily when you breath them with a ton of undesirable effects, often related to central nervous system, which is never a nice thing. Broken mercury thermometer won’t kill you. Playing with the puddle inside a non-ventilated room might kill you in several decades. Working in the non-open-air environment where mercury is always present will slowly worsen your health as mercury accumulates.

Organic compounds of mercury are what actually is nasty. A short contact with a few millilitres of that — and you will have to recover for a long-long time, if ever. However, the scary stories about methylmercury rarely mention that there are other organic compounds that are just as toxic or worse. I wouldn’t get close to any organic cadmium compound, for example, and would be extremely wary of its inorganic salts too. The thing is it’s extremely unlikely that you encounter any of these chemicals ever in your life, and if you do encounter them, then you are likely a professional who knows exactly how and why you are to deal with them.

Is no one going to comment on the font rendering

I've played with mercury when I was a kid. Hopefully it doesn't come back to bite me in the ass when I'm old.

Photo: Robert W. Madden

Oh, he be Madden alright.