What is quicksilver?
Quicksilver is that shiny grey thread: in the thermometer which goes up when you have a fever It is the same shiny thread which tells the temperature on a weather thermometer and it is the same thread which rises and falls to show air pressure on a barometer. If you have seen it only sealed away in one of these thin glass tubes, you would never guess what a fascinating substance this quicksilver is.
If you break a thermometer, a few drops of quicksilver may run out from the tiny glass tube. It looks like silver and behaves like drops of water. A small puddle may separate into drops like silvery beads and, when several drops touch each other, they merge again into a puddle, Watch out, or the silvery beads will run down a slope or run right off a table. Watch out also to keep this frisky silver away from your mouth and food for it is poisonous.
We call this wonder stuff mercury, though the old.name quicksilver was a very good one. In days gone by, the word quick used to mean living and mercury certainly acts like living silver or quicksilver. Actually, the wonderful material is metal. It is so full of life because it is the only metal which reaches its liquid state at ordinary temperatures. Iron, copper, gold and aluminum are stiff and solid because they are frozen at ordinary temperatures.
Mercury too can be frozen solid, but the temperature has to be a chilly 38 degrees below zero. On such a bitterly cold day, the runny mercury in a thermometer would become solid like a sliver of iron. It could not move up and down to tell us the temperature or whether we have a fever. In an oven at 675 Fahrenheit degrees, our runny mercury would boil away and become a gaseous vapor.
In the modern world, we have about 3,000 different jobs for mercury to do. But we have to dig for our supplies of this wonderful metal. We find it as an ore, mixed with other minerals. One mercury ore is a bright red stone called cinnabar. In this rocky ore, the mercury is combined with sulphur. When the red rock is heated, the mercury steams off as a gas where it can be caught and allowed to cool 3n silvery drops. A cinnabar mine in Spain has been yielding mercury for almost 3,000 years. Other mines are in the southwestern and far western states of America.
Mercury vapor is used in ultraviolet and other lamps. It s combined with other elements to make explosives, paints, disinfectants and germ killers. It is used in making paints and dyes and there is mercury in the pretty red mercurochrome you put on a cut finger.