Wapsi Square Forum

So some people found a bunch of liquid Mercury under the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan (man, that's really hard to spell).

How hard is it to isolate elemental Mercury? I thought it took European alchemists a while to figure it out. Is this another weird thing, like the mica chamber? Anybody else get a feeling this might be used in a future storyline here in the Wapsiverse?

GlytchMeister wrote:So some people found a bunch of liquid Mercury under the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan (man, that's really hard to spell).

How hard is it to isolate elemental Mercury? I thought it took European alchemists a while to figure it out. Is this another weird thing, like the mica chamber? Anybody else get a feeling this might be used in a future storyline here in the Wapsiverse?

It's not hard to collect a puddle of liquid mercury (it's a byproduct of smelting various ores), it's just time consuming and a tad hazardous.

The tomb of the first emperor of China is supposed to have a model landscape with lakes and rivers made out of mercury, too. The Chinese archaeologists are waiting for better exploratory techniques to be invented before they disturb the tomb to find out, though.

If I recall properly ir's not terribly hard to do, if you don't mind being crude and inefficent. Roast some cinnabar ore, and mercury will evaporate from it and condense where the vapors cool.

I could see this happening as an accidental side effect of other mining and mineral working. The raw cinnabar ore has been used as a pigment and paint since cave-dwelling days, and having some of it evntually end up in a semi-sealed vessel on/near a fire seems sorta inevitable.

The hard part is figuring out how not to poison your brain while doing it.

Catawampus wrote: The tomb of the first emperor of China is supposed to have a model landscape with lakes and rivers made out of mercury, too. The Chinese archaeologists are waiting for better exploratory techniques to be invented before they disturb the tomb to find out, though.

If you haven't read Hughart's Bridge of Birds and the two sequels (collected as The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox)... well, run and find and acquire a copy and do so. Buy it used, use an inter-library library loan, pry it out of the cold dead fingers of a deceased former owner (and hope he isn't the Laughing Prince)... just get a copy somehow.

The First Emperor of China is discussed at some length therein, as is mercury, the Taoist quest for immortality, bells, ginseng, and the only safe (and quite delicious) recipe for cooking porcupine.

It's one of the handful of stories I've ever read, which has induced in me the wonderful state of "grinning ear-to-ear and leaking tears"... and it did so twice.

You will thank me.

Dave wrote:If I recall properly ir's not terribly hard to do, if you don't mind being crude and inefficent. Roast some cinnabar ore, and mercury will evaporate from it and condense where the vapors cool.

Yeah, that's the way it's been gathered for thousands of years. Pliny the Elder wrote about it being done that way (as well as grinding up the cinnabar and mixing it with vinegar, though I'm not sure how well that actually works). They'd put it in flat pans, put a lid on the pan, put the pans in a pot and light a fire under it. After a bit, they'd carefully take off the pan lids and there would be liquid mercury condensed on the undersides of the lids.

I recall that central Mexico is a famous source for exceptionally high-quality cinnabar.

Oh, and I remember reading that the Mayas also had a pool of mercury under one of their ruins as well.

Ok, so it's definitely not a weird anachronism. I wonder why all these ancient cultures loved playing with mercury and in such large quantities?

My answer? Because it looks friggin awesome, and it's fun to screw around with.
...
Until it makes you go crazy and kills you, but whatever.

Speaking of mercury, the site's been mercurial about being up/down all night.

Hopefully it's not some weird DDOS because of the storyline or something.

I used to have the kind of sealed plastic maze toy where you tilt it to move the little ball around. Except it wasn't a little ball, it was a blob of mercury. Yes, it is very cool stuff to play with. I wish I knew what became of it.

shadowinthelight wrote:I used to have the kind of sealed plastic maze toy where you tilt it to move the little ball around. Except it wasn't a little ball, it was a blob of mercury. Yes, it is very cool stuff to play with. I wish I knew what became of it.

There's a puzzle videogame out there just like that, only taken up to eleven. I think it was on the PSP. Not positive.

You could split and merge the blob, dye it, and if two differen colored blobs merged, the colors mixed. There were also things that could destroy your blob...

It was a really fun game.

It was called Archer Maclean's Mercury. And it was a fun little game.

Had to look up a picture I remember from a Time Life book on geology(?).

Yes, that's a miner floating on a pool of mercury. It's dense enough to float a human bean...

Jabberwonky wrote:Yes, that's a miner floating on a pool of mercury. It's dense enough to float a human bean...

Can human beings also float on it?
What's a human bean look like, anyway?

lake_wrangler wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:Yes, that's a miner floating on a pool of mercury. It's dense enough to float a human bean...

Can human beings also float on it?
What's a human bean look like, anyway?

Audrey II? If eating beans causes humans to be flatulent, then eating humans causes beans to be... what?

I'd guess that the photo of the miner sitting on a tubfull of mercury might have been taken in California during the later years of the Gold Rush... or possibly in Alaska a bit later on. In either case, mercury was an important if dangerous part of the gold-mining industry. Partially sorted and pulverized gold-bearing ore was run through a "bath" in mercury, and the gold would dissolve into the liquid mercury and form an amalgam of the two metals. The gold-saturated mercury was then distilled away and captured for re-use, leaving the gold behind.

Nasty stuff. We're still dealing with mercury contamination in San Francisco Bay, more than a century later... runoff from the mercury mines south of here, and from the gold-mining sites in the Sierras. They're still doing some mitigation work at the old Almaden mercury mine, south of San Jose.

It was a big business at the time, though... and cut-throat-competitive. One big company managed to gain control of most of the mercury production, buying up all of the smaller mines, leaving the gold-miners no choice but to deal only with Amalgamated American Amalgams. "When the mercury rises, we're hot for your business!"

Stuff that Floats on Mercury

GlytchMeister wrote:Ok, so it's definitely not a weird anachronism.

Well, its presence isn't a weird anachronism. Either the process by which it was made or the use to which it was put could be anachronistic. Or weird. Or weirdly anachronistic. Or anachronistically weird.

Jabberwonky wrote:Yes, that's a miner floating on a pool of mercury. It's dense enough to float a human bean...

To say nothing of the human dense enough to try to float on it.

shadowinthelight wrote:I used to have the kind of sealed plastic maze toy where you tilt it to move the little ball around. Except it wasn't a little ball, it was a blob of mercury. Yes, it is very cool stuff to play with. I wish I knew what became of it.

Quicksilver maze by chance? They were fun. Somehow I think I left mine behind in the move. My son thought it neat.

lake_wrangler wrote:What's a human bean look like, anyway?

DinkyInky wrote:Quicksilver maze by chance? They were fun. Somehow I think I left mine behind in the move. My son thought it neat.

Holey carp, I Goggled it and think you are right. That is exactly what it looked like.

shadowinthelight wrote:

lake_wrangler wrote:What's a human bean look like, anyway?

Nah... I'm expecting a future MIB movie to tell us he's just as alien as Dennis Rodman...

lake_wrangler wrote:Nah... I'm expecting a future MIB movie to tell us he's just as alien as Dennis Rodman...

As is Anne Hathaway...

And I suspect, Scarlett Johansson is too, once you get under the skin