Gold Miners used to keep Mercury in a bottle and they would take off their handkerchief and squeeze the Mercury through the handkerchief and then put it back around their neck to separate the gold So yeah some of those crazy 49ers were crazy for real! And you would be in a world of shit if you're caught with a gold pan and Mercury in California It's highly illegal!
Yeah I'm very aware of it. I always preferred a metal rusty one But I even used the hub cap off of my Mustang once and found color with it just proving a point!
I was born in Long Beach. And I worked for gold divers underwater mining equipment we made dredges but left for Nevada after the taxes got too high I didn't go with the company though I stayed in California but Mercury pretty much across the board is illegal throughout major parts of the US.
and understandably so, but since i left socal in '99 everything, and i mean everything, has become illegal there. even in blatant violation of the u.s. constitution.
No I know about it. And I'm sure you can find videos online Well movies of it I'm pretty sure Disney did a thing about using Mercury to separate precious metals I think it was on Disney world of color or one of those programs It's been over 40 years since I had anything to do with dredging and gold mining!
This still happens in South America. Mercury smuggling is a big business and cartels are involved. Only one country in South America (Guyana) allows mercury import by private citizens, and it's smuggled all around. Certainly many of the larger illegal mines have other sources, but the boutique mines by smaller individual miners in the jungle are mostly sourced this way.
What’s up with a gold pan and mercury being highly illegal in California. I’ve not heard this and I’ve seen people in possession of both. Mercury is a common way to extract gold from ore.
Yeah it'll get you in a world of trouble if they find it on you especially. A giveaway would be a copper pan back in the olden days. Because yeah you can extract easily extract the gold from the placer with it. And they're worried about people dropping it in the rivers and streams.
No video cameras weren't as common back in the 1980s back then It was only very rich people had video cameras and they we're bulky and weighed a lot! But basically you would just put the Mercury in the pan and it would separate the gold from the other elements and then you would squeeze it in your handkerchief and the Mercury would squeeze out of it and what you had left was your gold because the gold I think Disney made a film of it once the process!
I may be wrong but I thought they used mercury to form an amalgam. The mercury bonds with the gold to separate it from the sand etc. then they heat it up to vaporize the mercury and recapture it and the gold is left behind.
If gold and mercury form an amalgam I don't see how using a handkerchief as a filter would work.
You can pan for gold in many places in California. Dredging and high banking is illegal, but hands and pans is fine. Good luck finding good quality gravel that isn't claimed however. But there are public places you can use hands and pans.
East Fork of the San Gabriel River is a great place to use hands and pans. You won't find much, but you can find color.
Yeah we had a claim. And our couple jet could remove 1 and a half tons of rock sand and gravel a minute gravel a minute Yeah it's been made illegal now I think Keen was one of the few companies that was still making dredges last time I heard, I've been out of the game for well over 20 years!
Public Lands For The People just recently lost the Dredge Ban lawsuit. So, any profit from river claims is mostly impossible now. You got out at a good time.
I remember telling Burrell we haven't had a customer for a couple of weeks. And he said well you've worked here long enough opened up the safe and had gold ingots way before it was ever legal to trade with gold. He literally had millions of dollars in gold and when it became legal at $100 an ounce he made a fortune LOL
When she was about 6, my younger sister was recovering from orthopedic surgery when she bit off the end of a mercury thermometer the nurse had placed in her mouth. You should've seen the craziness that ensued!!
They pumped her stomach, fed her with some kind of black sludge to make her throw up, then monitored her closely for about a full 24 hours (she was about 18 months younger than I was.. Still is, in fact)
She turned out okay, but it was a memorable circus in her hospital room for a while.
Can't remember how I got those tiny little balls from the floor that play hard to get.
It's literally almost impossible to pick those with your hand. When you think you got some in your hand, there's nothing. I hope I didn't vacuum those. Thats the worst thing you could possibly do.
my uncle did that and had a lot of cancer throughout his body. battled for about 7 years until the end. always considered it could’ve been because he loved playing with mercury, not sure though
Does mercury feel wet? I’ve never touched it but I really want to now because it looks like that goop stuff you can make with cornstarch. Can you please just describe the feeling of it?
We should probably also mention other things that CAN be absorbed through the skin if we're going to talk about it at all.
Lead (Pb) CAN be absorbed through the skin and it should only be handled with the appropriate PPE. Old construction, old lead-based paint, solder not labeled as Lead-Free. Lead shows up in weird places.
Epoxy resins, chromates, rubber chemicals, amine hardeners, and phenol-formaldehyde resins. This means those cool epoxy tables you see people make on Youtube are potentially toxic, and especially so until they're fully dried and cured. Still, I wouldn't eat off of anything made with these chemicals.
Plastics made with certain inflammable properties (like cooking utensils) can contain Cadmium and Antimony that, over a long period of use, can build up in the system. High levels are often linked with the development of cognitive and neuromuscular issues.
I recently took a heavy metals test, and my levels of Cd and Sb were "elevated". This might explain my recent fights with depression and worsening ADHD. I'm also of the opinion that the rising rates of mental health issues in this country tracks well with the rate we're using cheaper and cheaper materials to make things.
We're so careless and blind to how we're slowly poisoning ourselves, all because the FDA or EPA or TSCA thinks they're all made at "acceptably safe levels". The only safe level of these things is zero.
Whoever thought cooking utensils and cadmium or antimony was a good idea, is some kind of sick sociopath. Same with cadmium and toys or costume jewelry. Smh
Our school dental nurse gave us the leftovers from our fillings to play with. We would take it back to class! Who knows how much we ended up ingesting? It’s probably all through the carpets too! Primary school in the 80’s Auckland New Zealand 🤣
Boy Scouts made a rule because of my brother and I.
Pine wood derby cars need to be within a certain weight, the heaviest possible the fastest. We hollowed out our cars and used mercury instead of using basically tire weights. Well one of the cars leaked on the track and you can not use mercury anymore. My dad’s shop has always had all sorts of random stuff like jars of mercury.
Later on in college they had to actually make it a rule that you can’t have a slip n slide in the hallway of the dorm. We didn’t break any rules at the time :D
That’s actually inaccurate. Mercury is absorbed through the skin but slowly, so you would have to handle it for a long time for the exposure to have toxic effects. These gloves (they have 2 pairs on) are more than sufficient. Mercury vaporizes at a low temperature and the mercury gas is exceptionally toxic. This is the most dangerous route of exposure for elemental mercury. For methyl mercury, the absorption routes change, same with ethyl mercury. Type of mercury also determines how fast the body can eliminate it and or if it accumulates.
Basically all of the risk is mercury is caused by it having significant vapor pressure and being very well absorbed by the lungs. It's safer to swim in mercury while wearing a good mask than it is to just stand in a room without ventilation with mercury in an open bowl without a mask.
The "dimethyl" part of the "dimethyl mercury" is a really big deal. Same with the "tetraethyl" of "tetraethyl lead" in gasoline. The organic compounds of these heavy metals are way more problematic because they can sneak into the body way easier than a super heavy metal.
Yes, in the post it is assumed to be elemental mercury.
However, to assume all mercury you're going to come across is elemental could be false. The woman died of mercury poisoning that went through her gloves. Most people stayed she even took reasonable precautions for what she was researching.
The question is whether you want to take the risk of mercury poisoning or not.
The only mercury that the average person will ever encounter in their life is elemental mercury. And the only way the average person is going to see it is if an older thermometer breaks. You will never encounter dimethylmercury outside of a lab setting or someone trying to kill you with it.
It wasn't a contamination of elemental mercury. She was working with that specific compound.
With regular old elemental mercury like in this post, there's essentially no risk of poisoning unless you swallow it in large quantities. Hell, Cody's lab did a video about this and he held elemental mercury in his mouth.
That is really the difference between understanding a risk vs perceiving a risk. Liquid mercury is not especially dangerous. It will even pass through the digestive system if you ingest it.
It is dangerous when vaporized and inhaled. So more important than gloves would be a respirator.
Yeah man. Liquid mercury is Hg2, and methylmercury is CH3HgX, they behave really, really differently. Kind of like how you have sodium all up in your body, but if you toss metallic sodium in water it explodes. They are in completely different forms, with completely different chemical properties.
haha, yeah. My co-worker explained to me how voltage works, and how the rubber soles on shoes are just fine to protect when voltage is low. I was like 'Sure, but I'd still wear ppe'
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u/[deleted] Dec 15 '24
Crazy amount of trust in those gloves