Physical Properties of Mercury

Once in awhile mercury can be found in its natural form in nature. It is difficult to mistake it for another metal because it is the only one that will not solidify until the temperature is at minus 40 degrees. Mercury is also distinguished by its high specific gravity, which is of 13.6. If you happen to stumble across a glob of mercury in nature it most likely means the presence of cinnabar, which is the main ore of mercury. Cinnabar can easily be recognized because of its red brick color and if the surface is oxidized the mineral will break very easily and show the color. One way to test it is to grind the specimen and then rub a penny across the power, if the penny picks up the mercy and turns into a silvery color you will know that it is mercury. Mercury has been used in the gold and silver mining methods because of the convenience and easiness with which mercury will amalgamate with them. In gold placer mining, in which minute specks of gold are washed from sand or gravel deposits, mercury was often used to separate the gold from other heavy minerals. After all of the practical metal had been taken out from the ore, the mercury was dispensed down a long copper trough, which formed a thin coating of mercury on the exterior. The waste ore was then transferred down the trough, and any gold in the waste that was amalgamated with the mercury. This coating would sometimes get scraped off and refined to get rid of the mercury, leaving behind somewhat high purity gold. Mercury amalgamation was first useful to silver ores with the development of the patio process in Mexico in 1557. There were also additional amalgamation processes that were created for processing silver ores, including pan amalgamation. Today, mercury amalgamation has been changed by other methods to recuperate gold and silver from ore. Hazards of mercury toxic waste have played a part in the very close to disappearing of mercury amalgamation processes.

Mercury is known to be one of the most basic of all the chemical elements. It is a heavy, silver metal that is liquid at normal temperatures. Mercury can easily form alloys with other metals and because of this it is useful in processing gold and silver. A lot of the movement to develop mercury ore deposits in the United States came about after the discovery of gold in California during the 1800’s. The one problem with mercury though is that it is, as was mentioned previously, a very toxic material and because of that, its use has been reduced a great amount in the past years. The most important applications of mercury are in the production of caustic soda and chlorine and it is also used as a component of a great number of electrical devices as well as mercury vapor lamps and florescent lamps. The demand for mercury went up during the year 1557 with the development of a process that made use of mercury to be able to extract silver from the ore. In 1644, Torricelli invented the mercury barometer and then the invention of the mercury thermometer by Fahrenheit was invented in 1714. Later on after the 1900’s, mercury was used in many products and industrial applications and was frequently used in paints, explosives, batteries, light bulbs, light switches, fungicides, pesticides and pharmaceuticals. It was in addition utilized in the production of paper, glass, felt and a great number of plastics. Around the 1980’s it became pretty obvious that mercury was harmful for the health and the environment and this factor began to greatly outweigh the benefits it was utilized for and because of this the usage of it went down tremendously. Just a few years later during the beginning of the 1990’s the usage of mercury in batteries reduced to less than fifty percent of the level it had in 1988 and its use in electrical devices and light bulbs also reduced fifty percent during the same time. The usage of mercury in pesticides, fungicides and paints has been prohibited in the United States and its use in the manufacturing of paper, felt and glass is discontinued as well. The production of mercury around the world is now limited to a very small number of countries that do not have the strict laws that other countries do.