Beryllium Oxide insulators

I think that josephkk may be suggesting - in the nicest possible way - that you are little over-sensitive and rather too inclined to react to fair comment as if it were intended as an insult.

And describing someone as a rusty, clanking insult machine is a trifle uncivil, as well as a bit silly. I can't rust and I don't clank.

A co-worker at a previous job liked to tell the story of synthesizing one of the -caines (not co-, something less interesting) in a lab for his college chemistry course in the mid 1970s. The final test was to dip your finger in the stuff, rub that finger on your gum, and see if your gum went numb or not.

In the late 1980s, my high school chemistry teacher got the "broken thermometer" box out one day. It was a plastic box with some sulfur powder and blobs of mercury in it. I *think* he may have even tipped it out onto a tray and let us poke at the blobs with a pencil, before putting it all back in the box.

Matt Roberds

I the 70's there were all sorts of lab demos that would not get past an ethics committee or H&S these days. One of our first lab synthesis experiments we were told to be careful because it would be withdrawn the next year due to a risk of carcinogenic side reactions.

We actually were among the last to see Maxwells spur running on the open bench. That is a spur on a horizontal bearing dipping in mercury and a hefty current flowing approach with a magnet and it spins round arcing and sparking and flicking blobs of hot mercury out of the pool.

Kilogram quantities of mercury were found loose under the floorboards of a major UK national observatory in the late 1980's. It isn't quite as dangerous as they would have you believe after it has formed an oxide skin. Accumulated spills from a long defunct transit instrument.

Thanks John,

We will be looking at both.

regards, Bob