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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Artificial horizons and mercury
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2003 Jul 16, 23:00 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2003 Jul 16, 23:00 -0700
I remember playing with a Petri dish of mercury in school back when I was about 10 years old. We students were allowed to stick our fingers in the mercury and float coins on it. There was no personal protective equipment for us at all. That was back in the 1960s. Times have changed. A few years ago, a kid broke a mercury thermometer in a classroom so they evacuated the building. The Los Angeles TV stations covered the hazmat spill response with live video from copters hovering overhead. Of course with my experience I was thinking, "get a LIFE, people!" Mercury *is* pretty nasty, though. Put the words mercury msds in a search engine and take a look at some of the material data safety sheets. No more touching mercury bare-handed for me! This web page on handling mercury in the lab is pretty good: http://www.ilpi.com/safety/mercury.html
