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Chemistry / Curious mercury reaction from years ago
« on: 14/02/2014 14:39:19 »
I'm not advocating playing with mercury - in fact don't play with mercury but many moons ago we were allowed to and over a lunchtime conversation today I remember one demo that was never explained.
We had a trough of water with about 10ml of mercury in one blob and an orange powder. When a dollop of orange powder was added to the water, the mercury would rush towards the powder and react producing a greenish product and sending blobs of mercury shooting off in all directions. The reaction could be repeated several times before the water got murky
The teacher refused to tell us what the orange powder was.
I never plan to repeat it but I'd love to know what it was, all I could guess at was some sort of chromium compound and it might not have been plain water.
We had a trough of water with about 10ml of mercury in one blob and an orange powder. When a dollop of orange powder was added to the water, the mercury would rush towards the powder and react producing a greenish product and sending blobs of mercury shooting off in all directions. The reaction could be repeated several times before the water got murky
The teacher refused to tell us what the orange powder was.
I never plan to repeat it but I'd love to know what it was, all I could guess at was some sort of chromium compound and it might not have been plain water.