The Quicksilver

The Quicksilver
Chemistry I
October 25, 1996


One day an ancient alchemist was sitting at his and noticed a strange silvery liquid-like metal. He called several of his colleagues over to admire it. It was passed down through the years, this chemical reaction, that formed this "Quicksilver" as the alchemists called it. One day a French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier tested and proclaimed it a metal. And he named it Mercury (Hg). With strong controversy from scientists around the world, Lavoisier was never given credit until after his death.. During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth is when a significant amount of work went into developing a good use to mercury- thermometers. Before people had been developing thermometers but they were not as accurate as the ones produced around 1900.
In the later twentieth century people developed a increasing "need" for pure gold and silver. European and American scientists developed a new advanced way for this- amalgams. Amalgams are alloys of mercury usually used to extract elements from there various ores. Then, once the common metal is extracted mercury is then separated through distillation.
Without mercury our world would be much different. We would have different, if any, ways of determining temperature. Mercury is also used in cleaning modern day swimming pools as "Mercury Vapor lamps" for sterilization. Mercury can be used in both reconstructing and destroying life in water ways depending upon the attention people give it. We would have no fast, economical ways of cleaning large pools; no fast, economical way of controlling river clean-ups. Life in our modern day households would be much, much colder because we would have no way of having a auto-start heater- people would have to turn on their heater manually. Yet we would also need to look at the positive side of no mercury. We would have little, if any at all, severe river life loss, therefore little need for the time and effort we spend clearing our water of mercury contamination.