News

Lately I've been into chemical isolation of elements, meaning taking compounds with an element I want and working out a way to get it alone. I've done this with Bromine and Iodine recently, and I know how to go about it with Chlorine and a number of others.

In other elemental news, I found I have some Pewter, which is >85% tin, and I've been working on a way to get an Argon discharge lamp.

Through great luck at a flea market, I managed to get a "silent" light switch, which contains the rare liquid metal Mercury. Most these switches have small glass vials containing the Mercury, but while disassembling the switch, I accidentally cracked this vial. I immediately took my project outside to avoid risk of Mercury vapor, which is very harmful to breath, and carefully poured the Mercury into one of my sample vials, which I then sealed up and don't plan on opening soon. Mercury is one of the most interesting elements, because it looks just like any other metal, but sloshes around the vial when you tilt it, and is quite heavy, so it's nothing like having a vial of water, so I'll likely do a post on this in the next week or so.

I may buy a small set of metal bullion, which I generally avoid doing, because pure metals are boring, I want to see them being used for something, but in this case the metals are very very rarely seen in anything other than 1-10% in an alloy, so it would be nice to just have one piece of it. However funding is keeping that at bay for now.

I have also been trying to get my hands on a burned out sodium-vapor lamp, which besides containing the obvious Sodium vapor (An element quite difficult to get) the leads through the glass must be made of a Niobium-Zirconium alloy, which are two more quite unusual metals. If you have one or know where you can get one please speak up!

I will also be doing a post on the infamous Uranium, well known radioactive fuel most people think is so harmful.

Another note, I was considering turning this whole deal into more of a website, because I could then organize my samples and add new ones easily, instead of only doing new posts for specific elements.. The blog you read now would stay intact to tell of what samples I've attained in the last week or so, but would instead link to a page about it instead of doing an entire post on one element alone. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for reading

~Ben

Oh and hey, my 16th birthday is in 5 days :P