Bromine

Bromine is unusual looking, as it is a dark orange-brown liquid, one of only two elements liquid at room temperature (the other being Mercury) It is a halogen, being very very reactive and corrosive, and also will sublime or vaporize into a thick orange smoke which will severely irritate lungs and eyes.

Bromine's atomic symbol is Br, and is atomic number 35. It has two stable isotopes, Br-79 being slightly more common than Br-81, and has no natural radioactivity.

Bromine was originally discovered in a mixture including seaweed ashes, and was thought to be a compound of Chlorine and Iodine. The name comes from the word "Brome" which basically means a foul stench or oder.

Commercially, pure Bromine is very rarely used except in rare chemical processes, and in manufacture of fire resistant compounds which use Bromine's unique chemistry to fight the chemical processes going on in fires. Some bromine compounds are used in gasoline additives.

Bromine is, surprisingly, not a difficult element to chemically isolate, and can be done with pool supply chemicals. How I did it was I dissolved Sodium Bromide (NaBr) and Calcium Hypochlorite (Ca(Clo2)2) in water, then added Hydrochloric acid (HCl) which freed Chlorine gas from the Calcium Hypochlorite, which then released Bromine by separating the NaBr into NaCl (Salt) and pure Br. Once I did this, I had a solution of Bromine in water, which was pure enough to make the choking fumes bromine is most well known for. To purify it further, I heated the bromine water to evaporate the Bromine, then re-condensed the Bromine vapor by cooling it down in an ice bath. In all I got lots of Bromine water, but not much pure Bromine. I managed to ampoule the pure bromine I'd made, and I made a bigger ampoule of the Bromine water (Which is much safer than pure Bromine, and looks basically the same)

This is my ampoule of Bromine-Water, not pure Bromine but enough Bromine to see the orange color.

This is a microscopic view of my pure bromine ampoule, as you can see it is much MUCH darker than the Bromine-water above, and also flows much more freely than water would.

Another method of getting Bromine is electrolysis, which is breaking up chemical compounds with electricity. I simply got a solution of Sodium Bromide (NaBr) in water (H2O) and electrolyzed, Bromine started to form on one of the electrodes(Seen above) However my electrodes started corroding pretty badly, and I didn't get enough Bromine to manage another ampoule, I barely got enough to take this picture.

Thank you for reading

~Ben