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

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

Thorium

Thorium in pure form is a rather normal looking silver metal, and can be rolled and stamped just like aluminum or steel. However Thorium is radioactive, and most likely you'll run into it in the form of Thorium Dioxide, a grey powder, which is used because it can withstand extremely high heat.

Thorium's atomic name is Th, and is atomic number 90, the most common isotope is Th-232 (With a half life of over 14 billion years) which occurs naturally, almost as commonly as Uranium (which is actually quite common, relatively speaking).

Thorium is commonly found mixed in with Uranium ores, but is not currently used for much commercially, so there is lots of Thorium in the world as a by-product of Uranium purifying. Because of this abundance, some scientists have recently thought up a way to use it as a nuclear fuel, possibly replacing Uranium in this respect, but few nuclear power plants actually employ Thorium today.

Thorium was widely used before the 1950's or so, sometimes it was used simply as a metal with no regard to it's radioactivity in an alloy with magnesium called Mag-Thor, which was used in some missiles for it's light weight and strength.

Another common use was in old gas lamp mantles, which where coated in Thorium dioxide to make them glow more intensely with the heat of a flame, but since the 1960's it's been replaced with Yttrium oxide. Yet another use was mixing it with glass, this glass was then used to make expensive high-grade camera lenses due to superior optical qualities of "Thoriated" glass, however it has not been used for this since well before 1980.

Today one of the only sources I could find was in an electrode for "TIG" welding, these electrodes consist of a rod of Tungsten about 7 inches long and 1/16th in diameter, and if you search for long enough, you can find Thoriated electrodes with up to 4% thorium content. I bought a few of these electrodes, and proceeded to try to dissolve the Tungsten to leave just the Thorium Dioxide, the result was a dirty green crumbly layer, probably not very pure Thorium Dioxide.. But it is still radioactive, meaning in a way, my experiment worked. Both this green product and the original Thoriated-Tungsten electrodes are shown below (The dime is just for scale, dimes have 0% Thorium content.)

This concludes my Thorium post, thanks for reading.

~Ben

Helium

Helium is a colorless noble gas, and is the second lightest element. It is generally very common in the universe, because of nuclear fission of Hydrogen in stars results in it.

Helium's atomic symbol is He, atomic number is 2, and most common isotope is He-4 having 2 neutrons, but He-3 does exist as a decay product of H-3 (Heavy Hydrogen, "Tritium"). It is found right after Hydrogen and before Lithium in the periodic table, and is very very light. It is also a noble gas, so is very non-reactive and forms almost no compounds.

Helium is very well known for being lighter than air, and is quite commonly found in stores to fill balloons with. You can even purchase your own small tank for parties and such. Being a noble gas, it is very nonreactive, and if released into the air it will simply float away to the outermost levels of earth's atmosphere, then just sit there without reacting to anything.

Commercially, Helium is gotten by super-chilling air until the different gases liquify out, once most of the more common gases like nitrogen, oxygen, etc. are gone, most of what remains are various noble gases, including Helium.

Helium doesn't have many scientific uses because it is inert and no chemicals will bond with it, but because it is inert, it can be used to protect reactive metals from the oxygen in the air.

One interesting aspect is that since it is so much lighter than air, sound waves travel very fast through it, and as a result sound higher pitched. This effect can be seen if you fill your lungs with helium, then try to talk, it will result in a higher and probably hilarious voice (However breathing any gas can be hazardous, even inert gases, because you might not get enough Oxygen. Don't breath to much helium without taking some comfortable breaths of air in between)

My Helium ampoules (sealed glass tubes, see above) are self-made and not very high quality, but good enough for me. I made them by sealing one end of a glass tube, filling it with water, then, while submerged in water, bubbling helium up into it, then melting the tube shut just above the water. The water is to keep air out, but as a consequence the final product probably is around 5% water vapor, making it impure. Once again, close enough for my purposes. I made two from a helium balloon I commandeered(stole) from a political campaign booth at a fair.

This is all I have to say about Helium for now, tell me if I've left anything out.

Thanks,

~Ben

Radium

Radium in pure form is a radioactive metal with a slight blue glow, but it is very very rare to see it in pure metal form, or in any amount bigger than "Tiny".

Radium has the atomic name "Ra", atomic number 88, and the most common isotope is Ra-226. It's at the bottom of the Alkali-Earth metals, and is chemically similar to Barium.

It was discovered in 1898, when radioactivity wasn't very well known, by Marie Curie, found mixed in with a Uranium ore known as Pitchblende, once the Uranium was removed from this ore, the by-products, which where mostly Barium with traces of Radium, where still radioactive.

In the 1930s or so, radioactivity was considered a big deal, Radium was a popular word, and was quite commonly discussed by the general public. It was used in countless useless applications because it was thought to be healthy at the time, at one point you could buy Radium drinking water, Radium hand lotion, and a number of other bogus products.. Some of which really did contain Radium.

One actually useful application of Radium was discovered in the fact that the radioactivity of Radium(And Radium compounds, such as Radium Chloride) would react with the chemical compound Zinc Sulfide, and produce visible light, similar to "glow in the dark" items, but would last 20 some years without recharging in sunlight.

A company known as the the United States Radium Company(among other companies in various countries) manufactured a paint containing these chemicals, and it was used on wrist watches, switches, dials, anything that needed to be signified in the dark. Many military meters and gauges used Radium paint. However, in the 1960s, girls employed to hand-paint these items began to contract bone cancer from the exposure and light consumption of Radium (They used their mouths to re-shape their paint brushes), which lead to a lawsuit against the company, and a world-wide end to Radium paints.

I, however, was lucky enough to buy a broken watch from the 1920-40s off of Ebay containing this very paint. The risks of Radium to the wearers of these watches is much less than to the painters, and many where worn 24 hours a day with no side effects, but still, I won't be wearing mine.

I'm not sure how old this watch is or where it came from, but it is swiss made, and I think before 1960. On the left is the glow AFTER being charged with ultraviolet light, the Zinc-Sulfide in the Radium paint won't glow from radiation after about 20 years because it breaks up crystals vital for the glow, and it doesn't glow for very long under ultraviolet, just long enough to show what it might've looked like years ago when it was still good.

That's my post on Radium, thanks for reading!

~Ben

Xenon

Xenon (zee-non) is a very rare Noble Gas, and is most well known for the fact that it discharges very bright clean white light. Because of this it is most commonly used in strobe lights or flash bulbs.

Xenon's atomic name is Xe (Which is a reason I really like it, it has one of the most awesome names) atomic number is 54, and most common isotope is Xe-132 with 78 neutrons, however every isotope from Xe-124 to Xe-136 (With the exclusion of isotope 125, 127, 133, 135 which are synthetic and short-lived) is found naturally.

Being a noble gas there are almost no naturally occurring compounds, and is most commonly obtained from air, which contains a minute percentage of it. It is very unusual, an interesting fact is that on average there's less Xenon in air than there is Gold in sea water.

It is quite heavy for a gas, a balloon filled with Xenon will fall to the ground faster than a solid low-density styrofoam ball.

As mentioned above, it's most common uses are in strobe lamps, which are gas-discharge lights similar to Neon signs. Similar to Neon displaying a red color, Xenon displays a bright pure white, so is used in camera flashes or for high-power projector or spot light bulbs. All of my samples are in the form of lamps mentioned above.

These are my samples, all are (loosely speaking) light bulbs.

Top right sample: This is the Xenon flash bulb from your typical camera flash, easily found in disposable cameras for about $6. Normally I wouldn't take it off of the circuit board, because the circuit board can be used to light it up, but in this case it was from and older camera flash that no longer worked.

Bottom sample: This is a much larger flash bulb, probably used in a strobe light. I was very lucky to pick up 3 of these basically for free at a special flea market in Boston. They are basically exactly the same as the smaller one, just a different shape. You might also notice the third wire in the middle, this is a "trigger" wire, because it is very hard to get and arc to start in the Xenon, a high voltage (but low amps) charge is applied to the middle and one of the edges, this "starts" the arc, which than continues from a larger more powerful capacitor(This all happens in a fraction of a second) They make some bulbs even larger than these for airport lights and such.

Top left sample: This is a very rare lamp, given to me by my dad. It is in fact a projector bulb filled with Xenon, and it is unusual because it does not "flash", it actually stays lit up, which is difficult because the Xenon tends to get very hot quite fast. I am very lucky to have one of these, most are used by movie theaters and are returned to the company that makes them for "repairs". Quite difficult to get your hands on, and expensive to get new. This one may not work, I have no power supply to test it.

This concludes my post on Xenon, my favorite noble gas. Thanks for reading!

~Ben