AngryPotato YES, PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS WISE MAN, CODY :D I bet this would make a great video as I could imagine that it could be a challenge to make it float upright
Or better yet, solid gold "rubber" ducky to have something even denser float on mercury. Only problem then is the gold might dissolve into the mercury.
I'm a disabled industrial electrician. I have severe neurological damage after a mercury exposure incident It sent a chill down my spine when you said it was in your boot. It is easily absorbed through the large pores in your feet. Please don't take mercury exposure lightly especially if the exposure is through your feet and hands through the large pores of you body. The effects are devastating to your quality of life.
as far as i known pure mercury cant be absorbed easily but other forms of mercury can be easily absorbed trought the skin (i dont remember wicht types since i looked that info long time ago also sorry for my bad inglish)
He said that there was no mercury in his boots, so he knows it didn't leak. Not that there was and it did. He did say he had gotten some in his glove though
I hope you can gain, or have gained, more autonomy in your life since the incident. Modern life still has a long way to go in becoming more accessible, even in the wealthiest of countries. And society, in people's attitudes towards disability. It's every little bit worth the improvement.
Well, not all mercury is extremely toxic, it depends on the component inside of it. Pure mercury reacts a lot different then when there’s other things inside of it
Mercury was once used as bearings for heavy rotating components like lighthouse lamps, beacons, directional antennas, etc. The rotating mechanism will sit on a pan of mercury, which acted as a fluid bearing to prevent the rotating & stationary components from contact.
@@techheck3358 do you even listen to yourself? do you even know what bearings are? murcury was used as a LUBRICANT!!!! and not as a bearing!!!! absolute baffoon.
In many old light houses, the lantern that rotates at the top sits on a heavy cast iron frame and it actually floats around a circular trough of mercury bath, the same principle as seen here
@@Ken-fh4jc In fairness, that could also be due to the isolation and conditions they lived in. In the late 1800's supply and provisioning could be pretty grim. Especially given some of these lighthouses are on Islands in treacherous waters. It might also have something to do with the type of people attracted to such an occupation. Lots of potential causes for the basis of that saying.
@@TAGSlays Hazmat and heavyweight would also make bigger shipping charges. Also, hatters used to use mercury while making hats. The mental damages caused by that gave them the reputation of madness. Beside that, I wish I just could simply touch that liquid metal which doesn't scald or burn you. That shiny liquid metal that's not hot.
@ecs300 I already had that in mind, but I disregard it because it's not liquid in room temperature, like you said. And it somewhat sticks, stains and sores.
There's something incredibly surreal about watching an anvil bobbing around on liquid. It's also strange to see a liquid not "Wet out" a cast metal surface. The mercury doesn't even seem to want to stay on it, let alone stick to it. Very odd behaviour to watch.
I love counterintuitive stuff. The "not getting wet" part is because the mercury has a much higher surface tension so the drops stick to themselves better than water. You prob knew this, just saying.
@ Water is H2O, which leads itself to be a highly strong polar bond. Super easy for it to adhere to itself and other items/substances. Oil is usually made of hydrocarbon chains which lends itself to less effective to do what water does. Not saying it can’t stick to you, but water is generally better at sticking to EVERYTHING plus itself. It’s a universal solvent. That’s why you can mix things into water and not usually into oil.
Cody needs a watermark with the channel name, I remember SmarterEveryDay got a bunch of slomo videos stolen and spammed on facebook/reddit/twitter without credit given
It's the last thing they learn or never do. My dad does it very rarely these days but my cousins always make this mistake even if I correct them a dozen times lol.
Late 80's, early 90's, when I was a kid, I once saw a program on Dutch television where they had a swimming pool full of mercury. They threw in stuff like a cannonball, a bike, a ship's anchor, etc. I have never been able to find out what program that was so I only had the vivid memories to look back to. It's nice to see this as it's still exactly how I remember!
This is all that the anvil ever dreamed about - finally it got to take a nice bath and just float around for a bit. Should've given it a straw hat and an umbrella drink for the occasion!
Man... Mercury is one of those things, not unlike vantablack paint, that just looks like it's not from our reality. It looks like it's not even real, like it's CG almost, or pulled out of an animation. Awesome video.
@@Supremax67touching your skin is fine. If you leave your hand submerged in it for a long period of time, or have s cut that would allow it into your bloodstream, then it's bad. Also, breathing the vapors it gives off can be dangerous, but simply touching it won't hurt you, and working with it in short intervals is pretty harmless as long as you're careful
The mention of standing in mercury cutting off your circulation gave me a thought: what is the effect on different objects being submerged in mercury? For example: -Balloons; also the difference when they are filled with different substances like air vs water. (this made me wonder what a mercury filled balloon would act like) -what sorts of things can be crushed by the pressure of the mercury; a ping pong ball? (to be honest I'm having trouble trying to estimate how strong it is so it would be cool to have a practical visual reference) -Can you pop a grape out of its skin? -How strong is the cutting off of circulation? Is it as strong as an average tourniquet? How long would it take for there to actually be physical damage? -Could you measure blood pressure somehow? Or use it as a cast for a broken bone? -You've done that thing wearing a chainmail shirt, could you do something similar with a flotation vest filled with mercury? -What would be the equivalent depth of water to get the same amount of pressure? -does mercury do anything cool in a vacuum? Would it increase the pressure of the mercury on something such as an empty test tube? So many questions about Mercury, and only one man who can answer them for us. Be the hero we need Cody.
A bit out of order but: The equivalent depth of water for the same amount of pressure should just be the density ratio: 13.56 times the depth of mercury. It doesn't do anything interesting in a vacuum; Cody's technically already shown mercury in a vacuum chamber before, as the inert, low vapor pressure fluid you need for a barometer to work! Judging by some estimates for water pressure and the above calculation, a ping pong ball would be crushed when submerged about 2 meters deep in mercury, difficult with the current setup but not unreasonable as a demo with a taller and narrower container. That pressure would be an issue in holding the container together, of course... Measuring blood pressure is an interesting idea, but a cast is meant to be structural support for a broken bone, so that wouldn't really work.
Can't imagine a way to measure blood pressure using mercury that doesn't involve the potential to allow mercury to flow into cody's veins, then again I haven't really thought much about this.
Thanks Cody, I watched the original and could see it worked but the tub as you say was much to small or the anvil too big. I love how you scrapped the smaller anvil option and went for the BIGGER tub and MOAAR mercury. I had a jar of mercury from a very old and large outside thermometer (over 6-8 feet tall) from an orangery from a large house in Scotland. It was broken and leaked into a bucket below and the owner of the house (a British lord) gave it to me to play with! (1970’d, when health and safety relied on common sense more than written directives)! He did explain safety etc and my mum was a nurse so I was instructed what not to do more than what I could! Floating lead soldiers and toy cars, nails nuts and bolts...brother heated some once and stunned a bird sitting in a nest in the rafters of the coach house it was stored in, it fell out of the nest and took a good 15-30 minutes to recover. Mummy dear chewed his backside for that one! He’s 60 now and still healthy, I don’t know about the bird though! Keep up the great work my friend Peace Charlie UK
They used to float lighthouses fresnel lenses on mercury as a bearing, it’s amazing when you think the whole arrangement weighing over a ton can be turned using a tiny low voltage motor.
Mercury is used in astronomy. You spin the container of mercury to such a centrifugal force that it creates a bulging depression. You put the lens and gear out of mercury, and you've created a completely unique, and geometrically absolutely perfect mirror. The glass mirror has a fundamental defect, it reflects light beams in a so-called echo, i.e. multiple reflections of a copy of the beam (because the glass with amalgam below reflects beams from the amalgam, but also internally from the outer layer of glass). The mercury mirror does not suffer from any error. That's what my dad taught me 40 years ago. Thank you.
That's mostly correct, but most big telescopes use first surface mirrors. The light never passes through the glass as the incident surface is mirrored. Mostly for the reasons you described
I love the mirror coating the anvil get for an instant, i also love the fact that mercury doesn't stick to stuff as much as galiumn, it's cool to see it roll around the top of the anvil
Celivalg Coincidentally I recently made an anvil in Blender and I couldn't resist rendering it with a mirror finish. Looked as awesome as I hoped it would.
@@bloothechronosapien4288 yes, but that stuff he scraped off the surface isn't mercury in it's elemental form. Thats mercury oxides, which can penetrate the skin.
Mercury is only dangerous if you get it inside of you. So for example, if you have any cuts anywhere on your body that's close to where you're going to be handling the mercury then yeah, that's insanely dangerous, but if you don't have any cuts, then just don't huff the fumes from the liquid for long periods of time and you'll be fine
Curious how many other things could float an anvil. The issue I’d expect would be that most things denser than iron melt at a higher temp, so they’d just melt the anvil.
Yes I did! That's a lot of poisonous heavy metal! Enough to pollute xx tons of water or kill 1000th of people. In Germany the secret service will pop up at your door instantly with alone the attempt of buying it I guess... But cool video anyway
1:14 She didn't care at all for the beautiful shinny liquid metal, not even a "hmm" sound! She did care for your leg blood circulation that you simply got over by moving a bit.
Something I never would have seen in my lifetime unless you had done it. Love the sound that it makes when bobbing out of the Mercury, a little bit like water but there's a clearly different element to it. Kind of like a white noise hissing along with what might sound like water.
A fantasy sword design I saw once was hollow metal with mercury inside. As you swung the blade, the mercury flowed to the end, giving it more weight and a heavier hit.
That sword was Terminus Est. It was the sword wielded by Severian in Gene Wolfe's science fiction novel, Shadow of the Torturer, and it was appropriated as a unique weapon in Path of Exile.
It would have to be a metal planet all the way down, because otherwise the liquid metal would be heavy enough to tunnel down to the core. This is what happened to all but a trace of Earth's iron.
I have seen nearly all of your videos and this is by far the most visually mind blowing thing I have seen you do. I get the whole density thing, but seeing that anvil float is just surreal.
2:00 it's literally 5am and I heard it and I thought "wow, Iron floats better than wood in water? We should make boats out of it!" And then I remembered we already have them... It made me feel like a 17th century RU-vid guy
Brilliant. It looks utterly mad, but is exactly the sort of thing I wish that they would demonstrate to schoolkids to get them interested in science. It's so cool, that I reckon that if you were shown this as a kid - you'd never forget it, or why it's happening. Nice one!
What this guy is doing is dangerous and stupid as fuck, he intoxicated himself because mercury evaporates at room temperature. I am seriously baffled that one can buy this amount of mercury.
At university we had a professor Hans Uno Bengtsson. He had a show/lecture titled "a hundred and one ways to kill a theoretical physicist". It was really cool and full of ideas like this. Unfortunately he died really young, before the internet could immortalize him.
*John Connor:* Wait a minute here. You're telling me that this thing can imitate anything it touches? *The Terminator:* Anything it samples by physical contact. *John Connor:* Get real, like it could disguise itself as a pack of cigarettes? *The Terminator:* No, only an object of equal size. *John Connor:* Then why doen't it become a bomb or a machine gun or something to get me? *The Terminator:* The T-1000 can't form complex machines. Guns and explosives have chemicals in them. Moving parts. It doesn't work that way, but it can form solid metal shapes. *John Connor:* Like what? *The Terminator:* Like an anvil in a bucket.
The floating hammer was just more surreal, because the anvil acted and looked more like it was made of a block of wood,i wonder how my brain would perceive rocks 🪨 as floating object’s.
This is really mind bending. On one hand you know physics and physics say the anvil should float, on the other hand you know an anvil is heavy as hell.
you should try and contact the slow mo guys and see if they want to do some slow mo stuff with mercury. Seeing a balloon filled with mercury pop in slow mo would be fantastic.
1:47 bro this is so surreal to see. I once dropped an anvil on my foot by accident (The flat part landed on it, not the sharp end, thank god) But it hurt like hell. I knew it weighed a lot, and to see it floating like that?
It's always important to avoid wearing gold jewelry (wedding rings) when working with mercury, they alloy. It actually happened to a friend a long time ago.
You guys are making me paranoid, but I like it. I'm taking a mental note to choose a wedding band that I can either easily duplicate or have several spares of when I get married someday. I'm 100% serious. Thanks for sparing me the...well, not having spares! (I can't stand losing things and always have backups for keys, cash, batteries, etc. Redundancy is the best the best.)
Cheaper and safer just to use air lifting bags. After being submerged at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean for over 100 years, its in very poor condition. I think I read an article somewhere that said the salt water will eventually completely corrode away the titanic to iron oxide (rust) particles
Natural organic Mercury is the very very dangerous substance many are thinking of. , this , elemental , although still not to be played with is not as easily absorbed through the skin. When I was 9 , living in the bay area my young Russian friends parents were scientists and would now and then give us a half gallon milk jug of Mercury to play with outside . LOL It sparked a serious desire for knowledge in that direction in me .( now 66 years old ) Amazing substance!
It would be really cool to see Cody make a DIY Large Zenith Telescope. I wonder what deep-sky images one could get using a consumer camera and a 4 foot mirror. Maybe rough out a dish from blue insulation foam sheets and spin-coat it in epoxy so the total weight is low. I wonder how hard it is to make bearings that would run smoothly for something like that.
Good question about oxidation. Assuming you pour the mercury through a filter when deploying the mirror, I wonder how long it would take for oxidation to become an issue for image quality? If it takes several hours you could probably ignore it. Maybe chilling the mercury first would reduce the reaction rate too.
It's bewildering to see a liquid that doesn't wet and slightly discolor everything it touches. The closest thing I've seen to that is soldering material when it's hot.
A quick and easy way to kill the ring on an anvil is to slap a decent sized magnet on the underside of the heel, no mercury required. I've tried other methods (embedding the feet in sand, putting rubber under the anvil, chaining it down) but the magnet seems to do the best job.
We used to have horses... Now we just have a metric shit ton of mercury. Could you do a video on the technology that would be required to make a mercury submarine? Question was inspired by the extremely dense oceans on the planet Eve in Kerbal Space Program.
That’s a very interesting question, not only from the standpoint of the ability to sink, but also the depth capability and even the different pressures between the top and bottom of the submarine!
I have a proposal for you Cody: Could you try to construct a system to convert mercury in a parabolic mirror? You know, put it in a recipient and rotate at different speeds to modify the focal point. And maybe try to create a sort of newtonian telescope. People, like if you think is a good idea, hope Cody can read me. yours is one of the best channels ;-)
+Predmaster awesome idea! +Gold Recovery Expert your question make me do the experiment... if i'll find the answer i let you know. (note: sorry for my English)
Is this guy not happy being alive? I stand to be corrected of course, but from what I've seen/read/heard, isn't it dangerous to even be breathing around that amount of mercury?
No. Gaseous mercury is very dangerous, and mercury in the environment can bioaccumulate and eventually cause issues. But pure elemental mercury like this is not absorbed by your body. There might be a concern if you sloshed liquid mercury in your hands every day for long periods of time, but not for short exposure. You can drink it, actually. It just passes through you rapidly, and iirc you can't even absorb elemental Mercury through your intestinal lining. It was used as a laxative back in the day.
Pure mercury is nowhere near as easy to absorb as it is impure, and produces an immeasurably small amount of fumes. He would be fine standing in a tub many times that size as long as he doesnt drink it
I think this is how the pyramid blocks were floated into place. Dig out channels with removable damns and float the stones on mercury. Mercury was found under the pyrimds in massive amounts. Teotihuacan also.
This is so cool! Regarding the acoustic absorption/diffusion w/ the hammer blow - It would be *really* interesting to visualize what is happening to the kinetic/acoustic energy as it passes through the anvil and on in to the mercury. Is it absorbing entirely? Diffusing? A combination of the two? It sort of reminds me of what happens with, say an aluminum rod covered in rosin: if you grip it at a standing wave division, you will hear an almost sine wave tone when the rod oscillates. (...rub your finger across it.) If you grip it anywhere outside a standing wave division: it will not. It suggests to me that the mercury is so dense it stops the anvil oscillating entirely wherever it's making contact. ...which brings me to another question: *if* you had capacity to fully submerge/encapsulate the anvil in mercury and hit it with a hammer in those conditions, would you hear anything at all?
Francois Lacombe Health concerns aside, it would probably be a bad idea. Too much effort to dampen the sound can lead to reduction of impact power because the anvil isn't resisting the hammer strike as much, which is why you use an anvil in the first place. The absolute best thing is to go find yourself some hearing protection 8nstead of being an idiot. There is really no excuse not to wear hearing protection while blacksmithing.
Definitely hearing protection. It can also help to mount a decent sized magnet to the anvil, particularly under the horn or under the tail. It acts to dampen some of the higher ring without losing impact power. But combine it with basic hearing protection. You only get one set of ears.
Excellent point: dampening an anvil is exactly opposite to WHY you have an anvil - it's both MASSIVE and HARD. Let's use logic and think about the the opposite case: try forging on something that's nice and LIGHT + SOFT. Pros? You'll get an enormous right (or left) arm. (Oh, and it'll be cheaper. And quieter.) Cons? Pretty much everything else.
When I was little (late 70’s), my grandmother would save the Mercury every time a thermometer broke and kept it in an old pill bottle for us to play with when I came over. I used to love hitting the ball of mercury on the floor and watch it shatter into a thousand pieces and then come back together.
@@webpombo7765 Oh we touched it. We would flick it and poke it to make it break into a million tiny balls and watch it come back together. My mom never found out about this until I was grown and she nearly fainted😂
@@webpombo7765 elemental mercury isnt that bad, it still gives off highly toxic fumes but short exposure isnt too bad. Its more dangerous when in organic compounds. Some mercury compounds will go right through gloves into your hands and in your body, and it will stay and poison/kill you
