I found a quarter pound of Paris green in a dumpster one day. It’s in a paper canister and the warning label on it says to eat three egg yolks, then take sodium bromide and opium to treat poisoning. Needless to say, the canister is very old
In the 19th century it was widely used to paint wood garden trellises and wood garden benches. Monet painted his wooden bridges and wood shutters with it at his Giverny, France waterlily garden. In Paris, boxes for shops were covered in Paris-green-painted paper. I suspect that Paris Green had the added benefit of keeping nuisance critters at bay that might eat paper and wood.
That is actually precious, the reason we cannot produce very good blue colors on fireworks is because we cannot find paris green, it can actually make the best blue colors out there.
User Pyrophoria has some excellent videos on pyrotechnic colors, and covers Paris green and suitable substitutes - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cEj8kweelaw.html
I was about to mention that. It's likely that Paris green is still found in fireworks that come from China; it's a good idea to wash your hands thoroughly after handling them, and to avoid breathing the gaseous byproducts of the combustion. Most people aren't aware of how toxic some of that stuff is.
@@bellowphone Because now it's expensive i don't think the Chinese use it at all if not a little. I have never seen a decent blue from them anyway. In any case after the combustion the problem is reduced.
Pharaoh's Serpent is another type of toxic firework we innocently played with, when we were kids. It was made with mercury thiocyanate. Another one was cigarette loads, which came in a little tin, and I found out later that the powdery white substance which would get all over our fingers, was lead azide. Not only that, but when a loaded cigarette explodes in a person's face, he generally gasps in a big breath of the exhaust gases. But what did we know?
Paris green has become extremely over rated. You can absolutely make excellent blue formulas using more available modern blue colorants. The Italians have beautiful blues and they use copper oxide red/black, and Chlorate
3:15 The vibrant Paris green begins to come through and glow beautifully In the 19th century it was widely used to paint wood garden trellises and wood garden benches. Monet painted his wooden bridges and wood shutters with it at his Giverny, France waterlily garden. In Paris, boxes for shops were covered in Paris-green-painted paper. I suspect that Paris Green had the added benefit of keeping nuisance critters at bay that might eat paper and wood.
My grandfather was accidentally poisoned with Paris green on an onion he grabbed from a neighbor's garden when he was a kid. Luckily he survived it, otherwise I wouldn't be here!
This was probably the most used pest controlling chemical for the greater part of the XXth century here, but it is now virtually unobtainable, for good reasons, I would say! Since you have acces to arsenic, you might try making some cacodyl derivatives.
For cacodyl stuff I´d need to make more As2O3 before as there´s only a little left. Might try though once a way to produce arsenic oxide in bulk was found.
@@THYZOID Another fantastic video! What an awesome channel. I'd love to see cacodyl derivatives made too. I used to have around 250g of arsenic trioxide many years ago, along with many other dangerous chemicals. My older brother worked at a chemical and biological supplies company and the boss didn't have a clue about chemistry, and he used to say to me "help yourself to the chemicals" whenever I used to help him out. Those were good times! I wish really that I'd made cacodyl. I've never seen anyone else try it. In fact I can't even find any images of what the reaction products of heated arsenic trioxide and potassium acetate looks like.
@@THYZOID I went to a Sherwin Williams paint store last month with a little vintage canister of Paris Green. The man opened it and put the powder in a paint can for me. Then he used a clear varnish to mix with some of the Paris Green powder to create a paint; he dried it. He then used their light scanner to plot the color so he could reproduce a modern equivalent for me. And do you know what happened? He scanned it over and over again, about 5 times, and kept getting an error code. The computer told him that there is no modern pigment equivalent. It can not be gotten close to. He then visited their paint chips and visually pulled out the closest ones. When he held those colors near the Paris green, nothing seemed close. Everything modern was dull and “off”. For the first time in his career, he could not reproduce a paint color. Nothing had the beautiful vibrancy of classic Paris green. So I went and ordered myself 7 kilos of Paris Green pigment powder online and will use the stash to paint my wooden garden trellises, wooden shutters, and other objects that bring beauty to my home and ornamental garden. One thing I will not do is paint garden benches or things people touch, since it is toxic. I’m also using it to do restoration work on some 19th century art objects. This is my favorite color in the whole world. Nothing makes me happier. Thanks for your beautiful video. It’s quite exciting to watch.
Those bags can leech especially with damp solids inside. I started out storing things I'd made in those but now it's a sticky pile of about 50 of them, including mercury chloride and all sorts 🤦 I did find a bottle for the mercury chloride but yeah wasn't nice to find that when I did. 10ml or 20ml glass bottles are the way from now on. P.S I'm currently working on a paris green video, it should be up in a day or so 😊 Also got a new phone so I'll probably see you on discord...
I made a cheap and pretty effective inline desiccator for my vacuum pump using a large mason jar filled with silica gel cat litter. Just drill 2 holes in the lid put a couple tubes with a stainless steel mesh screen on the end of it to keep the silica gel from getting into your pump or your glassware. Eventually I plan to make a better one using a long PVC pipe so the moisture gets a longer contact time.
@@THYZOID It has been confused with Paris green in the fireworks trade which is not good since it is hygroscopic and perhaps more dangerous with chlorates.
I have a 1820,s mirror covered in Paris green paint I should dispose of it but it’s so pretty with the mercury glass I just put it where no one can touch it
Pretty sure the underside of the eaves of my house are treated with this, probably from when it was built in the 1930s. The wood is very well preserved anywhere the green is.
Fascinating and looking very nice~. I did some research and turns out there's a similiar reaction with antimony trioxide, which also leads to a green product. If you use bismuth oxide, you get black crystals, though, which also occur as the mineral "Kusachiite" in Japan. I only found stuff without the acetate, though, so just CuSb2O4 and CuBi2O4. (The arsenic compound without the acetate also exists and is called "Trippkeite") Would be interesting to see what happens if you add Cu(OAc)2 to Sb2O3 or Bi2O3 - whether there's some acetate in there like in Paris Green or you get the pure oxides like in Trippkeite, I guess~. (Though your lab is probably not equipped for stuff like that, just thinking out loud...)
@@THYZOID awesome! Thanks for letting me know! I'll check it out. I need to make a bunch of Paris green and need a good procedure to go by. Yours seem to be the best I've found so far. 😃
when you make pigments, can you please color match to pantone or take to a local paint store to match and share the recipe? I'd love to have historic color hues in my art and home
That is such a cool color. Btw, did you ever get around to making Silica gel like I asked for a while ago? (rip concentrated acids, but should still work) Also my drying method sucks that I mentioned, spray drying is preferred. Ofc that's hard to do in a home lab.
Your silica gel method was the one with NaOH + sand followed by dissolving the water glass and crashing out SiO2 with acid if I remember correctly? If so it’s still planned.
@@THYZOID yeees that's the one. dry it and crush it in a rock tumbler or something to get some extremely fine powder that you could potentially use for some crude column chromatography. not sure how well that works, depends on the final particle size. I would not use sand tbh, just buy those "silica gel - do not eat" dessicant things en-masse (or just buy silica gel), then heat it with NaOH in solution. the sodium silicate i use has approx 30% w/w SiO2, can't remember how much Sodium tho, i'll get back to you on that. EDIT: you definitely need a slight excess of SiO2 to prevent NaOH in the sodium silicate. NurdRage has a video. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xltvwhogklI.html
@@JustinKoenigSilica na I’ll just use quartz and fuse it together with NaOH under high temperatures. As I’m still waiting for my ether and other chems I might even be able to film it tomorrow
This happened when anaerobic fungi attacked the dye in the wallpaper. Mind you the trimethylarsine created isn't terribly toxic; you were actually far more likely to die from ingestion of the dye than the gas produced.
I always choose a container that suits the subject. A paint can is best for a pigment but I sadly didn´t have a glass bottle that fit into the container so I used a plastig bag. A small amount will be ampouled someday
@@jamesg1367 They actually did a hair analysis on him and found rather low arsenic levels, so they now believe arsenic or Paris Green was not the culprit. In any case, you need to have dampness and fungus growing on the wallpaper that converts Paris Green to arsine gas. No fungus, no problem (or at least a smaller one).
Oh please for the love of god use a thermocouple on that ika. Its horribly unsafe to use it without the thermocouple as thats how it controls the heating element. If theres no thermocouple it just heats and heats and heats until as you saw it went to 220C. If youre ever boiling organic solvents with that it is an insane safety hazard due to the flash points. With water its okay i guess but not organics.
I don’t want to use a sand bath for such trivial things. For solvents the thermocouple would be worth using but for water I never used it and I never will.
Is there a wet method to get arsenic trioxide from the sulfide ores (realgar/orpiment). I know they dissolve in NaOH to give a mixture of compounds (thioarsenites and whathaveyou). Trying to make some Paris or Scheele Green from the ores :)
@@THYZOID I’m very impressed at your ability to maneuver an otherwise difficult field. I’m currently pursuing a bachelors in chemistry and couldn’t come up with half the stuff you do
either with a suitable solvent, an acid, a base or a more aggressive cleaning agent depending on what is stuck on the filter. because you use a filter paper the holes should not contain any leftovers though
I'm pretty much a total moron noob when it comes to chemistry. Like didn't even take it in high school because I'm such an under achiever. Pisses me off. Anyway I did some copper dissolving with hydrochloric. I'm not sure exactly but I used hcl, sulfuric, and eventually I threw some sodium hypochlorite. The result was a green liquid that just looked like copper in solution a deep dark green but settled at the bottom was sediment that looks very similar but more aqua marine than emerald. I thought I ended up with copper chloride or something but I have no clue. Anyone here know I'm quite curious. Also I dissolved a copper sulfate pentahydrate and was letting some crystals fall out of solution. One night I tried to accelerate the process by putting the solution in the freezer and the result was like a very powdery sedimentary form of copper sulfate. I was able to grow a pretty nice sized crystal though which I then cast into resin but that ended up having way too many tiny bubbles so it's not a nice clear display of a large blue crystal and over the months the color has slowly turned less blue and more of that greenish color very interesting in my opinion. Thanks for the video I enjoyed it. I have an idea for you how about a video on what can be made from the leftover of sodium nitrate and sulfuric acid for making fuming nitric acid. I still am not sure what it even is, sodium bisulfate i think but what can I use that to make would love to know. Thanks
Did you use both hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid in the same container with the elemental copper? Then the addition of sulfuric acid is what gave the copper(II) salt percipitate the aquamarine change in colour. For your own safety I would advise against doing hobbychem without proper knowledge. Specifically when thinking about creating fuming nitric acid, that can really easily fuck you up.