Answer Man: Reader asks if mercury he handled in chemistry class years ago is the same stuff considered highly toxic today

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Answer Man: When I was a teenager taking chemistry class, I rubbed mercury on a dime with my fingers. It made the dime shiny and I liked the feel of the mercury. Also, we liked to drop it on a table to watch it roll. I am 84 years old and the mercury does not seem to have harmed me in any obvious way. Is the mercury that we are so concerned with today the same kind I once played with? — Richard L. Wikoff, of Nixa

The short answer is Yes.

With that said, I need to reveal something. Richard sent me this question via letter. He sent it to me when I was at the Springfield News-Leader.

In 2015.

As I have mentioned before, I have a long document where I write down all the Answer Man questions I receive. The list goes back to 2015. My first Answer Man column was in January that year.

Every few months, I review that list looking for possible stories I might have passed up but for whatever reason I now might find interesting. When I recently saw Richard’s question on my list, I didn’t remember receiving it. I must have written it down and forgotten it.

My first thought when I considered answering it eight years later was this: I hope he’s still alive.

And if he’s not, I pray it wasn’t mercury poisoning that got him.

Now, back to mercury.

Mercury is a metal. It is liquid at room temperature. If I knew more about science or if I had scored 36 on my ACT, I would explain to you how a “metal” can also be a “liquid.”

But I’m ill-equipped to do that.

I do know mercury was once used in thermometers to determine the temperature not only of rooms but of humans. People once put mercury-filled thermometers under their tongue.

If you have such a thermometer in your medicine cabinet, get rid of it.

The very same mercury that Richard (and many others) once played with is toxic to humans and toxic to the environment.

I remember watching silvery mercury drops on a table that would scurry away when I tried to touch them. I can’t recall if I played with mercury in high school chemistry or if I had broken open a thermometer in my tree house.

Mercury hasn’t changed. We have.

After all, we once believed there were no health risks to smoking cigarettes, too. The tobacco companies swore it was true.

I reached out to Missouri State University and asked for an expert on mercury, preferably someone in the science department. Preferably someone who hasn’t been exposed to it for a long time.

“I did the same tricks with liquid mercury a long time ago during shows/demos in the classrooms back in U.S.S.R.,” says (via email) Nikolay Gerasimchuk, a distinguished professor of inorganic chemistry who apparently once lived in the former Soviet Union.

He has a doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry from Kyiv State University, Ukraine.

“We ‘converted’ bronze/copper coins into more valuable silver-looking coins that way,” he writes.

(In reading this email, I can’t help but imagine the words being spoken in a thick accent.)

“That was a great surprise to the kids and amusement,” he wrote.

“Since that time, all demos with metallic mercury are prohibited due to its very high toxicity. So, what we did in the past is totally illegal now.

“Moreover, if somebody sees these days droplets of Hg (mercury) on the floor or in crevices there — a call to HazMat is necessary to remediate it.

“Metallic mercury as vapors comes to the lungs and after long exposure humans get poisoned slowly developing a ‘mad hatter disease’ damaging the brain. Numerous people were poisoned that way in the past. It is a silent and slow, but sure, killer.”

Let me interrupt the professor for just a second.

According to the History Channel, the effects of mercury poisoning are called “mad hatter’s disease” because:

“The expression is linked to the hat-making industry and mercury poisoning. In the 18th and 19th centuries, industrial workers used a toxic substance, mercury nitrate, as part of the process of turning the fur of small animals, such as rabbits, into felt hats.

“Prolonged exposure to mercury caused employees to develop a variety of physical and mental ailments, including tremors (dubbed ‘hatter’s shakes’), speech problems, emotional instability and hallucinations.”

I was going to stop right there — honest, I was! — but two paragraphs down I was drawn to two words: “Abraham Lincoln.” I have been reading about Lincoln recently, and — for better or worse — I will continue.

“Researchers have suggested that Boston Corbett, a hat-industry worker who killed John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, might’ve suffered from poor mental health due to mercury poisoning.

“Corbett, who’d been employed as a hat maker since he was a young man, became a religious zealot and in 1858 castrated himself with a pair of scissors as a way to curb his libido.”

On that note, let’s discuss the best ways to clean up mercury spills.

Gerasimchuk, the MSU professor, wrote:

“The best way to remediate mercury spills is a treatment of all suspected surfaces and cracks/crevices with a 5 percent solution of FeCl3 (ferric chloride.)”

This turns the mercury into a powder, he writes, “which can be removed more easily than chasing very agile droplets of liquid metal on the surface.”

Back to Richard L. Wikoff, the man who asked me the mercury question in 2015.

You will be pleased to know — as I was — he has not died of mercury poisoning.

Better yet, he has not died at all.

He resides at the Castlewood Senior Living facility in Nixa. I spoke to him.

He is a former psychology professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is 92 and he remembers sending me the question.

He was kind enough to not ask: “What took you so long?”

Finally, yes.

It said he used a pair of scissors.

This is Answer Man column No. 52.

Steve Pokin writes the Pokin Around and The Answer Man columns for the Springfield Daily Citizen. He also writes about criminal justice issues. He can be reached at [email protected]. His office line is 417-837-3661. More by Steve Pokin