Found a Little Bottle of Mercury

[coinman123]

Hey everyone, sorry if I haven't posted on here in a while, life has gotten a bit in the way for the past year or so, though I've still gotten out and metal detected whenever I've been able to, and had decent luck this year so far. Originally I planned to go to three new cellar holes I found, tomorrow, but it looks like the snow is gonna get in the way, so I'll probably just stick at home until it melts.

Today though, I decided to go to a huge bottle dump I've been going to for the past few months when I don't have any other spots to go to. Its easily 100 square feet of just bottles everywhere, and older ones if you dig, though 95% of them are junk from the 1940's-1950's. There are a few spots where I've had luck with finding old stuff though, and even pulled a couple pontiled bottles from the mid 1800's, and a lot of fragments of them. I also found a beautiful 1870's-1880's aqua ink well shaped like a barrel in one area, along with a blob top bottle on the surface next to tons of little perfume bottles. Anyways, today I went back there, and found a patch that seemed to have some of the older stuff, and started digging. The first bottle I pulled out was a very small bottle that seemed to be still corked. I looked inside and saw what looked like water at first. At a second glance I immediately recognized it as mercury. At first I was pretty scared about the toxicity of it, and quickly put it down, but then realized that if it's stayed contained in there for that long, it's probably pretty safe. I carefully brought it home and immediately did what I could to make sure the top stayed sealed, covering the corked top with a coating of glue, and putting tape over it just to keep the sealed top from getting damaged and potentially breaking any seal.

The bottle seems to date from likely the late 1800's to around 1900, and I am not sure what the mercury was used for, though it definitely is possible it was used for medicine back before the FDA outlawed the sale of quack medicine, though I'm sure there were other uses for mercury back then. However, the very small size of the bottle makes me think there is a likely chance it was a medicine bottle.

Definitely one of the coolest things I've found, in my opinion. I also tested to see what it shows up as on my metal detector, and it reads in the foil range.

 

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[Digger RJ]

Nice!!! Congrats!!!

 

[Argentium]

Well , I can honestly say that is a first for me...I have never seen anybody post a mercury find here !

 

[Squirrel322]

My mother related a story where as a young child (who grew up during the depression) she was exploring her aunt’s house. She climbed up to reach a shelf where she found a small tray that contained what look to her to be silver dragees (cake decorations). She was going to lift the tray to her lips to consume them when she heard someone approaching so she quickly returned the tray to the shelf and climbed down. As an adult she realized what she saw in the tray (and almost ate) was actually Mercury.

Parents, hoping to ease the teething pain of their infants, rubbed one of many available calomel-containing teething powders into their babies’ sore gums. Very popular at the time: Dr. Moffett’s Teethina Powder, which also boasted that it “Strengthens the Child . . . Relieves the Bowel Troubles of Children of ANY AGE,” and could, temptingly, “Make baby fat as a pig.”

Beyond the creepy promise of Hansel and Gretel-esque results, there was something else sinister lurking within calomel: mercury. For hundreds of years, mercury-containing products claimed to heal a varied and strangely unrelated host of ailments. Melancholy, constipation, syphilis, influenza, parasites — you name it, and someone swore that mercury could fix it.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insigh...as-considered-a-cure-until-it-killed-you.html

 

[jewelerguy]

My Dad had a bottle in his garage that contained about a half cup of mercury that he had collected from broken thermostats and whatnots. After he passed away, I took it to the local fire/police department to see if they could give it to a proper hazardous material handling facility. The police chief called me after several days and said the only place he could find wanted 1,500 bucks to take it off my hands. Uh no, that's not going to happen. A couple of days later he said one of the local plumbers he talked to said they could use it to construct mercury gauges out of. I told him as long as it didn't cost me anything they were welcome to it. Pffft... 1500 bucks, get out of here.

 

[gunsil]

Don't worry about the "toxicity". When I was young we used to take mercury and rub it on the silver coins which would make them shiny like chrome for a day or so. We played a lot with mercury and none of us have ever had any problems from doing so. I also have taken mercuric oxide and heated it on mom's kitchen stove in a tin can to turn it into mercury, still not dead. I wouldn't recommend eating it but simply having it in your hands or fingers won't hurt you. It doesn't absorb well through your skin.

Jewelerguy, mercury is pretty expensive stuff to buy, surprised you couldn't find a buyer. I have also used it to drop gold plated jewelry into to recover the gold, and the ancients used it for gold amalgam to do intricate granulation work on jewelry. It is still used by small gold miners throughout the world to recover gold from ore.

 

[Qball]

When I first started hunting in the 80s I was mentored by a man named Doug who was also an avid gold hunter. Doug became ill with a mysterious illness with Parkinson like systems. After years of declining health he was diagnosed with mercury poisoning. He never recovered. Do not leave mercury lying around for your grand kids to find. Take it to the toxic roundup

 

[boogeyman]

If you look in your area, you should be able to find buyers. As long as you don't try to eat it or breathe the fumes, you're relatively safe. $1500!?!? All they're going to do is squeeze it through a chamois then run it through a lab retort and resell it!

HINT - Keep it at room temperature. Take that bottle & place it in a plastic bottle to store! If you drop it & it breaks you'll be picking up tiny BBs forever. I have eight or ten pounds that I keep in small plastic bottles inside larger plastic bottles. If you do drop it, silver coins will suck it up if there's no oil on them. After they're coated take them outside well away from anything & heat them on a camp stove or bbq in a pan you will never use. Make sure you and your pets are up wind.

 

[jewelerguy]

Jewelerguy, mercury is pretty expensive stuff to buy, surprised you couldn't find a buyer. I have also used it to drop gold plated jewelry into to recover the gold, and the ancients used it for gold amalgam to do intricate granulation work on jewelry. It is still used by small gold miners throughout the world to recover gold from ore.

The thought of a buyer never even crossed my mind. My town is pretty small with a population of less than 5,000 so resources here are pretty limited unless you want to drive a considerable distance to reach the modern world. My main concern at the time was keeping it safe and helping to insure that it didn't get dumped onto the ground at some point in the future because our town water supply is a field of water wells. I've known of a couple of instances during my life were other communities in my part of the state found mercury in their water supply. (yikes)

 

[ARC]

Probably sold as "teeth whitener" back in the day.

 

[Indian Steve]

How is it use to recover gold plating? I've lots of gold plate and a pint or so of mercury. Thanks

 

[Wildcat1750]

Interesting find! I used to have a tiny bottle of mercury as a curiosity back in the 60s when it was no big deal. Not sure what ever happened to it.