I remember 50 years at Cub Scouts, for some reason our scout leader decided to change a tube in the scout hall while we were all in there. He dropped it, it smashed. He got us all to sweep up the remains for him.
Can you imagine today........................
On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:26:30 +0100, Fredxx snipped-for-privacy@spam.invalid wrote: [snip]
I didn't realise. Thanks for clarifying this. What about buying online from outside the UK?
In theory you should ensure it conforms, however for a single purchase no one is going to chase you for documentation of conformance.
A lot of importers run roughshod over the rules knowing that checks are few and far between. Trading standards are a small vestige of what they used to be.
We had a teacher who after changing a lightbulb in the classroom used to tell the class to raise both hands in the air, declaring 'Many hands make light work'.
I read a newspaper story a few years ago about a fluorescent light (either tube or CFL) which got broken in a child's bedroom. The parents were told (by whom?) that everything absorbent in the room (carpets, curtains, bedding, clothes, cuddly toys) would have to be burned "for safety reasons". It was treated as a major pollution hazard. Seemed rather draconian. Don't know whether there was any truth in the story or whether it was circulation-boosting scare-mongering.
I can remember in the 80s, someone locally had broken their garden thermometer and (according to the local paper) the fire brigade turned up to conduct a full clean up. Presumably something like that did happen, because the paper was only doing its usual trick and dressing up press releases and PR handouts into 'stories' without applying any scrutiny (Nothing has changed there)
I can remember in the 70s we used to be allowed to flick a pool of mercury across the bench in the chemistry class using a ruler.
One of the purposes of street lights in a city, is to light the jay-walkers when they run across the street at night. Some of the motorists here, drive too fast for conditions, and people crossing the streets just aren't ready for them.
This is an example of "too fast" :-)
We were only allowed to do such things if the mercury was contained in a special mercury tray. One of our chemistry teachers told us about an ex colleague at his previous school who died a few weeks after accidentally heating mercury to its boiling point and inhaling the vapour. He had been demonstrating an experiment where mercury was precipitated out of an aqueous solution and the residual water was boiled off over a bunsen burner before weighing the precipitated mercury. He was distracted and carried on heating after the water had all boiled off. Our teacher used blotting paper to soak up the excess water when doing this demonstration. John
The people standing in the garage didn't seem too concerned about it.
Are you trying to suggest that the street-lights slowed down the vehicle in question?
On Wed, 14 Jun 2023 06:52:09 -0700 (PDT), John Walliker snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Another activity was to connect the red and black (low voltage) terminals in the physics class with magnesium ribbon, which would then catch fire when the teacher turned on the electricity.
My chemistry teacher in the fifth form had worked "in industry" (that mythical location!) before retraining as a teacher. He told us a cautionary tale that is even more scary than yours about the teacher and the mercury.
He'd worked for a company that used bottles of various gases: the cylinders which were about 5 feet tall and contained oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, helium etc.
One day one of his colleagues decided, for reasons known only to himself, to unscrew the main pressure-reducing "Christmas tree" valve and gauge unit where it screwed into the top of a cylinder. It doesn't really matter what gas the cylinder contained: all that's important is that a full cylinder contains a gas at *very* high pressure.
It is presumed that the valve ripped out the last few threads once there were too few remaining to hold the valve in place. The valve shot through two floors and the roof of the building and disappeared. There wasn't a lot left of the engineer. The valve was found several weeks later by a security guard patrolling the perimeter of Heathrow Airport - which was five miles away...
Moral: don't mess with the main valve on a cylinder of a gas :-(
Well in the UK we have really just made pedestrians a protected species, as they are most likely to suffer "damage" in an accident.....
I would have thought burning all that stuff would cause any mercury in it to be vapourised, thus making the problem worse.
That thought had occurred to me.
I wonder what the acceptable method is for collecting spilled mercury safely where it has spilled in large enough quantities to be a danger, genuinely needing the fire brigade (or whoever) to contain and collect it. Large "pipette"? Making it a solid amalgam with something that can be picked up with a shovel etc?
I'm not convinced that it is possible to decide that those symptoms were caused by the mercury.
When I was a primary school kid, the dentist recepionist would give kids some mercury if you asked for it so you could play with it in the waiting room.
Wonder what happened to the receptionist.
I offered six fluorescent units FOC in the village Facebook group. No takers. Bill
Many years ago a friend drove from Nottingham to Manchester in a (loud) classic Mini. One of his headlamps failed as he was leaving Nottingham and, as it was a sealed beam unit and it was the early hours of the morning, there was not he could do. Three times he was stopped and given a "producer". He was then stopped a fourth time and fanned out the producers, so the officer decided to breathalyse him instead!
I was followed all the way to the border of a neighbouring county once by two plods who probably thought I had been speeding. They gave up at the county border and 5 minutes later I turned round and went home.
Similar occurrence when they tried to get me to speed, but I wouldn't, and they did me for a bald tyre instead, when I stopped outside my house.
That was why the next time I didn't stop . They didn't have 'probable cause' if I kept on going.
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