Science: Quicksilver Rush

To a German geologist named Norton who was traveling through southwest Arkansas lately, Farmer J. L. Cox of Graysonia showed a hunk of red rock. "Cinna-bar," explained the geologist. "Put it in a fire pot. It will run quicksilver." That is one version of the start of a current rush to mine mercury in the Ozarks. Another version is that railroad laborers exposed a valuable vein of cinnabar near Amity when they blasted out some sandstone riprap.

No matter how the lodes were discovered, southwest Arkansas was booming in minor key last week. A lumber company at Graysonia, which had finished clearing all the available timber in the district and was about to move, turned hands loose at mining cinnabar and transformed its sawmill to a mercury refining plant. Amity also has a mine and refinery. Murfreesboro is another centre. All around farmers are melting red rocks. About 1,000 strangers are in the neighborhood. They want mining rights and whiskey, raising a pretty problem for the hearth-tenders up the creeks—whether to distill moonshine or quicksilver.

Raw mercury fetches $1 a pound, but evil accompanies the wealth. Quicksilver is a. fickle metal. It is poisonous and those who work with it are usually affected. The pure metal may be absorbed by the skin or the vapors inhaled. Alchemists discovered this as they did most other facts known about this keystone of their hermetic arts. One compound of mercury (calomel, mercurous chloride) is a useful purge. Another compound (mercuric bichloride) is a corrosive poison (TIME, March 7). Quicksilver helped Joseph Priestley discover oxygen (1/74) and thus start Antoine Laurent Lavoisier on modern chemistry. It dissolves most metals (iron and platinum are among the few exceptions). Besides its familiar uses— gold and silver amalgams to fill teeth; filling for thermometers and ultraviolet ray lamps—it goes into explosives and drugs. Recently it has been used to run electro-turbines at Hartford and Schenectady (TIME, July 8, 1929). The world annually produces about 150,000 "flasks"* of mercury, gets almost all from Spain and Italy, yet appreciable quantities come from the U. S. (California, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Washington, Arizona), Mexico, Japan.

Mysterious mercury, the only metal liquid at ordinary temperatures, was the basis for the alchemical transmutation of the elements. With retorts, alembics, beakers, pots, furnaces and incantations. Greek. Latin and Arabic experimenters sought first to purge quicksilver of Aristotle's four pristine elements. Mercury cleansed of earth, fire, air and water might then be changed to precious gold and silver. The rush for mercury in Arkansas last week was paralleled by a rush into Canada's Great Bear Lake region for radium, the modern transmuter's lodestone.