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If you were asked to choose the most "bewitching" one in the periodic table of chemical elements, it would definitely be it.

At normal temperatures, it is the only metal that is liquid.
It's terrifyingly heavy (a bottle of mercury the size of a mineral water bottle weighs 27 pounds, and you can't even lift it with one hand), but it flows like water. It shines with cold silver light and has a fatal attraction.

When you broke the thermometer as a child and watched those little silver beads rolling around on the floor, your mother would scream and hug you away.

She is right.
Because of this thing, there are only two words left in human history: madness.


1. Qin Shihuang’s “IQ tax”

In Chinese history, mercury is a well-deserved "imperial harvester".

The ancients did not understand chemistry. They saw that cinnabar (mercuric sulfide) is red, which is the color of blood and a symbol of life; when heated, it can turn into a flowing silver liquid (mercury).
This transformation of "red to white, solid to liquid" is simply a miracle in the eyes of the alchemist.

They take it for granted: This thing is neither dead (metal properties are stable), but also alive (can flow), so wouldn't eating it make you immortal?

As a result, Qin Shihuang Yingzheng, the overlord who annexed the six countries, became the biggest victim of mercury.
Historical records record that Qin Shihuang was extremely obsessed with "elixirs" in his later years. The main ingredients of these elixirs are mercury and lead.
His temper became violent, suspicious, and irrational. This is actually a typical symptom of heavy metal toxic encephalopathy.

He died early, probably by "poison".

What's even more ironic is that he didn't have enough fun after his death.
Sima Qian wrote about the Mausoleum of Qin Shihuang in "Historical Records": "Mercury is used to make hundreds of rivers, rivers and seas".
Archaeologists discovered through detection that the mercury content under the Qinling Tomb underground palace seriously exceeded the standard. The emperor lay on the poisonous silver river, dreaming of a spring and autumn dream of ruling the eternity.

The "eternal life" he pursued eventually turned into a thousand-year heavy metal pollution.

2. The "Mad Hatter" in Alice in Wonderland

Turn your attention to the west. Mercury didn't spare the poor souls there.

Have you seen "Alice in Wonderland"? There is a famous character in it called "Mad Hatter" (The Mad Hatter). He is crazy and behaves strangely.
The prototype of this character is not a fairy tale, but a cruel historical reality.

In Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was popular for gentlemen to wear tall felt hats.
Making felt requires a special process: gluing together beaver or rabbit fur. Craftsmen found that fur treated with mercuric nitrate solution had the best bonding effect, and the hats made were crisp and stylish.

As a result, thousands of hat makers worked all day in small workshops filled with mercury vapor.

No one told them it was poisonous.
Slowly, the workers began to develop strange symptoms: hand tremors (known as the "hatmaker's tremor"), teeth loss, slurred speech, and the most terrifying thing was personality changes - extreme shyness, paranoia, and then sudden rage.

In Britain at the time, "Mad as a hatter" was a well-known saying.
The dignity on the heads of those elegant gentlemen was actually obtained by the brain damage of countless workers.

3. Physicist’s “BUG”: Why is it liquid?

Toxicity aside, mercury is an extremely weird entity in physics.

Have you ever thought about it, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc... they are all metals, why is it that only mercury is liquid at room temperature?
Its melting point is only -38.8℃.

This is actually a relativistic effect. Yes, it’s Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The electrons outside the nucleus of the mercury atom run too fast, approaching the speed of light.
According to the theory of relativity, when the speed of an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes larger. As electrons become more massive, their orbits shrink, moving closer to the nucleus.
This causes the binding forces (metallic bonds) between mercury atoms to become very weak.

In layman's terms: Mercury atoms are too "unique".
Other metal atoms are held hand in hand to form a hard solid; mercury atoms are lightly pressed against each other and fall apart with a push.

Therefore, the mercury thermometer you are holding in your hand contains not only a temperature-measuring liquid, but also the most intuitive evidence of special relativity in the macroscopic world.
Without relativistic effects, mercury should be a hard solid like silver.

4. Breaking Bad: Two drops kill

There is one of the saddest stories in the history of modern chemistry regarding the toxicity of mercury.

In 1996, Karen Wetterhahn, a female professor at Dartmouth College in the United States, was conducting experiments on the toxicity of heavy metals.
Wearing latex gloves, she carefully used a dropper to absorb an organic mercury compound called dimethylmercury.

Accidentally, two drops of liquid fell on her latex gloves.
She didn't take it seriously. After all, she was wearing gloves, and she quickly took them off and washed her hands.

But she didn't know that dimethylmercury was the god of death's ability to pass through walls.
This organic mercury can penetrate latex gloves in seconds and then, like a ghost, penetrates the skin and enters the bloodstream.

Three months later, she began to feel nauseous and dizzy.
Five months later, her speech became slurred and she walked into walls.
The test found that the mercury content in her blood exceeded the legal limit by 4,000 times. The mercury had irreversibly eroded her cerebral cortex.

Despite the best possible treatment, the talented chemist died in excruciating pain 10 months later.
She spent her life telling the world: In the face of organic mercury, all conventional protection (such as latex gloves) are as fragile as paper.

5. Minamata disease in Japan: The dancing cat

If the laboratory accident is an example, then Minamata Disease is the darkest scar in the history of human industry.

Minamata Bay, Japan, in the 1950s.
At first the cat went crazy. Local cats will suddenly run wild, crash into walls, or commit suicide by jumping into the sea. Locals call it "cat chorea."
Then there are people.
The fishermen's hands and feet began to become numb, their vision was reduced, and their hearing was lost. Finally, their bodies were twisted and deformed, and they died screaming.

The culprit was a chemical factory that, in order to save money, discharged mercury-containing wastewater directly into the sea.
This mercury is eaten by plankton in the sea and accumulates in fish. Methylmercury has a terrifying property: biomagnification.
The big fish eat the small fish, and the mercury concentration doubles at every level.

When humans eat these fish, the mercury is like a boomerang, accurately inserted into the human central nervous system.

The most heartbreaking ones are those fetuses.
Many mothers themselves do not have severe symptoms, but their children are born with cerebral palsy and deformities.
Because methylmercury can cross the placenta. The mother's body becomes a sieve that filters toxins, leaving the most poisonous parts to the unborn baby.


Conclusion

Now, mercury is slowly withdrawing from our lives.
Thermometers have become electronic, blood pressure monitors have become inflatable, and fluorescent tubes (containing mercury) are being replaced by LEDs.

This silver devil was once regarded by Qin Shihuang as an elixir of immortality, and was once used by medieval doctors as a powerful medicine to treat syphilis (although it cannot be cured, it can make patients die of mercury poisoning before the onset of syphilis), and it once drove countless craftsmen crazy.

It's so beautiful.
The heavy feeling of falling into the hand and the flowing luster like silk always tempt humans to touch it, use it and devour it.

But it has spent thousands of years teaching us a truth:
Some things can only be viewed from a distance, not played with. This "liquid metal" created by nature may not belong in the palm of human beings.