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Quicksilver, or mercury

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Someone please elucidate the origins and properties of elemental mercury? - Where it comes from and how is it refined. It is refined from traces in melds of silver, sulfurum and other elementals. The final reaction is HgS (solid) + O2 (from air) => Hg (gazeous, condensation required) + SO2 (solid).

Mercury metal

Mercury is a toxic silver-white metal liquid at room temperature. Mercury is common in a variety of industrial applications, although due to its toxicity, it is becoming less common in consumer applications.

Mercury occurs rarely in its elemental form, and is more commonly found in cinnabar and other minerals. Almadén in Spain and Italy supply much of the world's mercury. The Spanish fleets carried mercury from Spain to the Indies where it was used in Zacatecas and Potosí to extract the silver that made the main of the American riches. Silver was left as ingots or coined as pieces of eight, that voyaged eastwards to Europe to finance the Spanish Empire and its religion wars, and westwards in the Manila Galleon since it was the only foreign ware that China would trade for its manufactured products.

See entry on jlab.org for basic elemental properties and history.

See also the Wikipedia entry for the element mercury for additional information. See Mercury for various entries.

Additional information, including Mercury's alchemical symbol can be found in the entry for Mercury in the visual periodic table of the elements (flash version) on ChemSoc, the chemical science network of the Royal Society of Chemistry of the United Kingdom.

Mercury was also one of the only somewhat effective treatments for syphilis during this time period. It was used from the mid thirteenth centuries until Penicillin became available in the early twentieth. Mercury acted as a sort of chemotherapy; retarding the growth of the spirochetes. See Wikipedia's article. This is relevant in view of the number of people who suffer from the disease in the book. As Gregory Bolstrood is an epileptic. Mugwort, copper, mercury, and zinc oxide were among the treatments used during the Renaissance, and not till the 19th century were substances discovered that actually worked.

Mercury god

Mercury \Mer"cu*ry\, n. [L. Mercurius; akin to merx wares.] 1. (Rom. Myth.) A Latin god of commerce, thieves and gain; -- treated by the poets as identical with the Greek Hermes,messenger of the gods, conductor of souls to the lower world, and god of eloquence.

Mercury element

  1. (Chem.) A metallic element mostly obtained by reduction from cinnabar, one of its ores. It is a heavy, opaque, glistening liquid (commonly called quicksilver ), and is used in barometers, thermometers, ect. Specific gravity 13.6. Symbol Hg (Hydrargyrum). Atomic weight 199.8. Mercury has a molecule which consists of only one atom. It was named by the alchemists after the god Mercury, and designated by his symbol, [mercury].

Note: Mercury forms alloys, called amalgams, with many metals, and is thus used in applying tin foil to the backs of mirrors, and in extracting gold and silver from their ores. It is poisonous, and is used in medicine in the free state as in blue pill, and in its compounds as calomel, corrosive sublimate, etc. It is the only metal which is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and it solidifies at about -39[deg] Centigrade to a soft, malleable, ductile metal.

Mercury planet

  1. (Astron.) One of the planets of the solar system, being the one nearest the sun, from which its mean distance is about 36,000,000 miles. Its period is 88 days, and its diameter 3,000 miles.

  2. A carrier of tidings; a newsboy; a messenger; hence, also, a newspaper. --Sir J. Stephen. ``The monthly Mercuries. --Macaulay.

  3. Sprightly or mercurial quality; spirit; mutability; fickleness. [Obs.]

He was so full of mercury that he could not fix long in any friendship, or to any design. --Bp. Burnet.

  1. (Bot.) A plant ( Mercurialis annua ), of the Spurge family, the leaves of which are sometimes used for spinach, in Europe.

Note: The name is also applied, in the United States, to certain climbing plants, some of which are poisonous to the skin, esp. to the Rhus Toxicodendron , or poison ivy.

Dog's mercury (Bot.), Mercurialis perennis , a perennial plant differing from M. annua by having the leaves sessile.

English mercury (Bot.), a kind of goosefoot formerly used as a pot herb; -- called Good King Henry .

Horn mercury (Min.), a mineral chloride of mercury, having a semitranslucent, hornlike appearance.

Legends and fact

In old Roman legends, Mercury was the swift-footed messenger of the gods. The planet is well named, for it is the closest planet to the sun and the swiftest of the sun’s family, averaging about 30 miles per second (48 kilometers per second). It makes its yearly journey in only 88 Earth days. Interestingly, the time it takes Mercury to rotate once on its axis is 59 days, so that all parts of its surface experience periods of intense heat and extreme cold.

Although its mean distance from the sun is only 36 million miles (58 million kilometers), Mercury experiences by far the greatest range of temperatures: nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius) on its day side; minus-300 degrees F (-184 degrees C) on its night side.

This planet actually had two names, as it was not realized it could alternately appear on one side of the sun and then the other. Mercury was called Mercury when in the evening sky, but was known as Apollo when it appeared in the morning.

It is said that Pythagoras, in about the fifth century BCE, pointed out that they were one and the same.

Hermes

\Her"mes\, n. [L., fr. Gr. ?.] 1. (Myth.) See Mercury .

Note: Hermes Trismegistus [Gr. 'Ermh^s trisme`gistos, lit., Hermes thrice greatest] was a late name of Hermes, especially as identified with the Egyptian god Thoth. He was the fabled inventor of astrology and alchemy.

  1. (Arch[ae]ology) Originally, a boundary stone dedicated to Hermes as the god of boundaries, and therefore bearing in some cases a head, or head and shoulders, placed upon a quadrangular pillar whose height is that of the body belonging to the head, sometimes having feet or other parts of the body sculptured upon it. These figures, though often representing Hermes, were used for other divinities, and even, in later times, for portraits of human beings. Called also herma. See Terminal statue , under Terminal .

Mercury is a Roman god, also known as the Roman god of trade, profit and commerce. His name is apparently derived from the Latin merx or mercator, a merchant. He is very similar to the Greek god Hermes and the Etruscan Turms.

His temple on the Circus Maximus, on the Aventine Hill, was built in 495 BCE.

On May 15, the Mercuralia was held in his honor; merchants sprinkled water from his sacred well near the Porta Capena on their heads.

Mercury became extremely popular among the nations the Roman Empire conquered. The Celts equated him with their main god Lugus, and Germans equated him with Wodan.

He was called Mercurius in Latin and was also known as Alipes ("with the winged feet")

HERMES programming language

An experimental, very high level, integrated language and system from the IBM Watson Research Centre,produced in June 1990. It is designed for implementation of large systems and distributed applications, as well as for general-purpose programming. It is an imperative,strongly typed and process-oriented successor to NIL.

Hermes hides distribution and heterogeneity from the programmer. The programmer sees a single abstract machine containing processes that communicate using calls or sends. The compiler, not the programmer, deals with the complexity of data structure layout, local and remote communication, and interaction with the operating system. As a result, Hermes programs are portable and easy to write. Because the programming paradigm is simple and high level, there are many opportunities for optimisation which are not present in languages which give the programmer more direct control over the machine.

0.7 Alpha for Unix ( Hermes ) — Hermes features threads, relational tables; Hermes is typestate checking, capability-based access and dynamic configuration.

  • Mercury is also a programming language — Mercury is a functional/logical programming language based on Prolog, but designed to be more useful for real-world programming problems. Mercury is compiled rather than interpreted as is traditional for logic languages. It has a sophisticated, strict type and mode system which, when combined with the abstract nature of logic programming, is claimed by its authors to make writing reliable programs simpler and faster than by more conventional means. Mercury's module system also makes it easy to divide logic programs up into self-contained modules, a problem for logic programs in the past.

HERMES in Appleseed

HERMES is the fictional process in Appleseed Manga and Anime that allows MagLev devices to operate.