Thursday, December 17, 2015

“Red Mercury”


Re the age of alchemy:

Many authors chide the reader, telling him that, if he uses common mercury, he will be wasting his time;  instead he should use ‘the mercury of the philosophers’, our ‘our mercury’.
-- M. P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; 21978), p. 26



There is a curious contemporary parallel to this, in the terrorists’ will-o’-the-wisp “red mercury”, a mythical WMD.

More on Renaissance cover-terms -- alchemical COMSEC:

There were many cases where the name of a substance … was definitely misleading, by falsely suggesting its composition.  For example, the term cinnabar of antimony suggests a compound of antimony, whereas the name was applied to red mercuric sulphide, prepared from antimony sulphide and mercuric chloride.
-- M. P. Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (1962; 21978), p. 88

2 comments:

  1. Oh, how valuable would the relevant Wikipedia page been back in the olden days.

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    1. Our colleague Abu-Ramadi (USA), back in the day in the Land of the Two Tributaries, was handed a shovel by some officer, and told to go out at random and dig for red mercury. He was not given a description of how to recognize it as such were he to find any.
      Your tax dollars at work.

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