Fluorine has a serious reputation . It ’s been nicknamed “ the tiger of chemistry ” because it has pop so many chemists . We ’re going to show you one of its most fickle blowup , and explain how it near killed one of the first researchers to work with it .

Fluorine is one of the halogen . Halogen means “ salt former , ” which does n’t sound so fearsome . The fellow member of this group , including chlorine , bromine , and I , make a great mass of useful table salt , and are often used as disinfectants . The only trick was people had to treat them with guardianship , as they could be a bit irritable .

Fluorine never seems to run out of means to kill research worker . It be given to form acids easily , which means it eat through whatever other chemist used to control it . Once it ’s out , it is poisonous all on its own , but it can conflate with other elements to form other poisonous chemical substance . One particularly unpleasant combination , atomic number 1 fluoride , destroys tissues on contact lens , particularly the corneas of the heart . Oh , and it explodes .

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flux hydrogen and chlorine create a compound that explode when even slimly perturbed , and even when exposed to sunlight . Hydrogen and fluorine will explode without any contact and in complete darkness . Plenty of research lab and chemical substance processing industrial plant have been rocked by atomic number 1 and F explosion . ( In one causa , F bulge eating into its own containment case shot , which created atomic number 1 gas , which exploded the canister . ) Once the combining explodes , it exhaust a great mickle of that unpleasant hydrogen fluoride gas — meaning it can kill people two dissimilar ways with the same response .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2zP4jxTL4s

F racked up quite a few deaths when it came to early pharmacist . Many , including Sir Humphrey Davy , were poisoned . Several died . Two brothers were poisoned by the same experiment , and one was sick-abed for three class . But George Gore really took the bar . He was the type of chemist who savor work with extremely explosive chemical substance , and knew very well from his research with chlorine and hydrogen what would happen with atomic number 9 and hydrogen . After create a few containment vessel for atomic number 9 , all of which were destroyed , he went ahead and combined the two elements anyway . The resulting plosion demolished much of his lab and almost envenom him , but because fortune sometimes favour the reckless , he escaped unharmed . Today , there are still explosions due to the inadvertent mixing of hydrogen and F . And , as we see in the television , there are occasional explosions due to the measured mixture of atomic number 1 and atomic number 9 , so in some way George Gore ’s spirit lives on .

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Image : Rob Lavinsky , iRocks.com

[ ViaLateral Science , UCSF , ChemGuide ]

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