The cliché is that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I submit, however, that that particular aphorism lacks vision. If you’re a habitual YouTube viewer and/or someone with an interest in science, you’ll already know that there are at least two more things on which you can rely: that anything uploaded by Drake “Styropyro” Anthony will be both a) worth watching and b) at least mildly terrifying.
So it proves for our hero’s latest video, which apparently doesn’t meet the standards for his main channel—on which he was last seen wiring a shitton of car batteries together, if you’ve forgotten—and thus surfaced on his second channel instead. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s any less quintessentially Styropyro, though: not unless you think that putting together a plasma tube that generates light by shaking some mercury metal sealed within somehow constitutes going soft.
The video starts with Anthony relating the history of the device he’s about to make, which goes as far back as 1675—impressive, when you consider that the device in question is basically a light bulb. As Anthony explains, astronomer Jean Picard—perhaps a distant ancestor, or at least a spiritual forebear—decided to see if anything would happen if he put mercury inside an evacuated glass tube and then shook it around a bit. Something did indeed happen—Picard discovered that the mercury glowed with a strange, otherworldly light. The light is the result of something called the triboelectric effect, which you can learn all about here.
The first half of the video is curiously vulnerable, because it features Anthony being notably bad at something, viz. working with glass. (It seems he has a lazy eye, which certainly can’t help.) Anyway, once he’s put together the required glassware, it’s onto breaking out the mercury, which gets tipped carefully into a makeshift little glass bulb. Anthony then hooks this up to a vacuum pump, flushes out the air and, um, mercury vapors, and seals the newly evacuated bulb with a blowtorch.
It turns out that Picard must have had a keen eye, because the glow is pretty subtle in anything but complete darkness; Anthony explains that the effect is contingent on the purity of the mercury used, and his is “pretty dirty.” But that’s OK, because there’s something Picard didn’t have, but Anthony does: a bunch of noble gases. Gases like neon and krypton are already well-known for their use in tube lighting, where the glow is produced by passing an electric current through a low-pressure tube containing one such gas. The current ionizes the gas, producing a vivid glow.
This also works with the mercury tube, as Anthony demonstrates by bringing it close to a Tesla coil. But! If you combine the two ideas, you get some truly crazy-looking results. Anthony starts by adding mercury to a flask and pumping the air out of it, as before, but this time he pumps a small amount of neon into the tube. Once it’s sealed and cooled, he gives it a shake, and… holy shit, lightning in a bottle!
The rest of the video is devoted to constructing different shaped tubes and experimenting with different noble gases. Krypton produces blue flashes instead of the vivid red of neon, while bringing the mercury/noble gas tubes back into the electrical field generated by the Tesla coil also yields some remarkably beautiful results.
Don’t try this at home, obviously—but goddamn does it look cool.
Source: Gizmodo