Mercury Fulminate - Breaking Bad
Wednesday March 5, 2008
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Mercury fulminate [or fulminate of mercury, Hg(ONC)2] was first prepared in 1800 by Edward Charles Howard. It is an explosive that mainly was used in favor of flints to ignite black powder in a firearm. It's pretty easy to make... the synthesis involves dissolving mercury in nitric acid and adding ethanol to the solution. However, you end up precipitating a white to grayish-brown powder (depending on purity) like what you see in this photo and not big chunks of glassy crystals, as seen in 'Breaking Bad'.
Although mercury fulminate is easy to prepare, you don't want to try it. The explosive is highly sensitive to just about everything... shock, sparks, flame, friction, and heat. I don't think Walt could have been so casual handling a bag of it without having a little accident. If you don't blow yourself up with the compound, you could gas yourself with fumes from the synthesis (reaction should be done outdoors or inside a fume hood). Then there is the product... mercury compounds are toxic. The mercury doesn't magically disappear when the compound explodes.
The episode got me wondering. If you were in charge of props for a tv show and were asked to come up with 'crystal meth', what would you use? I'm going to guess using the illegal drug would not be an option. I am betting they used rock candy. What do you think?
Breaking Bad - Elements in the Body | Breaking Bad - Hydrofluoric Acid
Photo: Mercury fulminate is a grayish powder of orthorhombic crystals. (Tobias Maximilian Mittrach, Wikipedia Commons)
Comments
I think they used rock salt that is commonly used as an antiperspirant/deodorant
There was an article in Chemistry and Engineering News that talked about the prop department choices. The crystal meth was a silicon rubber that is usually used to simulate broken tempered glass.
Walt was involved in crystallography among other things, maybe he is just that good that he can make gigantic, clear crystals of mercury fulminate : )
He definitely slammed the bag of mercury fulminate against the wall in that episode- that wouldn’t have been good.
he does say when asked what it was “Mercury Fulminate with some chemistry magic” so in the world of the writers he could have added something to it to make it look more like meth and more stable.
I was asked at one time by a law enforcement agent how to set up a fake meth lab.
The conclusion was to use jugs with water, salad oil, a little powdered nutmeg to look like red P , and a drop or two of xylene or toluene to give the room that ‘just cooked’ smell.
Large pieces or rock salt with a coating of salad oil would give it the right ‘feel’ and spraying some purple dye onto kosher salt gave it a look damn near like iodine crystals.
He went back to the department, and with about $100 in glassware, it looked like they were running the ‘crank of the month’ club!
And, no, I won’t tell you where this was done, as they would really like to run several reverse stings with this layout.
I reviewed the handling of the mercury fulminate (FM if I may)by Walt and he did not slam the bag, Patrick. When he got in the car he did hit his cash filled hands into the steering wheel.
In Tuco’s crib the concussion definitely would’ve set off the bigger quantity. My dad had a horn of gun powder go off during his muzzle-loading days. He was firing the gun 4 to 5 ft from the horn on a hot AZ afternoon. Gun powder is more stable than the FM. Funny, referring to gun powder as stable.
Oh, and the career for the Irish guys who cleaned out the mercury ovens during the late 1800’s was about 3 days to a week, then they’d die.
Tedrock, he actually says, “Fulminated mercury, a little tweak of chemistry.”
So, uh no.
But would just a little piece of the fulminated mercury have exploded with enough force to blow out the glass out of the windows along with the evaporative coolers?