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So this sample, it’s a very, very interesting sample; it’s arsenic. So this is quality
arsenic.
So arsenic used to much more common in the community than it is nowadays. It was used
as a pigment in the nineteenth century for green wallpaper contained copper arsenite,
because there weren’t any other good green pigments to make the wallpaper. And when the
rooms were damp, Victorians didn’t like opening the windows in their rooms, then mould
would grow on the wall. And because arsenic is poisonous to most life forms the mould
would convert the arsenic into a volatile compound, trimethylarsine, and the trimethylarsine
went into the air and several people were killed by the arsenic coming from their wall
paper.
Now arsenic as we know is very toxic and there have been a number of very high profile and
very famous cases of people that have poisoned perhaps their partners or their business partners
using arsenic. Okay, so I’m going to very carefully take this vial out. He says very
carefully then knocks it really hard.
Arsenic was also used quite widely by people to dispose of husbands, wives, lovers. Though
now it is much less common. It is used in the electronics industry for getting electronic
properties for making transistors. And also it is still sometimes used for medication
for feeding to livestock. It is only quite recently that the use of arsenic has been
banned as an additive to chicken feed in the United States.
So here you see the arsenic powder okay. Now this is a metallic very dark metal, but I’m
not going to open this because like I said it’s very, very toxic. It’s a very dark
metallic sample, you can see a very fine powder in the bottom of this vial. Now I’m going
to put this back in before I get any on my skin because it’s a very toxic material
and I don’t want to expose myself.