Uses of Mercury (Hg) in Everyday Life

Mercury at work around you

Every use below comes straight from the full Mercury study page, where each point also carries the chemistry behind it and an exam-style question. Skim the list here; open the full page when revision time comes.

Uses of Mercury in the study notes

• Thermometers, blood-pressure gauges and Torricelli-style barometers — the silver thread that measured fevers and weather alike for three centuries, now surrendering to digital sensors under the Minamata Convention, to which Bangladesh is a party.
• Fluorescent tubes and CFL bulbs: the electric discharge through mercury vapour gives ultraviolet, and the phosphor coating on the glass turns that UV into white light.
• Dental amalgam — mercury triturated with a silver–tin alloy — set into fillings that served hundreds of millions of teeth through the twentieth century.
• The classical calomel reference electrode of potentiometry, and the historic gold-miner’s amalgam trap for catching alluvial gold before cyanide leaching took over.

Where you meet it

• The old glass thermometer rolling in the family medicine box, its silver thread of mercury, is now handed in as hazardous waste rather than binned.
• Each classroom or office fluorescent tube carries a few milligrams of mercury vapour — the reason broken tubes go to special recycling, never to the open bin.
• Traditional red sindoor was historically coloured with cinnabar — mercury sulfide ($\mathrm{HgS}$), the very ore from which the metal itself is roasted out.