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Chlorine smells overwhelmingly of public swimming pool. That's because it is used to disinfect the water, and you smell it as it escapes from the water. It's also used in bleach (chlorine bleach, eh?), so you can smell it in your own home if you like.
What you smell is a tiny bit of chlorine gas mixed in with a whole lot of air. In more concentrated form, it's a choking, toxic gas that would burn your lungs and kill you in fairly short order, if you were unable to get away. But combine it with sodium (a dangerous alkali metal that reacts explosively with water) and you get ordinary table salt, NaCl.
Chlorine gas also has the distinction of being one of very few colored gases: It's a pale but clearly visible yellow color. Bromine, however, is the champion in this category.
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Sal Ammoniac.
Names from a long time ago. Chemists may call it ammonium chloride, but if you go to a hardware store, it's still Sal Ammoniac ("Salt of Ammon", in the plumbing section), same as it was around the turn of the millennium (not that one, the one before). And even the chemist isn't escaping this history, because the modern name "ammonium" itself comes from Ammoniac, which comes from the fact that the substance was discovered in white crystals that formed on the roof from the burning of camel dung in the Temple of Zeus/Jupiter Ammon in Egypt (or so says the internet).
Today it's used to rub soldering irons on to clean the tips.
Source: Hardware Store
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 5 August, 2002
Price: $3
Size: 2"
Purity: 50%
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Gas in a bulb.
If you look closely you can see the pale green-yellow tint created by the approximately 1 atm pressure of chlorine gas in this sealed bulb. There's a very similar bulb under bromine, but its color is much, much darker. Normally when you see a "gas" that is colored, it's not really a gas but rather tiny droplets of liquid (in fog) or particles (in smoke) that make it look colored or thick. The difference is that in a real colored gas, there is no diffusion of the light, just attenuation. A fog or smoke makes things look fuzzy, while with a true colored gas, they look perfectly sharp, just colored.
I received this sample when Tryggvi and Timothy came to my sodium party.
Source: Tryggvi Emilsson and Timothy Brumleve
Contributor: Tryggvi Emilsson and Timothy Brumleve
Acquired: 21 September, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 3"
Purity: 99.9%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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