The other day at work I saw a fluorescent light bulb crash to the ground and shatter. When I started picking up the pieces, a coworker warned me to be very careful, saying there was a highly toxic chemical inside fluorescent tubes and one cut meant certain death. This is something I’ve heard before. Just what is this mystery chemical? Is it really as deadly as I’ve been led to believe? –Patrick Zepeda
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Not unless you’ve got some really old fluorescent tubes, and even then they wouldn’t kill you. Prior to 1950 or so the white coating inside the tubes, a kind of chemical compound called a phosphor, contained a beryllium compound that retarded healing. If you cut yourself on a broken tube the cut would never close. The main threat was to workers in light bulb factories, and it was mostly for their benefit that the compound was removed.
Finally, all fluorescent tubes contain small amounts of liquid mercury, which turns to vapor when the lamp is switched on. Mercury is toxic if your body absorbs enough of it, but the small quantity in a tube usually disperses quickly if the lamp breaks. If you broke a whole carload of tubes–I remember as a youth hoisting a brace of bulbs over my shoulder without realizing there was a spinning fan directly overhead–well, you could have problems. (Who knows, maybe even brain damage, which in my case certainly explains last year’s Monty Hall disaster.) But under ordinary circumstances the danger is vanishingly small.
“[Thomas Brothers vice president Barry Elias admits] that the company sprinkles fictitious names throughout its guides. . . . ‘We put them in for copyright reasons,’ he said. ‘If someone is reproducing one of our maps (as with a photocopier) and selling them, we can prove an infringement.’
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
