[jdurg]

On Tuesday I made a trek up to the Boston area and met up with one of my major suppliers for elements.  We spent a good day just going over the fun parts about chemistry and element collecting, and then spent some time generating some chlorine gas to seal up in an ampoule.  I now have nice, large ampoules of chlorine, bromine, iodine, and mercury which are very well sealed up.  The bromine looks great and I don't have to worry about it leaching through the glass as my nose can't pick up ANY odor of bromine.  The chlorine one is really nice too since we had generated the chlorine ourselves, cleaned it, and dried it before sealing it in the ampoule.  If I turn the ampoule from side to side, you can kind of see the green color of the gas moving due to the density.  It's really neat.  Perhaps the neatest thing, however, is the iodine ampoule.  I took quite a few grams of my iodine and put them in a glass test tube.  (We used test tubes for the ampoules, and just heated up the open end until it melted shut.  It's an ingenious setup that works really well).  We then put the iodine filled end near the burner flame, and the iodine liquified!    There was a very dense purple vapor over the solid crystals, but by golly there was liquid iodine there.  I could not believe it.  I guess the pressure from the heavy weight of the iodine vapor caused it to turn to a liquid before becoming a gas.  However, it was really cool looking and I was amazed that it turned into a liquid.  I didn't think Iodine could do that unless it was at a really high pressure, but I was proven wrong and got to see a really cool form of I₂.  Once I get my ampoule rack built, I'll take a picture of the green chlorine ampoule, the red-brown bromine ampoule, and the purple iodine ampoule.  

[Donaldson Tan]

would be nice if you have a video of the entire process