Tricks::: Water turns into... blood

There are three glasses and an opaque vessel on the table. You say that the vessel contains simple water, which will now turn into blood. To convince the audience that there is water in the vessel (and since this is so), you can take a few sips from the vessel as proof. And then you fill all the glasses with water from the vessel. Absolutely nothing will happen. Pour all the water back into the vessel from all glasses except one. The liquid in the vessel will turn red, like blood, make a dramatic pause, say that the vessel is no longer water but blood - pour it back into the glasses. Now all viewers are convinced of this. Pour the contents of the glasses into the vessel again - this time from all three. The liquid will become discolored, the “blood” will turn into “water”, which you will again pour into glasses. However, you no longer need to drink it.

The secret of the trick:

The vessel will be a glass jar covered with colored paper; for greater mystery, draw alchemical symbols on paper. Pour water into the jar. Prepare three clean glasses: drop a few drops of acetic acid into one glass and mark it for yourself (it is from this glass that you will not pour water into the vessel first), into the other - a spoonful of soda ash, and into the third - a few drops of phenolphthalein solution (Pour the soda a small amount of water and stir). Then there is no secret - chemistry will do everything for you.

Indicators - phenolphthalein
Indicators from natural substances
Indicators from juices and compotes
Food acidity testing
How to distinguish acids from bases
How to distinguish bases from acids
How to remove potassium permanganate stain
Starch is colored by iodine
Starch loses color when exposed to sodium sulfite and soda
Potassium permanganate colors the solution
Potassium permanganate purifies water
Detection of carbon dioxide in exhaled air
Formation of flakes during the reaction of potassium permanganate with sodium sulfite
Obtaining carbon dioxide from lemonade or mineral water
Cloudiness of lime water due to carbon dioxide
Turning water into blood
Turning tea into water
Preparation of lime water
Reaction rate - experiments with soda and vinegar

To warm up, miracles require:

If you don't get something, it doesn't matter. Skip the experience and move on to the next one. But read the description of the missed experience: someday, if the opportunity arises, you can return to it.

For the first experiment, you need two substances that you probably have at home: baking soda (chemists call it bicarbonate or sodium bicarbonate) and vinegar. Fill a glass with water by a third, add a few drops of vinegar, and then take about a quarter of a teaspoon of soda and pour it into the glass. The mixture will immediately bubble as if it is boiling. This is how it should be: carbon dioxide is released from the solution, the same one that is in lemonade and sparkling water.

Now let’s change the experiment a little: don’t pour the baking soda into the vinegar solution, but put it directly in a spoon and stir immediately. Now the boiling is boiling - the liquid in the glass is seething and bubbling.

Let's try the third option. Prepare a clean glass plate or tile, place it on the table and drop some water in the middle to make a small puddle. In two bottles, prepare two solutions separately: the same baking soda (dissolve a little powder in water) and vinegar (drop a few drops into a bottle of water). Make two more puddles from solutions of soda and vinegar, on the sides of the first one - the one made of clean water. Now take a stick or plastic straw and carefully, so as not to accidentally mix the liquid, connect the outer puddles with the middle channels.

Have patience. One solution is on the left, the other is on the right, and it takes time for them to meet. And as soon as they meet, bubbles will appear approximately in the middle, on the border between the soda area and the vinegar area.

Having made your first chemical experiment (maybe the first in your life), it doesn’t hurt to take a break and think. Let's think about why soda and vinegar interact with each other, sometimes violently, and sometimes lazily, slowly.

All substances consist of molecules - you probably know this. In our experiment, carbon dioxide is released as soon as the soda molecules and vinegar molecules come into contact. When you poured baking soda into the vinegar solution, it also began to dissolve in the water and its molecules began to collide with the vinegar molecules. They say that a reaction has begun - this is the word chemists use to describe the transformation of substances and their interaction. Please remember it, it will appear more than once, and not only in this book.

And then you began to stir the contents of the glass. And of course, it helped more molecules of soda and vinegar to meet, collide, and connect. At the same time, carbon dioxide molecules were intensively released - and the liquid seemed to boil.

In the third experiment, with puddles on glass, we did the opposite: we separated the molecules and prevented them from meeting immediately. However, remember how the smell of jam or perfume spreads throughout the apartment - it will take some time until their molecules finally reach your nose and you will feel a pleasant aroma. Numerous molecules of soda and vinegar moved in the same leisurely manner in the water, and when they met in the middle of the puddle, they communicated this with bubbles...

The experiment is very simple, but the explanations are long. Then it will be mostly the other way around. But here, using a simple example, you immediately learned a lot of new things: what a chemical reaction is, where it begins (remember, from the meeting of molecules), how to speed up or slow down this meeting. Just in case, I’ll add that very often substances are heated to speed up the reaction, to intensify it. As the molecules heat up, they move faster and faster, making it even easier for them, even without our help, to find each other and react.

One last note before we move on to the next experiments. Chemists know how to abbreviate everything that happens in flasks, beakers and vials in the form of formulas and equations. In our case they would write like this:

NaHCO 3 + CH3COOH = CH 3 COONa + H 2 O + CO 2.

But for those who do not yet know chemistry, such an entry is like a rebus without a solution. Therefore, where necessary, we will describe the reaction in full, in words. In our case, this is the case: when soda reacts with acetic acid, sodium acetate, water and carbon dioxide are formed. The explanation is long, but it means the same thing as written in the equation.

We continue our warm-up. Let's carry out some beautiful experiments one after another and without much explanation. But first, buy a bottle of iodine tincture, a pack of phenolphthalein and a pipette at the pharmacy. Yes, perhaps, so as not to go around again, take a bottle of ammonia and calcium chloride. All this costs literally pennies. Place the bottles in place, and crush the phenolphthalein tablets into powder, pour them into a glass and pour two or three fingers of water into it. Stir well, let stand and pour the liquid without sediment into a clean bottle. To avoid confusion, glue to the bottle, as we agreed, a label with the following inscription: “Phenolphthalein solution.”

Pour tap water into two clean glasses - no more than a third of the height. Pipette two or three drops of phenolphthalein solution into the first glass, add half a teaspoon of soda ash (washing soda) into the second glass and stir. Both liquids are completely transparent. But as soon as you pour the liquid from one glass to another, the mixture will turn raspberry red. Looks just like a trick. And chemists use this reaction very often. It helps them immediately recognize substances - like those found in a solution of washing soda. There are many such substances; their common name is foundations.

Let's now decolorize the red liquid from the previous experiment. And it couldn’t be easier to do this. Bases have opponents with whom they cannot live together: acids. Including acetic acid. A few teaspoons of vinegar added to the raspberry solution will make it colorless again. And along the way, carbon dioxide will be released (as in experiments with baking soda).

This property - to react with bases - is inherent in all acids, not just acetic acid. You can take, say, citric acid instead, dissolving a few grains in water; the result will be the same.

Do we have any other substance that would color phenolphthalein red? Yes: ammonia. Drop a few drops into a bottle or glass, dilute with water, add phenolphthalein - the liquid will turn red. Pour a little acid and the color will disappear. Just don’t take a lot of ammonia: it has a strong, unpleasant smell.

Substances such as phenolphthalein are called indicators. This Latin word means "signpost"; in other words, the substance indicates whether the solution contains a base or an acid. For example, beetroot decoction can serve as an indicator: in the presence of acid it becomes brighter. Now do you understand why a little acid is sometimes added to borscht? It's right that it looks beautiful in plates.

And the leaves of red cabbage contain similar substances. Boil some of this cabbage in a saucepan with water and pour the broth into a glass. In another glass, drop a few drops of ammonia to the bottom. Now add cabbage broth there. It will immediately turn from blue-red to greenish: this is how cabbage reacts to the base. Add a little acid and see what happens.

If you are keen, you can check the indicator abilities of other colored decoctions. For example, from fresh or dried blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, currants. Or from brightly colored fruits - dark plum, pomegranate, cherry. And also from some flower petals: iris, violet, peony.

It is most convenient to soak narrow strips of white paper with a decoction of berries and petals and, if necessary, immerse these strips in the test solution. Chemists very often use just such pre-soaked and dried paper (it is called indicator paper).

If, for example, a decoction of dark red peony petals itself has a purple color, then indicator paper soaked in such a decoction becomes red in acid solutions, and first blue and then yellow in base solutions.

It is possible that the coloring substances of some plants will transfer very poorly into hot water, and it will not be possible to prepare a bright decoction from them. Then another portion of berries or petals can be poured with a small amount of cologne or acetone; They will probably dissolve the dyes. But remember, please: these liquids easily catch fire, so when working with them, be sure to make sure that no one nearby lights a match or turns on the gas.

The indicator can also be prepared from juices diluted with water or from compotes. To soak several dozen paper strips, half a glass of compote is enough, so it’s unlikely that anyone will blame you for wastefulness. And “compote” acid-base indicators work very well. For example, an indicator from blackcurrant compote in an acid solution will be clearly red, in a base solution it will be clearly blue...

However, we won’t give you any hints. You yourself will be able to test homemade indicators and find out how they behave under different circumstances. But please, don’t trust everything to your memory: be sure to write down how the color changes when your homemade indicator meets an acid or a base. I would advise you to make a sign (it’s more convenient), but you can write it down in a row on a piece of paper. Then these notes will probably be useful to you, because indicators are very often needed for chemical experiments. And in this book you will meet them more than once.

In the meantime, try to check what properties - acids or bases - different foods have. For the experiment, take milk, kefir, lemonade, mineral water, broth, etc. In order not to waste food, pour a little liquid into a bottle and put paper strips soaked in advance with the indicator into it.

Test for acidity and other substances. For example, a solution of some bleach or sink cleaner. You will see that sometimes such remedies show a reaction characteristic of acids, sometimes - of bases. This is no coincidence: after all, cleaning and washing ability depends on acidity. Therefore, chemists and engineers, when developing each new drug, pre-select the best ratio of acids and bases for it.

Yes, one more thing: after some training, you can show all these experiments with indicators to your friends as tricks if you want. Think for yourself what spells to say so that the trick leaves a lasting impression. I hope you think to mention in advance about "turning water into blood" or something similar. In the end, we can also consider even these simple preparatory chemical transformations miracles...

In the first case, I’m ready to tell you how to perform a trick with “water” and “blood,” although if you came up with something of your own, it would be even better. Here's my advice. Cover a glass jar with colored paper and, if you want, draw some mysterious signs on it. Prepare several clean glasses. In general, three are enough, but to make the audience think that the trick is very difficult, it is better to take five or six glasses. Add a few drops of any acid to one glass and mark it somehow so that you can immediately distinguish this glass from the others. Pour a little washing soda into another glass, fill it with water and stir. In the third glass, of course, drop a little phenolphthalein solution. Pour ordinary water into the jar.

Now the focus itself. Tell the audience that the jar contains clean water, and to show that this is true, take a sip or two to convince them. Then fill all the glasses with water from the jar: the water will remain clear. Then pour the water from all the glasses (except, of course, the one containing the acid) back into the jar. The liquid in it will turn red. Spectators will be convinced of this if they pour it into empty glasses: “water” has turned into “blood”!

Pour the contents of all the glasses into the jar again - all of them, including the glass with acid. The liquid, as you understand, will become discolored. Pour it into glasses and show the audience: “blood” has become “water.” Don't forget about spells, of course. But remember: now you must under no circumstances drink this “water”!

Let's move on to the iodine tincture, which we recently bought at the pharmacy. For the sake of simplicity, this tincture is often called simply iodine, which is short, although inaccurate, because it contains other substances besides iodine. But it is iodine that is important for us.

So, pour a little iodine tincture into a clean bottle and dilute it with approximately the same amount of water. Now take out the potato, cut it with a knife and drop a drop of diluted tincture from a pipette onto the fresh cut. The potatoes will turn blue before your eyes.

But potatoes, like almost any other food, consist of many substances. Which of them turns blue under the influence of iodine?

Starch turns blue. By the way, it is usually made from potatoes (although sometimes from corn or rice). You probably have some starch (any kind) at home. Mix a teaspoon of starch in half a glass of cold water - you get something like milk. Drop a few drops of iodine and the “milk” will turn blue.

Of course, this is an excellent basis for another trick, but you just need to drop iodine into another glass beforehand and let it dry. If you then pour “milk” into it, having previously “ordered” it to turn blue, it will immediately “obey”...

The complex substance that is formed when iodine combines with starch is quite unstable, and the color soon disappears. This process can be further accelerated. Photo stores sell sodium sulfite; buy one bag. And if it’s not there, then the contents of a large cartridge of ordinary developer for photographic films will do - it contains the same substance, only with additives that will not interfere with us. Dissolve some sodium sulfite in water. Cut the potato again, drop diluted iodine tincture on it, as before, and, after admiring the blue, drop sodium sulfite solution onto the same place. The color will disappear immediately. (Don’t throw away the remaining sodium sulfite - it will come in handy.)

Here's another way to get rid of blue stains. Pour a quarter teaspoon of starch into half a glass of cold water, stir and heat in a saucepan, stirring from time to time. You will get a liquid paste. Cool it and add a few drops of iodine so that the starch liquid turns blue. Meanwhile, pour water halfway into another glass and add a little washing soda. Now slowly pour in the blue starch solution - its color will disappear before your eyes. But if you continue to pour, the color will reappear and become brighter.

The photo store sells another substance, which is called differently: sodium thiosulfate, hyposulfite. This substance also reacts with iodine, and very clearly. Fill a glass of water halfway and add a few drops of iodine to make a solution similar in color to tea. Now take a little thiosulfate with a wooden stick or a teaspoon and pour it into this “tea”. And stir with a spoon. "Tea" will immediately turn into "water". Also, by the way, good for focus...

Tired of warming up? Then let's continue. Let's take a closer look at carbon dioxide. Moreover, until now we have dealt only with liquids and powders, and every real chemist must be able to handle gases.

We can get carbon dioxide from at least a bottle of mineral water (or lemonade). It is only necessary that it does not scatter in all directions, but ends up where it should. It’s best to do this: make a hole in a cork (cork or plastic), tightly insert a glass tube into it, put a rubber tube on it, insert another tube (at least from a pipette) into the other end of the rubber tube, and direct it where you want . But you can quickly prepare a simpler device: take some dough (consult your mother or grandmother) and any flexible tube. As soon as you open the bottle, insert a straw into it and quickly cover the neck with dough. The gas has nowhere else to go but into the pipe...

And we will release carbon dioxide into lime water. Ask a construction site for very little, literally a few grams, of slaked lime - they probably won’t refuse you. Grind it well and put half a teaspoon of lime in a glass. Pour hot water to the middle of the glass, stir and let stand for half an hour; There will be sediment at the bottom and a clear solution on top, called lime water. Carefully, along the wall, so as not to lift white sediment from the bottom of the glass, pour it into another glass.

If you can’t get slaked lime, here’s a recipe for making it yourself: dilute a pharmaceutical solution of calcium chloride with water and add ammonia drop by drop until a rich white cloud appears. And in this case, let the liquid settle. The transparent solution that you pour into another glass will turn out to be the same lime water.

Now take a bottle of lemonade or other fizzy drink, open it and immediately insert a stopper with a tube into the neck or cover the tube with dough. Place the other end of the tube in a glass of clear lime water. Carbon dioxide bubbles will escape from the lemonade. If they run slowly, put the bottle in warm water. These bubbles, getting into lime water, make it cloudy and whitish, like milk. In fact, a substance is formed here that chemists call calcium carbonate. Every schoolchild knows him. And you have dealt with him more than once. Because calcium carbonate is the most common chalk. And it is clear that its small particles make water look like milk.

But don’t rush to stop the experience! Donate another bottle of lemonade to science (especially since after the experiment you can drink it, although, alas, it will have almost no bubbles). Quickly close the bottle again with the cork or dough and continue to pass carbon dioxide through the lime water. It won't be long before the solution becomes clear again! This carbon dioxide reacted with the newly formed chalk and a new substance appeared - calcium bicarbonate. It, unlike chalk, dissolves well in water.

Carbon dioxide for such experiments can be obtained without lemonade. In general, without any devices or instruments. With the help of your own lungs.

You probably know that the air we exhale contains a lot of carbon dioxide. And if so, then it means that limewater should become cloudy from it. Let's check.

Lime water will have to be prepared again (it cannot stand for long - it will become cloudy on its own). When it has settled, pour the clear solution into a clean glass as before.

No matter how you get lime water, pour it into a small medicine bottle (or a test tube, if you have one), insert a glass tube or straw and blow into it several times, trying to breathe deeply. The water will become cloudy, and this is a sure sign that there is carbon dioxide in the air you exhale. If you want, let your friends breathe into the tube, just don’t forget to change the cloudy lime water to clear before each experiment.

This experience can also be made in color to, for example, show a trick. The fact is that limewater, like washing soda, is colored red by phenolphthalein. And when the slaked lime it contains turns into chalk, phenolphthalein no longer affects it, and the color disappears.

Can you guess what the experience will look like?

Like this: add a few drops of phenolphthalein solution to fresh limewater, pour the red solution into a test tube or bottle and blow through the tube. The red will turn white.

And here is a version of this experiment: a little washing soda, literally on the tip of a spoon, pour into a bottle, fill (but not to the top) with water, drop 2 - 3 drops of phenolphthalein. And then blow into the pink solution. The color will disappear this time too, only the liquid will not be cloudy, but transparent.

The warm-up is coming to an end, a little more - and we’ll get down to more serious miracles. What chemical exercise would you like to do at last? Give me this - with potassium permanganate from the first aid kit. If you carefully read what is written on the label, you will find out that the full chemical name of this substance is potassium permanganate. Almost black grains of permanganate, dissolving in water, give a bright violet-red solution. A very small amount of the substance, literally a pinch, can color many liters of water. Throw a few grains into a glass, add water and stir.

Pour half the solution into the sink and fill the glass to the top with water (try to pour it so as not to stain the sink, otherwise it will take a long time to wash it later). Again pour half a glass and add water. And so on ten, even twenty times. The color will gradually fade, but it will remain pink for a very long time, although it seems that with such dilution there, in the water, there is almost no “potassium permanganate” anymore.

Of course, you still have sodium sulfite left over from previous experiments - the one from the photo store. Dissolve a little sulfite - say, a quarter of a teaspoon or even less - in a bottle of water. And pour potassium permanganate solutions into the other three vials, but not to the top. In the first, let the solution be dark purple. In the second bottle, the solution must be diluted further so that it turns pink-red. And in the third - even stronger, to a pale pink color.

When you have completed these preparations, add the sodium sulfite solution prepared from the very beginning to all three vials. The pale pink liquid will become almost colorless, the pink-red liquid will become brown. And where there was a purple solution, thick brown flakes will appear. It is from “potassium permanganate” that a substance is formed, which is called manganese dioxide (or dioxide). The same substance leaves a brown coating on the sink if it is not washed off with running water in time. You rub him, you rub him, but at least he needs something...

If you stain it chemically, you need to clean it chemically. Try adding pharmaceutical hydrogen peroxide and a few drops of vinegar (or a few pinches of citric acid) to a bottle with a browned solution. See what happens with the coloring.

Now you know the recipe in case you accidentally stain your sink with potassium permanganate: add a little acid to hydrogen peroxide, moisten a cloth with this solution and wipe the sink once or twice. And then rinse with clean water, and the sink will become white again. You can get by with citric acid alone, without peroxide, but then you will have to rub longer and harder.

Potassium permanganate molecules contain a lot of oxygen, the same oxygen that we all need to breathe. And under suitable conditions, the molecules give up excess oxygen. Then they say that they oxidize some substance. In our recent experiment, potassium permanganate oxidized sodium sulfate. In fact, they say about it that it is a strong oxidizing agent: it can give oxygen to various substances. And at the same time change them in such a way that they become harmless from harmful. That’s why “potassium permanganate” is kept in first aid kits: it disinfects wounds and destroys many dangerous microbes. How? Yes, oxidation!

Let's check these properties using this simple experiment. Pour clean, fresh water into one bottle, and water that has stood for a long time into the other, or even better, from a swamp or an old puddle. Add a little oxidizing agent to both bottles - a pink solution of potassium permanganate. In clean water it will remain pink. And in the water from the puddle it will become discolored. In stagnant water, many substances of little use accumulate, especially in warm weather. “Potassium permanganate” oxidizes them, destroys them, and at the same time becomes discolored.

By the way, experienced tourists take a little potassium permanganate with them on a hike. Even if after boiling the water is in doubt, is it safe to drink? - then a few grains of this substance will make it completely safe. Just don’t put in a lot of potassium permanganate: a pale pink solution is what you need.

Read and write useful

First punishment: turning water into blood

14 Then the Lord said to Moses:

Pharaoh is stubborn and refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning when he goes out to the river. Take the staff that turns into a snake and wait for the king of Egypt on the banks of the Nile. 16 Tell him: “The Eternal, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: “Let My people go to worship Me in the wilderness.” But you still haven't let them go. 17 Thus says the Eternal: “Now you will know that I am the Eternal. With the staff that I have in my hand, I will strike the water of the Nile, and the water will turn into blood. 18 The fish in the Nile will die, the river will become stinking, and the Egyptians will not be able to drink from it.”

19 The Eternal said to Musa:

Tell Harun: “Take the staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt - over the rivers and canals, over the ponds and all reservoirs: the water in them will turn into blood. Blood will be everywhere in Egypt, even in wooden and stone vessels."

20 Moses and Harun did as the Lord commanded them. He raised his staff in front of the pharaoh and his entourage, struck the water of the Nile, and it turned into blood. 21 The fish in the Nile died, and the river became so foul that the Egyptians could not drink from it. Blood was everywhere in Egypt. 22 But the Egyptian sorcerers did the same thing with their witchcraft. And stubbornness took possession of Pharaoh's heart. He did not listen to Musa and Harun, as the Eternal said. 23 The king of Egypt turned around and went into the palace without even thinking about all this. 24 And the Egyptians began to dig wells along the Nile to get drinking water. They could not drink from the river.

From the book Book 16. Kabbalistic Forum (old edition) author Laitman Michael

From the book KABBALISTIC FORUM. Book 16 (old edition). author Laitman Michael

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The transformation of Taoism into superstition The history of Taoism in China shows the changing fate of this religion. Sometimes emperors made it the official religion of their state, and sometimes they banned it, closing Taoist monasteries and exiling monks to distant provinces.

From the book Driven by Eternity by Beaver John

A USUAL "TRANSFORMATION" The gospel we preach has been distorted by emphasizing the acceptance of Jesus in the sinner's prayer, when, having once called Him "Lord," we are saved forever. But this is not what Jesus teaches. He says: “Not everyone who says to Me: ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter

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From the book The Explanatory Bible. Volume 1 author Lopukhin Alexander

6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate water from water. (And it became so.) “let there be a firmament...” Firmament - literally from the original “prostrate”, “tire”, for the Jews imagined the heavenly atmosphere surrounding the globe as such, how especially bright it is

From the book The Explanatory Bible. Volume 5 author Lopukhin Alexander

6. Whoever sheds the blood of man, his blood will be shed by the hand of man: for man was created in the image of God; 7. But you be fruitful and multiply, and spread throughout the earth, and multiply in it, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by him shall his blood be shed by the hand of man...” Law,

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9. For this is to Me as the waters of Noah: just as I swore that the waters of Noah would come no more to the earth, so I swore not to be angry with you and not to rebuke you. 9-10. These two verses represent a Divine oath given to confirm the immutability of the above - about the eternal mercy of God in

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From the book Holy Scripture. Modern translation (CARS) author's Bible

3. In them lay a great multitude of the sick, the blind, the lame, the withered, waiting for the movement of the water, 4. for the Angel of the Lord from time to time went into the pool and troubled the water, and whoever entered it first when the water was troubled was healed, no matter what his condition was. obsessed with illness. Here

From the book Old Testament with a smile author Ushakov Igor Alekseevich

54. He who eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55. For My Flesh is truly food, and My Blood is truly drink. The idea expressed in the previous verse is repeated here in a strengthened form (the concept "is" is not indicated here

From the book God and His Image. An Essay on Biblical Theology author Barthelemy Dominic

First punishment: turning water into blood 14 Then the Eternal said to Musa: “Pharaoh is stubborn and refuses to let the people go.” 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning when he goes out to the river. Take the staff that turns into a snake and wait for the king of Egypt on the banks of the Nile. 16 Tell him: “Eternal, God

From the book Essays on Comparative Religion by Eliade Mircea

The first punishment of the Lord in the world And the angry God became even more incensed than before and cried out to Eve: “By multiplying, I will multiply your sorrow in your pregnancy.” You will give birth to children in pain, and your man will rule over you. And he said to Adam: “Because you listened.”

From the book Transforming Problems into Joy. Taste of Dharma author Rinpoche Lama Zopa

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114. TRANSFORMATION INTO PLANTS The conversion of life between these two forms is preserved in many legends and folk stories, which can be divided into two stages: a) the transformation of a murdered human being into a flower or tree; b) miraculous rebirth through fruit or seed.

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Transforming Diseases into a Path Another teaching on transforming the mind says: “Diseases are a broom that sweeps away all negative karma and obscurations.” When you are sick, you can feel happy by thinking like this: “The negative karma that I have accumulated in the past and with which

Chapter 7

1-9. Moses receives a command from God to go to Pharaoh.

1. But the Lord said to Moses: Look, I have made you God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother will be your prophet:

2. You will tell (him) everything that I command you, and Aaron your brother will tell Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go out of his land;

1-2. In response to the words of Moses: “How will Pharaoh listen to me?” The Lord says to him: “Look, I have made you God to Pharaoh.” You are not afraid of Pharaoh. I have determined to give you and, indeed, I will give you such power that he will fear you as his god. And if kings obey and listen only to God, recognizing Him as superior to themselves, then surely he too will ultimately submit to you; your tongue-tiedness, which you refer to as the reason for the king’s disobedience, will also not matter. Your brother Aaron will speak for you through your mouth as a prophet (4:15).

3. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and will show many of My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt;

4. Pharaoh will not listen to you, and I will lay My hand on Egypt and will bring My army, My people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt with great judgments;

5. Then shall (all) the Egyptians know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand against Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them.

6. And Moses and Aaron did as the Lord commanded them, and so they did.

7. Moses was eighty, and Aaron (his brother) was eighty-three years old when they began to speak to Pharaoh.

8. And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying:

9. If Pharaoh says to you: Do a (sign or) miracle, then you say to Aaron (your brother): Take your rod and throw it (on the ground) before Pharaoh (and before his servants), it will become a serpent.

10-13. The first sign is the transformation of the rod into a serpent.

10. Moses and Aaron came to Pharaoh (and his servants) and did as the Lord commanded (them). And Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent.

10. From a comparison of verses 15 and 17. of this chapter from its 19th Art. It follows without doubt that the rod of Aaron (10) is the rod of Moses, miraculously transformed into a serpent at Horeb (4:2-4) and appointed to serve as an instrument for subsequent miracles. If it is called Aaronic, it is because it passes into the hands of Aaron, like the words of Moses into his mouth (4:30). Expression of snakes, Heb. “tannin,” into which the rod is turned, signifies all sea or river monsters and is specially applied to the crocodile, as a symbol of Egypt (Isa. 51:9; Ezek. 32:2; Ps. 73:13). In this place, this term is thought to mean some particular type of serpent, perhaps an asp, or an ureus, the royal serpent.

11. And Pharaoh called the wise men (of Egypt) and the sorcerers; and these magicians of Egypt did the same with their spells:

12 Each of them cast down his rod, and they became serpents, but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.

11-12. Contrasting the divine power, of which Moses was an organ, with the knowledge and art of his magicians, Pharaoh invites wise men and sorcerers. The term "wise men", Heb. "hakamim", literally skilled in the arts, means representatives of one of the classes of the priestly caste, and "sorcerer", Heb. “mekashefim” (speaking quietly, in a whisper), indicates persons who perform sorcery, in particular, the spell of harmful animals through the unclear muttering of a magical formula. These persons, also called the Magi (Heb. “hargumim”), and by the Apostle Paul and by the name Jannes and Jambres (2 Tim. 3:8, their names, with some variants, were preserved in Targ. Jonath., in the Talmud, etc. ) did with their spells secret magical art the same thing as Aaron, that is, they turned their rods into snakes. How they did this, the text does not indicate. The newest exegetes explain the transformation of rods into snakes through an analogy with the art of charming snakes, known in ancient Egypt and mentioned in the Bible (Eccl. 10:11), bringing them into a state of numbness, in which they became like sticks. The Fathers of the Church attribute the art of magicians to the power of the devil. If the transformation of the magicians' staffs into snakes served for Pharaoh as clear proof that there was no superiority on the side of Moses, then the next moment of the first sign - the absorption of the magicians' staffs by the staff of Moses should have convinced him of the greater power of the messenger of God and Jehovah himself, in whose name he works. As can be seen from Egyptian monuments, the rod and snakes were symbols, emblems of deity and attributes of royal power. And if the rod of Moses devours the rods of the magicians, symbols of the deity, then this is undoubted proof that the power and strength of the Lord, on whose behalf he appears, is higher than the power of the Egyptian gods. Pharaoh, who considered the Lord more powerless than his gods and therefore did not find it necessary to obey His demand to release the Jews, must now fulfill this command, as coming from the name of almighty God.

13. Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had spoken (to them).

13. Pharaoh paid attention to the first half of the sign, did not take into account the second, and therefore, not finding in Moses any superiority over his wise men, he continued to persist.

14-25. The first execution is the transformation of water into blood.

14. And the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is stubborn: he does not want to let the people go.”

15. Go to Pharaoh tomorrow: behold, he will come out to the water, stand in his way, on the bank of the river, and take the rod that turned into a snake in your hand

16. And say to him: The Lord God of the Hebrews has sent me to say to you: Let My people go, so that they may serve Me in the wilderness; but behold, you have not listened until now.

17 Thus says the Lord: By this you will know that I am the Lord: with this rod that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the river, and it will turn to blood,

18. And the fish in the river will die, and the river will stink, and it will be disgusting for the Egyptians to drink water from the river.

14-18. Pharaoh's disobedience, resulting from the fact that he does not want to recognize the authority of the Most High over himself, His power and strength (5:2), leads to a whole series of signs and plagues, proving the superiority of the Lord over the gods of Egypt (17; 18:11). The first of these is the transformation of Nile water into blood. The prediction about it is given to the pharaoh at the time when he went “to the water” either for ablution, or to worship the Nile as a deity. The transformation of Nile water into blood, accompanied by the inability to drink it and the extinction of fish (18), was supposed to convince Pharaoh that Jehovah is Lord (17). As you know, Nile was one of the main deities revered throughout Egypt (Plutarch), was considered an emanation of Osiris and was deified under various names, among other things, the name of Gaia. In honor of him, “the life-giving father of everything that exists, the father of the gods,” temples were built (for example, in Nikopolis), sacrifices were made (in the temple of Jebel Semelech Ramesses II is depicted making a sacrifice to the Nile), holidays were established, etc. With the very first execution, this popular deity loses its beneficial properties (spoilage of water combined with the extinction of fish) depending on the actions of Aaron and Moses (17.20), submits, in other words, to the will of That God, whose representatives they are. Previously sacred, the Nile now becomes an object of disgust, desecrated, since blood, the symbol of Typhon, made, according to the views of the Egyptians, unclean of anyone who touched it. All this taken together served as obvious proof of the insignificance of the god of the Nile in comparison with the Jewish God. Blessed Theodoret assimilates this meaning of the first execution. To the question: “why did the first execution consist of turning water into blood?” he answers: “because the Egyptians thought highly of the river and, as a substitute for clouds, they called them god.”

19. And the Lord said to Moses, Say to Aaron (your brother), Take your staff (in your hand) and stretch out your hand over the waters of the Egyptians: over their rivers, over their streams, over their lakes, and over every receptacle of their waters, and will turn into blood, and there will be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in wooden and stone vessels.

20. And Moses and Aaron did as the Lord commanded (them). And Aaron lifted up his rod and struck the water of the river before the eyes of Pharaoh and before the eyes of his servants, and all the water in the river turned to blood,

19-20. The widespread change of water into blood is indicated, firstly, by reference to “rivers” Nile branches, “streams” numerous canals with which Egypt was cut for irrigation purposes, “lakes”-cisterns and “every receptacle of water,” swampy or muddy places, as well as reservoirs, built by Egyptians living far from the river, secondly, the remark: “there was blood throughout the whole land of Egypt” and, finally, a mention of digging wells (24).

21. And the fish in the river died, and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink water from the river; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.

22. And the Magi of Egypt did the same with their spells. And Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had spoken.

23. And Pharaoh turned and went to his house; and his heart was not touched by this.

22-23. Based on the expression: “and the Magi of Egypt did the same with their spells,” one can think that they made the same significant change in the water as Moses and Aaron did. By imitating them, the Magi paralyzed the impression that Pharaoh should have received from the miracle: “And they did the same, and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.” According to the story of the book. Exodus, as well as the consciousness of other Old Testament writers (Ps. 77:44; 104:29), the first plague was a miraculous phenomenon that took place according to the will of God. Meanwhile, not only naturalists, but even biblical scholars of a positive direction consider it a natural phenomenon, the coloration of its water observed annually when the Nile floods. But such an identification of the transformation of water into blood with its natural coloring does not find any basis in the text. According to the Bible, the first plague falls at the time of the normal level of the Nile water, when the Nile flows in its banks. So, the pharaoh receives a prediction about the onset of execution at the moment when he goes to the river bank (15), the Egyptians are digging wells near the river (24). Both messages are understandable only on the assumption that the area adjacent to the Nile is not covered with water. The time of the first execution does not allow the thought of the Nile flood. The flood lasts from July to September, and the first execution falls in January, as can be seen from the following. According to the Bible, flax and barley especially suffered from the 7th plague: “flax and barley were killed, because the barley was eared, and the flax was seeded. But the wheat and spelt were not beaten, because they were late” (9:31-32). Since flax blooms in lower Egypt at the end of February, and in mid-March it is harvested and the barley is harvested, it is obvious that the seventh plague took place at the end of February or beginning of March. From this time until the last execution, which fell at the beginning of April, a month passed; Consequently, the last four executions took place within a month, separated from each other by almost a week. If the same time was used to determine the intervals separating the first six executions, then it took 1 1/2 months to complete them, with the first execution falling in January. Secondly, the flood of the Nile is not only not accompanied by spoilage of water, but even represents the cessation of its unhealthy state, in which it was in the previous time, during the period of the so-called green Nile. Thirdly, during a flood, the fish in the Nile do not die, and the flood itself does not last 7 days (v. 25), but from July to September. The totality of all these data does not allow us to identify the transformation of water into blood with its coloring during the Nile flood. The validity of this view is supported, among other things, by the authority of the fathers and teachers of the Church. “Water turned into blood,” says Blessed Theodoret, “accused the Egyptians of committing infanticide.” “Moses,” notes Ephraim the Syrian, “struck the waters of the river, and the waters turned into blood.” Cyril of Alexandria expresses the idea of the substantial transformation of water into blood even more clearly. “Is it possible to understand,” he asks, “how water was transformed into a blood creature?”

24. And all the Egyptians began to dig near the river to find water to drink because they could not drink water from the river.

25 And seven days were fulfilled after the Lord smote the river.

Sit not far away from the table and look carefully: I’m starting.

Milk... from water

The famous American writer Brett-Garde has the following scene in his story “The Story of an Ore”:

“The stranger dipped a dry piece of grass into the bottle and shook a drop from it into the water. The water remained as clean and transparent as before.

Now throw a pinch of salt there.

Kungo obeyed. At that same moment, whitish steam appeared on the surface of the water, and all the water became milky.

This is witchcraft! - Kungo exclaimed.

It's silver chloride! Ignoramus!"

What reaction is the novelist describing here, and is it described correctly?

The following experience will give you the answer to these questions.

There is an empty glass on the table. You can examine it; there is nothing magical about it; a glass is like a glass.

I hold two similar glasses, each half filled with, as far as one can judge from their appearance, clear, clean water in my right and left hands.

I drain the water from both glasses at the same time into a glass that stands on the table (Fig. 8).

Rice. 8. Milk from water

Miracles! He poured water, and the glass was filled with... milk.

But wait a few minutes, and the illusion dissipates - a thick white cheesy sediment sinks to the bottom of the glass, and the water above the sediment becomes clear again.

Therefore, if, repeating my experiment, you do not want to spoil its effect, immediately hide the glass of “milk” in the table and move on to other tricks. I will tell you the secret of transformation.

The glasses that I held in my hands were filled not with water, but with transparent aqueous solutions: in one - ordinary table salt (sodium chloride), in the other - lapis (silver nitrate). Keep in mind that lapis is poisonous, handle it with special care, do not handle it, remove it from the jar in which you store it with tweezers (Fig. 9); The jar should be made of dark glass, since lapis decomposes in the light. This, by the way, I’ll tell you, is the basis for its use in photography. It is necessary to dissolve silver nitrate in distilled (distilled) water purchased at a pharmacy, since it produces turbidity in ordinary water.

Rice. 9. Tweezers

When the solutions were drained, a chemical reaction (interaction) occurred - the salts exchanged the metals that were part of them. The result was: silver chloride, insoluble in water and soon settled in the form of a snow-white precipitate, and sodium nitrate (sodium nitrate), which remained in solution. It is not difficult to verify the latter if, after carefully draining the liquid from the sediment, evaporate it in a porcelain cup on an alcohol lamp. When the water boils away, saltpeter crystals will remain at the bottom.

A small note of a practical nature: this is why you cannot dissolve lapis in tap water, because the most seemingly clean and completely fresh-tasting water always contains at least traces of table salt in the solution. In laboratories, the described reaction is used to determine the quantitative content of sodium chloride in water. Having precipitated it completely from the measured amount of test water, the sediment is dried and weighed. Chemical compounds, in contrast to a simple mixture of substances, occur only in the presence of strictly defined weight relationships between their constituent substances. Knowing the weight of the silver chloride formed, the chemist can calculate how much salt was in the test water.

Water and wine in one bottle (Chemical indicators)

And now, if you want, I can pour you either wine or water, at your direction, from... the same bottle.

Please inspect it before starting the experiment.

This will convince you that the bottle contains not wine, but ordinary water.

You ask to pour some wine.

I fill one of the glasses in front of me from the bottle, and by the beautiful color of the liquid you can judge that this is red wine.

But I want to drink water. I pour the wine into another glass and it turns back into water (Fig. 10).

Rice. 10. "Turning Wine into Water"

But you can't drink this water. And that's why.

Really simple water was poured into the bottle, but a few drops of phenolphthalein solution (poisonous!) were previously added to it. Even before the start of the experiment, I poured a little strong soda solution into the bottom of the first glass, and the same solution of tartaric acid into the bottom of the second glass.

Phenolphthalein turns red in alkalis and salts with predominant alkaline properties. Soda (sodium carbonate) is just such a salt. It is formed by very weak carbonic acid and a strong alkali - caustic soda. Acids destroy this color, so when the solution colored by soda is poured into a glass with tartaric acid, it becomes discolored again.

By the way, about phenolphthalein.

It is constantly used in chemical laboratories, serving to indicate the appearance and disappearance of the alkaline reaction of solutions in the so-called volumetric analysis of substances. Like litmus, it is therefore a chemical indicator, that is, an indicator of a reaction.

Replacing phenolphthalein with another artificial organic dye - methyl orange, which gives a yellow color in alkalis and a red color in acids, in our experiment, you can pour white wine from a bottle of water into one glass, red wine into another, and pure water into a third.

But even in this case, you cannot drink poured “wine”!

Converting water to ink and back

In front of me are two bottles - one with water, the other empty, and four glasses. I pour water from a bottle into them, and you see that in even-numbered glasses it turns into ink, and in odd-numbered glasses it remains on its own.

Pour some of the resulting ink into a bottle and, if necessary, make sure that you can write perfectly with it.

I take an empty bottle and pour the contents from all the glasses into it. I shake the bottle, shaking the liquid. As you can see, the bottle is full of clean water. The ink is gone!

To show you this trick, I first dissolved half a spoonful of tannin in the water of the first bottle. Tannin is a complex tannin found in the so-called ink nuts, growths on oak leaves resulting from damage by special insects (nutworms). It contains organic digallic acid. I also poured a few drops of a strong ferric chloride solution into the even-numbered glasses in advance. With this compound, as with other iron salts, tannin produces iron.

In the bottle, which seemed empty to you, I poured a little strong solution of oxalic acid (poisonous!) at the bottom.

In exactly the same way, one can show the transformation of water into red ink and, conversely, red ink into water, by replacing the tannin solution with a solution of salicylic sodium (a medicine against fever). As you can see, not only the sick, but also the healthy can deal with it.

The former use it for treatment, the latter for entertainment and instruction.

Physicists' imaginary mistake (Chlorine bleaching)

Physics teaches that when blue and yellow are mixed, the color green is formed. All painters are convinced of the same thing. Meanwhile, I can easily prove to you that such a statement is wrong. Blue and yellow are complementary colors that cancel each other out. Solutions of blue and yellow paint, when combined, give a colorless mixture.

See for yourself. As you can see, this glass contains blue liquid, and this glass contains yellow liquid. I pour them into the third glass. In front of you is clear water: blue and yellow colors have destroyed each other...

I am almost sure that I will not mislead you and you yourself will unravel the mystery of such a “violation” of the laws of optics; but anyone who has not yet seen the experiments I have shown before will probably be perplexed by this experience.

You say that in the first glass I had an alkaline solution of litmus, in the second - the same solution of methyl orange, and in the third, into which I poured the contents of the first two, - chlorine water.

In the wonderful fairy tale “What the Wind Told about Waldemar Do and His Daughters,” Andersen describes the medieval goldsmith as follows: “Valdemar Do was proud and brave, but also knowledgeable. He knew a lot. Everyone saw it, everyone whispered about it. The fire burned in his room even in the summer, and the door was always locked; he worked there days and nights, but did not like to talk about his work: the forces of nature must be experienced in silence. Soon, soon he will find the best, the most precious in the world - red gold.

“From smoke and ashes, from worries and sleepless nights, Waldemar Do’s hair and beard turned gray, the skin on his face wrinkled and turned yellow, but his eyes still burned with a greedy shine in anticipation of gold, the desired gold.

"But then the bell rang, the sun began to play in the sky. Waldemar Do worked feverishly all night, cooking, cooling, stirring, distilling. He sighed heavily, prayed fervently and sat at work, afraid to catch his breath. His lamp went out, but the coals of the hearth illuminated the pale face and sunken eyes. Suddenly they widened. Looks into a glass vessel. Shines...

Burns like heat. Something bright and heavy. He lifts the vessel with a trembling hand and, choking with excitement, exclaims: “Gold! Gold!”

“He straightened up and raised high the treasure lying in a large glass vessel. “Found it!” Found! Gold!” he shouted and handed the vessel to his daughters, but... his hand trembled, the vessel fell to the floor and broke into pieces. The last rainbow soap bubble of hope burst.”

Let us try, following the example of the alchemists, to look for a way to obtain “gold from water.”

While you were reading excerpts from Gogol and Andersen, I boiled water in two flasks. I pour boiling water from them into a third, larger container, and cover it with a scarf. A minute of patience!

Ready! I take off my handkerchief and hand you the cooled flask.

What a beauty! What shine! It is all filled with tiny flakes of gold, which sparkle in the rays of the sun.

I then put the flask on a grid lying on a tripod, light an alcohol lamp under the grid, and after a few minutes the “gold” was gone: it completely dissolved in boiling water.

There is no need, of course, to say that it was not gold.

In separate flasks, I boiled solutions of lead acetate (poisonous!) in distilled water and potassium iodide (used as a medicine). By merging them together, we obtain, through the exchange decomposition of these salts, two new ones - potassium acetate remaining in solution, and lead iodide. The latter is soluble only in hot water, and when the solution is cooled, it falls out of it in the form of small scaly crystals with a golden luster.

This is perhaps the most beautiful of all chemical experiments.

Regarding the external similarity of crystalline lead iodide to grains of gold and its solubility in water, I would like to say a few words about the mistake of medieval alchemists and about the possibility of actually obtaining gold from other substances, as well as extracting it from water.

Alchemists believed in the existence of “primary matter” and did not distinguish between the concepts of complex and simple substances. Their mistake was that they paid all their attention to the physical properties of bodies, and not to their chemical composition. They hoped that by combining different substances that had the individual properties of gold, they could eventually obtain gold itself. They were especially captivated by the idea of turning heavy and shiny mercury into gold, giving it hardness and a yellow color. That is why they usually mixed it with hard and yellow sulfur for this purpose. In their opinion, sulfur was supposed to give mercury the properties it lacked.

In this case, they fell into a deep mistake, since, when combined, substances lose their physical properties and acquire new ones. Thus, sulfur, combining with mercury, did not give gold or even a new metal, but red paint - cinnabar. But they accidentally turned out to be right in the assumption that there is some kind of connection between gold and mercury.

In 1924, one German scientist, passing a high voltage electric current through mercury vapor, turned, as he thought, after a long time, part of the mercury - admittedly an extremely insignificant one - into gold.

This discovery was refuted by further experiments, but, in any case, it has no practical significance: such artificial gold would cost 10,000 times more than that mined in gold-bearing rocks; from the theoretical side, it would be very interesting, once again proving that the division of substances into complex and simple, which has been maintained for over a hundred years, is purely arbitrary.

However, for a practicing chemist this does not change matters much, since it is unlikely that it will ever be possible to obtain artificial gold in a factory way. Rather, we can expect to be able to isolate it from sea water.

What does the water of the seas and oceans not contain? Washing the shores of continents and islands, feeding on the waters of rivers running down from the entire surface of the land, over millions of centuries of their existence the oceans have accumulated colossal reserves of all kinds of chemical compounds leached by water from the earth’s crust.

Among these substances, gold was also found in sea water in the form of a compound with chlorine.

But what a weak solution this is!

200,000 tons of ocean water contain no more than one gram of gold (and according to the latest analyzes even less). The poorest terrestrial gold-bearing rocks, the development of which is almost unjustifiable, contain 1200 times more of this metal.

But the amount of water in the oceans is so colossally large (120,000,000 cubic kilometers) that if all this gold were isolated from it, it would amount to about 4 billion tons.

The entire world population is estimated at approximately 2 billion. Each of us, therefore, theoretically accounts for about two tons of sea gold.

That’s how much a golden slab weighs, one meter long and wide and a decimeter thick!

Do not think that attempts have not been made to chemically extract gold from the depths of the ocean.

There were many of them, some of them were more or less successful from a scientific point of view, but from an economic point of view, they are all no more successful than the attempts of ancient alchemists to turn cheap metals into gold.

The gold of the oceans is still waiting for the chemist who will find a cheap way to extract it to the surface. However, by that time it will cease to be a measure of price. In the future, when the capitalist system is destroyed everywhere, gold will become the same technically used metal as all the others.

Gold in the USSR

A sad geological fact for capitalist predators is the very pleasant circumstance for us that our country, the country of socialism, contains in the depths of the surface of its territory the greatest reserves of ore and placer gold in the world. The famous Austrian geologist Sues pointed this out back in the last century, and we are now convinced of this with every new exploration of our gold-bearing lands.

In Tsarist Russia, gold mining was carried out using predatory and primitive means. Despite all the capitalists’ greed for gold, they did not know how to search for or mine it. And yet, for gold production, tsarist Russia for many years stood in fourth place in the world, extracting on average about 32 tons of this “despicable, but seductive (for capitalists) metal” annually.

This represented about 10% of all world production.

Under Soviet rule, the gold mining industry was mechanized and chemicalized, and now it has reached second place in the world in terms of production. It will come out on top. It's only a matter of time.

Under the Soviet regime, which extensively carried out geological exploration of mineral resources, phenomenal mineral resources of our country were discovered. Deposits of such metals have been found and are already being developed, the presence of which was not even suspected during the times of tsarism, the need for which was fully satisfied by imports from abroad. These are, for example, nickel, tin and a number of rare metals necessary for the production of special grades of steel. Nor did they suspect the existence of many rich gold deposits, such as in Kazakhstan. The development of well-known deposits was carried out in such a way that now tons of gold are chemically extracted from the dumps of old mines, which eluded the former predatory entrepreneurs who only knew how to “skim off the foam” and received their profits through the exploitation of workers.

Nowadays, even in gold-bearing places that have long been known, large gold nuggets are found, such as, for example, a nugget weighing over 13 kg found at the end of 1935.

By the way, don’t think that he is very big. Gold is a heavy metal, its specific gravity is 19.3, so from a nugget of this weight you can cast a tile with dimensions: 20 cm long, 10 cm wide and 3 and a half thick. A good paperweight for a desk, worth 18,000 rubles.

The time will come when gold will be used for such products.

“When we win on a global scale,” Lenin said, “we, it seems to me, will make public latrines out of gold on the streets of several of the largest cities in the world. This would be the most “fair” and visually edifying use of gold for those generations who have not forgotten how ten million people were killed for gold and thirty million were crippled in the “great liberation” war of 1914-1918.”... (Lenin, Soch., vol. XXVII, p. 82, ed. 3) .

Gold is still partially used as an industrial metal, and not just for the minting of gold coins. Its salts are used in photography and medicine, in glass and ceramics production. The ruby-red glass is colored with one of the gold compounds - the “cassian purple” of the alchemists. With an admixture of “ligature,” that is, silver or copper, to give it hardness, it is used for jewelry, and when pure, it is used for gilding objects made of other metals.

An interesting example of the latest use of gold is the galvanic gilding of the frame of stars with precious gems, installed at the end of 1935 on two Kremlin towers.

From a solution of its cyanide salts, gold is deposited by galvanic current onto the surface of other metals connected to the negative pole of the galvanic bath.

The method has long been known, but never before anywhere in the world has there been a case of galvanic gilding of objects as large as these stars. Their diameter is 5 meters, the surface covered with gold is 30 square meters. m for each.

The reaction was carried out for 4 and a half hours, the deposited layer has a thickness of 20 to 25 microns (thousandths of a millimeter). No matter how thin such a layer is, it fully guarantees the durability of the gilding for 200-250 years.

Historical curiosity

Galvanic gilding, which is mentioned above, is a special case of galvanostegy - coating one metal with another using the electrochemical process of decomposition of the salt of this metal by current. Electroplating and galvanoplasty (making metal copies from relief images) were discovered in 1838 by Moritz Jacobi.

And where? In Russia during the time of Nikolai Palkin.

By whom? An architect and even a professor of architecture.

But Jacobi, who was not famous for anything in architecture, turned out to be an outstanding electrochemist who made a number of valuable inventions. The most important of them is galvanoplasty. Noticing that the copper deposited at the negative pole of the galvanic element, separating from it, gives a cast of it, Jacobi began to cover the casts of the relief images with graphite and deposit a layer of copper on them, obtaining copies of the originals.

He wrote to his great contemporary Faraday: “I will have the honor to send you a copper relief, the original of which is made of a plastic substance that is amenable to all changes in the hands of the artist. Using this method, all the smallest features of the original are preserved, which are lost during casting.”

The French Academy of Sciences awarded Jacobi a gold medal for this discovery.

Notes:

See the supplement at the end of the book, which, I repeat, I advise you to read before starting the experiments.