Hi guys! So today we're going to be talking about the chemical element bromine,
which in my opinion is one of the coolest elements I've ever worked with
If we take a look at the periodic table, we can see that bromine lies in group 17,
which is also known as the halogen family
If we look at the other members of this family, we can find things like chlorine and fluorine or iodine
and all of these chemical elements share some similar properties
The major physical difference between these elements is that
as we go down, the phases of the elements change
So when we start with fluorine, we have a gas, below it is chlorine which is also a gas,
but we get to bromine, it's a liquid, and we go down one more, and go to iodine, it's a solid
The fact that bromine exist as a liquid at room temperature
is pretty unique, because mercury is the only other element like this
All of the other ones you know like iron, chlorine, fluorine that are already mentioned etc.
They're all gases or solid at room temperature, we only have two, mercury and bromine that are liquid
So now we're done with the intro, we can just get rid of this paper
and we can take a closer look at the bromine
It has a very dark red nearly black color and honestly looks a little bit scary
Bromine has a high vapor pressure,
so it has a strong tendency to convert from its liquid to the gas phase
This makes it very hard to store, and bromine gas will leak out of almost all containers including this one
It's really not uncommon for the area around a bromine bottle to be rusted, discolored and decrepit
The only real way to store it without leak is to use glass ampules
The downside using ampules is that you'll need to break the ampule to use it
and you kind of need to use everything at once when you open it
Just as a quick side note, I mean both the ampules and the bromine myself
and if you're interested in seeing how it was done, you can check out the links in the description
So as I have all my safety gear on which is namely a lab coat, some gloves and goggles,
we're ready to open up the bromine
The first thing that you'll notice is the fuming that comes out
Like I said before, the bromine vaporizes quite readily
and it's... *cough* (oh God) it's gonna fume profusely
It's not good
Opening just the bottle was pretty bad and I had to leave the area
but I really want to show you guys what it looks like to pour it
So, to do this, I'm going to have to use a respirator
So here's my respirator, which is going to block the bromine vapors
I can alternatively just do this in a very well ventilated area
but I want to show you guys the fuming looks like and I can't do that if I have crazy fans or anything going
So I'm going to go ahead and put this on
With the respirator on, we are...
ready to continue
When I open the bottle for a second time, a lot of fumes are going to come out, but this time I'm protected
The bromine vapor is heavier than air, so when I tip the bottle
you can see it pouring to the beaker and all over the table
The density of liquid bromine is about three times out of water,
so even the small amounts of the liquid feels abnormally heavy
Just because it's more dense though, it doesn't mean that it's thick like honey or something
and the viscosity is very similar to that of water
To highlight the crazy rate of evaporation that bromine has,
I decided to put a little bit of the bromine on the watch glass
and see how long it takes to disappear
Even though it evaporates quickly, I'm not gonna bore you by playing it out in real time,
so I sped things up
In total, it took about four minutes to completely disappear
and this is with very little to no air movement
If I were to blow on it or set up a fan, it probably could disappear in less than 30 seconds
I mentioned earlier that I made the bromine in this video and here are a few shots of the preparation
As an element, bromine is quite reactive, so it's really not common to find bromine alone in nature
If bromine ever forms, It quickly reacts with other elements to form various compounds
One of the quick thing to mention is that bromine is a diatomic molecule,
which means it never exist as just "Br" and it's always combined with itself to make "Br₂"
This isn't unique to bromine though and there's a slew of other diatomic elements
and instead of saying all of them, I'll just provide a list here
One very common source of bromine is in the salt sodium bromide
which is the bromine equivalent of sodium chloride or table salt
The sodium bromide is sold in pool stores to use as a disinfectant,
but with a little bit of chemistry, we can liberate the elemental bromine from it
The preparation of bromine though is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons
and I really don't recommend doing it
Bromine isn't just a fun chemical to play with though and it actually has some useful chemical applications
Its most common use is to add a bromine group to a molecule
and I've actually done this in a previous video
I use the bromine that I made in the clips that I just showed a second ago
to make something called eosin
Eosin is a pretty commonly used dye in biology and histology
to stain tissues before looking at them under the microscope
For this preparation, we start with a molecule called fluorescein
and we need to throw some bromines onto it
If you don't understand the chemical structure, it really doesn't matter,
the only thing you have to notice is that compared to fluorescein,
the eosin has a bunch of bromines added onto it
Anyway, that's it for now, if you guys have any ideas on how I can improve these types of videos
or maybe just some topics for future videos, please let me know in the comments
As usual, I'd like to extend a big thanks to all my supporters on Patreon
and especially those who donated five dollars or more
Anyone who donates and supports me on Patreon gets to see my videos 24 hours before I release it to YouTube
and if you donate five dollars or more, you get your name at the end of the video like you see here
Also as usual, here's the videos that I've currently filmed and the ones that plan to work on,
if you have any suggestions or ideas, please feel free to leave them in the comments