Pharoah’s snake in a vivarium

October 11, 2012 • 1:38 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This kind of thing could have got you burnt at the stake a few centuries ago – or gained you the favour of easily-impressed influential people. The video’s a slow burner (ha!) – the action starts at around 1:10. They presumably did the experiment in a vivarium for safety reasons (and they very sensibly wear gloves).

Mercury(II) thiocyanate  – Hg(SCN)2 – used to be used to make Pharoah’s Serpent fireworks (I remember this from ‘indoor fireworks’). It’s expensive, but impressive. It obviously wowed Pharoah…

h/t Lisa Adamson’s FB page

24 thoughts on “Pharoah’s snake in a vivarium”

    1. And they didn’t include a disclaimer stating that no baby cacti were harmed during the making of the demonstration.

      Cactus haters is what they are.

    2. I suspect they’ll be hearing soon from People for the Ethical Treatment of Cacti.

  2. Did it actually make that clicking sound?

    If they could do this in the past, no wonder people had weird ideas about spontaneous generation.

  3. According to the pfft, it was synthesised in the late 19th century and not long afterwards was sold to the public under the Pharaoh’s Snake label in Germany. This stopped after a few kids ate the snaky bits and died. Wonder if it tasted good. Any volunteers?

    Rather than a vivarium, they might have been wiser to use a laboratory fume hood. Mercury, Cyanide; what’s not to like?

    1. Ooh, wouldn’t this make a good method of murder for a mystery? Death By Pharaoh’s Snake. Police were baffled.

      1. Indeed, imagine the spectacle if a much larger quantity were given to the unsuspecting victim to use.

    2. They never back the shot out wide enough to be sure, but the vivarium appears to be inside a fume hood with the sash raised above the top of the vivarium (at least it was raised initially, they might have lowered it after applying the flame).

    1. Did you not see the Noodly Appendage in that video? I did, and I’m sure it wasn’t Basement Cat fooling with my eyes.

    2. Spinoza thought that the Biblical miracles, if they even happened at all, were the results of secret scientific knowledge possessed by the miracle workers.

  6. Bring’s back some fond childhood memories of the slightly less awesome but chemically safer Black Snake fireworks.

    It occurs to me this might have been named “Pharaoh’s snake” in modern times, and not been known in Ancient Egypt, but info on the origin/discovery of the reaction seems hard to come by on Google.

  7. Anybody know what the reaction is? There’s a Wikipedia page, but it only gives the equation for the synthetic process.

  8. So now you can get a balanced equation on the internet! First result for Hg(SCN)2 + 02 is:
    2Hg(SCN)2 + 9O2 -> 2HgO + 4SO2 + 4CO2 + 2N2.
    Three gases and that solid stuff is Mercuric oxide, I guess.

  9. I don’t will put nothing here related to the post, so I apologise for this, but I’m at Coursera taking on-line classes of Genetics and Evolution and at my first class -there is an interview with you! And that was awesome! I’m just a year long reader of your blog and now “somehow” I felt like I’m your student!
    Sorry for my poor english but now that you released your book in portuguese (i’m from brazil) I gonna buy it!
    best regards!

  11. Sigma-Aldrich’s website, it looks like 50g of Mercury(II) thiocyanate costs about $100 (it’s telling me I can buy 100g for $200). I don’t know how much of that jar they spread on the sand, but this doesn’t appear to be a horribly expensive demonstration.

    The vivarium and cacti might have cost as much as, or more than the chemical.

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