the.com/amalgam
the marriage of mercury to anything that will hold still long enough
means A blend or mixture of different things combined into one — and specifically, in dentistry and metallurgy, an alloy of mercury with another metal.
from From Medieval Latin amalgama, used by alchemists for a soft mercury-metal paste. The deeper roots are murky and much-debated: one popular guess traces it to Greek malagma, 'a softening' or 'emollient,' from malassein, 'to soften' — which fits the squishy alchemical sense nicely. But the path through Arabic alchemical writing (where so much of this vocabulary was preserved) leaves the trail uncertain, and scholars hedge accordingly.
- dental past
- Filled cavities with liquid metal for 150 years
- gold trick
- Mercury dissolves gold, then boils away to leave it
- word origin
- Possibly from Arabic for the act of mating
- liquid alloy
- Mercury makes metals soft, paste-like, or fully fluid
- mad hatters
- Mercury fumes from amalgams poisoned hat-makers into madness
mercury dental fillings — silver-colored restorative material containing 50% mercury, used in dentistry since the 1800s
brass — copper and zinc alloy dating back to biblical times, widely used in musical instruments and fixtures
steel — iron and carbon alloy developed industrially in the 1850s, foundation of modern construction and manufacturing