Word: acidic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Alone, neither hydrochloric nor nitric acid will dissolve the "noble metals" gold and platinum, but a mixture of the two will. So to this potent corrosive the medieval alchemists gave the name aqua regia-royal water. Last week in Brooklyn, fumes from royal water knocked out scores of factory workers and firemen. left several in hospitals, threatened with severe aftereffects...
...Williamsburg section, an American Cyanamid Co. tank truck backed up to the Radio Receptor Co.'s plant (which makes electronic equipment) to deliver 500 gallons of nitric acid. Driver Benjamin Sidla hooked up his hose to a pipe indicated by employees, started pumping. After a few minutes, a man rushed up from the basement, yelled to Sidla: "You'd better stop. The fumes are terrible down there." Somehow the nitric acid had been diverted into a 3,000-gallon tank containing hydrochloric. Result: royal water, which was already beginning to dissolve the tank's rubber lining, eating...
Meanwhile, Wood and his firemen went into the basement tank room, tried to stop the leak with a new flange. When the air cylinders for their masks were empty and they came up to the street to change them, their faces and necks showed bright red acid burns; 38 were affected, one had to be hospitalized. Because aqua regia attacks pipes and pumps so avidly, it took three days to find resistant equipment to load it into a tank truck for neutralization and disposal in New Jersey...
...festival rally. All week long, Americans slipped anti-Communist literature under the dinner places and into the beds of Iron Curtain delegates, or handed it out openly in the Prater. For their pains, at least nine-four of them girls-were roughed up by Communist guards, and an acid bomb was thrown into the publishing house printing the anti-Communist tracts...
...Ugai remembered that strontium chloride combines with tannic acid to form an insoluble compound. From this he reasoned that strontium, instead of being deposited in the bones to do long-term damage, might be eliminated from the human system if there was enough tannic acid present. It worked in Dr. Ugai's laboratory, where mice stored up 30% less strontium in their bones when they also got tannic acid. Then he found that a standard brew of green or black tea worked like a weak solution of tannic acid...