Mercury(II) Fulminate - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

On AMC's Breaking Bad, Walter White throws a piece of fulminated mercury to the ground to cause an explosion at Tuco Salamanca's hangout. The effect demonstrated in the scene, while theoretically plausible, is generally considered to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect.

In Law & Order's Season 7, Episode 6 "Double Blind" the killer uses bullets tipped with fulminated mercury to kill a former school janitor. This scene should not be duplicated as mercury fulminate is a very sensitive explosive and would almost certainly detonate in the firing chamber.

In Burn Notice's Season 4, Episode 13 "Eyes Open" Michael Westen uses decoy Mercury Fulminate in order to distract a bomb man while Sam Axe searches his house.

In the movie Mister Roberts, Jack Lemmon's character Ensign Pulver uses "fulminate of mercury" to create a very large "firecracker."

In the eighth episode of the anime Code Geass, the Japanese Liberation Front uses a Mercury (II) Fulminate cannon as an anti-Knightmare long range weapon.

Read more about this topic:  Mercury(II) Fulminate

Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:

    “Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
    —Henry David David (1817–1862)