I originally reviewed What Color Is Your Parachute? in five parts, which you can find here, here, here, here, and here if you would like to read the original comments. What Color Is Your Parachute? is the eighteenth of fifty-two books in The Simple Dollarâs series 52 Personal Finance Books in 52 Weeks.
Thallium is extremely soft, malleable and sectile enough to be cut with a knife at room temperature. It has a metallic luster that, when exposed to air, quickly tarnishes to a bluish-gray tinge, resembling lead. It may be preserved by immersion in oil. A heavy layer of oxide builds up on thallium if left in air.
Chemists William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy discovered thallium independently in 1861, in residues of sulfuric acid production. Both used the newly developed method of flame spectroscopy, in which thallium produces a notable green spectral line.hallium is found in the minerals crookesite TlCu 7 Se 4, hutchinsonite TlPbAs 5 S 9, and lorandite TlAsS 2. Thallium also occurs as a trace element in iron pyrite, and thallium is extracted as a by-product of roasting this mineral for the production of sulfuric acid.