Make:

A friend and I built something similar when were were living in London. Since we couldn't find any mercury in our flat, we just used salt water, and we got the motor to work pretty well, using a 12V 1A wall-wart power supply. It ran, albeit slowly.

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This is very similar to our magnetohydrodynamic demonstration. The main difference is that the wire is held still, so it is the salt-water that moves.

I wish I had 60 lbs of mercury to play with.

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This is extremely similar to the first electric motor. This was a nearly identical setup, however the wire was fixed. A steel plug/cyllinder floated on the mercury and revolved around the wire instead.

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I wonder if home made ferofluid could take the place of mercury?

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I used to have about a pound of mercury (don't ask), I built one of these and was quite impressed at how well it worked. It was fun stuff, let's hear it for the use of heavy metals in mining!

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Theodore Gray rocks.

You could make the motor work with quite a small puddle of mercury - the amount you can harvest from the average old blood pressure meter would probably do for a small demonstration unit.

Do the experiment outside to avoid excessive fume inhalation and/or tiresome cleanups.

(The salt-water idea's a neat one too, though!)

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I was just thinking that salt water should work since the mercury is only used as a conductor in this instance(or so it seems anyway). Maybe I'll give this a shot.

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According to an episode of NOVA I recently saw, this is how Michael Faraday confirmed experimentally that electricity and magnetism were coupled.

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Terrifying.

Seriously.

Mercury is just so amazingly toxic even in small quantities that I won't have anything to do with the stuff.

I saw a mercury fountain in the Miró museum in Barcelona. Think water fountain-- except mercury shooting all over. Fortunately it was enclosed in a sealed glass chamber.

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