I have been going though my mothers belongings since she passed away and was gong though a bunch of camera's my dad had when when we were kids. This was in a polaroid camera from the 1970s:
Looks like a 532 3V battery, there is also the 531 4.5V battery that is same size but a little longer. Only 2 that i know of that are of this form factor (but hey, I don't know everything).
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son of a gun, so they CAN make batteries that don't leak and destroy electronics.
I guess that tech, along with our ability to go to the moon, is lost
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I think these are mercury batteries? I remember a very similar style in 1970s smoke detectors. I think the smoke detector version was 12V, it was about the diameter of a C cell.
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Yep this one is much smaller tha a C cell, I think I found a replacement on Amazon:
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Yes I remember when my mom got her first smoke detector's it had the large C size batter and had a mercury warning label on it for how to dispose of. By the time we went to replace the detector everything was 9 volt after that.
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When I was about 8, I found a thermometer. Broke it in half and rolled the mercury around in the palm of my hand, and thought it was cool how I could break up the mercury and it would all come back together.
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That explains a lot.... 
I keed!
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same - I am amazed at how much mercury I played with as a child and didnt suffer any [obvious] damage
used to actually bite the coin batteries and bend them in half to get the mercury out, break old thermostats open, silent light switches - you name it 
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You've heard the expression "mad as a hatter"? One possible explanation for the term's origin is the use of mercury in the preparation of felt - a common material used in hat-making.
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The house I grew up in was built around 1890. Had a boiler in the basement. I thought it was cool when I hit the white pipes that dust would come out. Big dummy, that was asbestos.
My FIL worked at a steel mill most of his life. When he started out as a millwright, he would have to go into the furnaces for maintenance. They would be shut off, but still hot as heck so he wore an asbestos suit, asbestos hat, asbestos shoes and asbestos lined gloves.
Lived to be 83. Mesothelioma didn’t get him, but Alzheimer’s did.
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ah yes the asbestos wrapped pipes- my elementary school had them exposed in the rather low ceiling hallways and we would jump up and swing from them ... so i got that going for me too 
We had several in our current house when I bought it. Encapulated them in latex paint, cut them out surgically and walked them to the dumpster...
As I remember Mercury the metal is biologically inert, it'll go through the body and just create some very interesting mobile crap. I remember little plastic games where you had to get all the Mercury or Quicksilver into the little pits in the plastic. Then Hopeless & Stupid got invented and it was little plastic balls.
The issue is certain compounds of mercury, they can be extremely nasty because they bind to or replace different compounds in the body and the higher the levels the nastier the damage. Its like phosphorus replaces calcium - Fossy Jaw - and that's because the jawbone is one of the most regularly stressed bones in the body - more stress, more bone deposition and phosphorus more bioavailable than calcium.. So you get phosphorus "bone" not Calcium bone.
If you are curious about really nasty compounds look up Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane and the others in the "things I won't work with" blog.
The last 10 years of my wife’s working career, she was employed by a law firm that handled meso cases. Almost every case was settled, but the plaintiff had died a horrible suffocating death before the case was settled. She would get so into these cases that she would wake up at 2am just to get the backlog of cases caught up.
Her law firm sued companies that knew asbestos was a bad thing yet continued to use it.
Ford, US Navy, Raybestos, many insulation companies, siding companies.
Big problem was that dad would bring the asbestos fibers home in his work clothing, get a hug from mom, and now her clothes are contaminated.
No, mercury is toxic, period.
Elemental mercury or quicksilver is poorly absorbed through the skin or GI tract (as compared to mercury salts or other mercury compounds). But vapor given off by elemental mercury is inhaled and can absolutely cause ill effects in the body.
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@RosieUK Please listen to @marktheknife, he is a physician..... As a rule of thumb, just avoid all contact with mercury period...
Yes, but...
Generally speaking, metallic mercury is a poison. But real cases are rare (see links below), compared to all the other real causes of illness or death. We should be more aware of the consumption of organic mercury (methylmercury) from fish (more for pregnant women and young children than for others) or be clearly more sensitive to the effects of Radon in our homes (or of cigarettes in the lungs of smokers). Just compare the number of deaths from mercury, radon and cigarettes. I understand all the concerns and warnings, but we have to be careful about the preponderance of the real problem and not pay too much attention to cases, real but few in number.
Just in case, I am a chemist and I have worked for more than 15 years in R&D in the pharmaceutical field (anti-cancer)
sources:
mercury: Mercury Toxicity - StatPearls - NCBI Bookshelf
radon : https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
smoking: Health Effects | Smoking and Tobacco Use | CDC
Yep, you're lookin' at an Eveready No. 531 Photo Battery (NEDA 1307 4.5 Volts) by Union Carbide
◄— Full Disclosure: Played with silver mercury as a child, and demo'd houses with asbestos in the 1980s . . . yet turned out somewhat normal(?)
