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Mercury rectifiers are beautiful. I once built a vacuum tube audio amplifier with directly heated triodes and mercury rectifiers, aiming for a symmetrical orange-blue-blue-orange glow.

It turned out that mercury rectifiers make a lot of electrical noise when they switch, so there was an annoying 120 Hz buzzing noise. But it did look cool.

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I recently built a "vacuum tube nightlight" (http://www.electronixandmore.com/projects/vrtubenightlight/i...) because I thought the plasma tubes give off such a nice glow. But they aren't very bright and it's hard to see the plasma; these rectifiers are way more attractive but I can't bring myself to work with them.

> these rectifiers are way more attractive but I can't bring myself to work with them.

Cool project! Do you say you can't bring yourself to work with them for safety reasons (as in, I imagine mercury vapor is very dangerous if it escapes the tube) or is there another reason?

just the mercury vapor being dangerous.

More likely that it generates a massive amount of wideband noise that happens to be modulated at 120Hz in this case.

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