Ew, yuck!, just accidentally caught a breath of bromine fumes. A lot harsher and more vicious on the airways and lungs IMO compared to chlorine gas. I've just been harvesting the bromine from a synthesis of same using concentrated sulfuric acid reacted with sodium bromide. Initially produces HBr and sodium sulfate, but the remaining H2SO4 is a strong enough oxidizer to oxidize hydrogen bromide to Br2.
To begin with, I was withdrawing the bromine from under a layer of bromine-saturated water (so of course this bromine will need drying before use), using a long cannula needle (different from the cannulae used for injections, setting up venous access lines in hospital and the like, these are really long, over a foot long, and used for things like pairing them up to withdraw air and/or water, using one syringe and cannula to withdraw the reagent whilst using a second glass syringe and cannula needle, both of them freshly flame-dried and repeatedly purge with inert gas before use, then one refilled with dry inert gas, so whilst one syringe draws up the reagent, the second, filled with dry inert gas, slowly depresses the plunger, introducing the inert gas into the reagent bottle so as to provide a headspace, and avoid creating a vacuum within the bottle, adding inert gas at the same rate as the reagent is withdrawn to constantly equalize the pressure, through the seal of the reagent bottle.
Only it was problematic to suck up the rather heavy, thick Br2 with the very long, thin needle, slow and requiring one to pull pretty hard on the glass syringe to draw up the bromine. And worse, with the cannula needles being so long while still being pretty thin they bend easily making it impossible to draw anything else up without taking the needle out and un-bending it.
So I used a couple of different gauges of plastic tubing to attach a long glass pipette to a 150ml glass syringe, and started to use this to draw up the bromine in order to squirt it into a bottle for storage.
But, bromine has a fairly high vapour pressure, so it can squirt itself out of the end of the pipette easily, which would be very bad news indeed if it were to end up contacting skin, as Br2 causes severe burns near instantly
if it touches skin, although I've never been burnt by it. With the needle it was really damn slow, but with it so being so thin too it didn't squirt if one isn't really careful. The glass pipette does, but on the other hand it won't bend and it draws up the bromine really quickly too and without having to yank and twist at the syringe plunger.
