40 Fun Facts About Formaldehyde

Formaldehyde is sold dissolved in water, but what is the pure compound at room temperature?

A colorless gas with a sharp smell is the pure form, which is why it is handled in water: condensed to a liquid, it quickly links itself into a solid.

Which British artist suspended a tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde for a 1991 artwork?

Damien Hirst paid £6,000 for the shark, and the original decayed so badly that a new specimen replaced it in 2006.

In the early 1900s, US bottling plants added formaldehyde to which drink to stop it spoiling?

Milk was dosed with formaldehyde as a cheap stand-in for pasteurization, at a time when few people understood how toxic the chemical was.

Which paralyzing disease was targeted by a 1955 vaccine made from virus killed with formaldehyde?

Polio was the target of Jonas Salk's shot, which grew three strains of the virus in monkey kidney cells and then inactivated them with a formaldehyde solution.

Which hurricane's survivors were housed in FEMA trailers that gave off toxic levels of formaldehyde?

Katrina survivors in the trailers reported breathing trouble, eye irritation and nosebleeds, and tests traced the cause to formaldehyde given off by the glues and pressed wood inside.

Formaldehyde, toluene and dibutyl phthalate make up the so-called toxic trio of which cosmetic?

Nail polish drew enough concern that San Francisco passed an ordinance publicly identifying salons whose polishes are free of all three chemicals.

Which space agency tested in 1989 whether houseplants could remove formaldehyde from indoor air?

NASA ran the tests with a landscaping trade group, hoping plants could clean the air inside sealed space stations; benzene and trichloroethylene were tested too.

Formaldehyde takes the first half of its name from the Latin word for which insect?

Ant is formica in Latin: chemists named formic acid after the insects that make it, then reused the root for the acid's one-carbon relatives.

Which early plastic, used for old telephones and radios, is made by reacting formaldehyde with phenol?

Bakelite, patented by Leo Baekeland in 1909, was the first plastic made from synthetic components, and it withstands heat and does not conduct electricity, which suited it to casings.

Which toxic alcohol, found in windshield washer fluid, does the human liver convert into formaldehyde?

Methanol does its damage after liver enzymes turn it into formaldehyde and then formic acid, which can leave a drinker blind.

What name is given to the roughly 37% solution of formaldehyde in water used to preserve specimens?

Formalin began as a trade name, and makers add a little alcohol as a stabilizer so the solution does not cloud into solid polymer.

Which salon hair-smoothing treatment drew an OSHA hazard alert for releasing formaldehyde?

Brazilian blowout solution labeled formaldehyde-free still pushed air readings past federal limits when OSHA tested salons that were using it.

Which preservation method behind the Body Worlds exhibitions begins by fixing a corpse in formaldehyde?

Plastination, developed by Gunther von Hagens in 1977, goes on to replace the body's water and fat with plastics such as silicone, leaving specimens that can be touched and do not decay.

Which South Korean monster film opens with formaldehyde being poured down a drain into the Han River?

The Host drew on a real case from 2000, when a civilian at a US military mortuary in South Korea had staff tip about 470 bottles of the chemical down the drain.

In chamber studies, which part of the body proves most sensitive to formaldehyde in the air?

The eyes react first, with volunteers reporting irritation at about half a part per million, though many people can smell the chemical at lower levels still.

Gruinard Island in Scotland was sprayed with formaldehyde in 1986 to kill spores of which disease?

Anthrax bombs tested on sheep there in 1942 left the island quarantined for 48 years, and it took 280 tonnes of formaldehyde solution in seawater to make it safe.

Which toxic element was common in embalming fluid until the early 1900s, when formaldehyde took over?

Arsenic fell out of favor partly because murder suspects could claim that the traces found in a body came from the undertaker's fluid, not from them.

Clothing makers add formaldehyde-based resins to cotton fabric to give it which property?

Wrinkle resistance has been sold this way since 1929: the resin cross-links cotton's fibers so a shirt needs no ironing, though the finish can release traces of the chemical.

What is the chemical formula of formaldehyde, the simplest of all the aldehydes?

CH2O is just one carbon double-bonded to an oxygen and carrying two hydrogens, which makes it the smallest molecule in its family.

In 1969 formaldehyde became the first organic molecule of more than two atoms to be detected where?

The interstellar medium turned out to hold plenty of it: astronomers have since found formaldehyde in many regions of the galaxy and in the comas of comets.

Formaldehyde is reacted with which common fertilizer compound to make the main glue in particleboard?

Urea resins are the biggest single use of formaldehyde, and over 70% of them go to the wood-products industry to bond particleboard, MDF and plywood.

Formaldehyde reacts with which compound to make the hard resin of Formica laminate and picnic plates?

Melamine tableware was fashionable in the late 1950s and 1960s, then sales fell away once owners found that the cups and plates stained and scratched.

What is the systematic name for formaldehyde under the IUPAC rules taught in chemistry classes?

Methanal joins meth-, the prefix for a single carbon atom, to the -al ending that marks an aldehyde.

Formaldehyde preserves tissue by forming chemical cross-links between which large biological molecules?

Proteins are locked together through their amino groups, which hardens the tissue and halts decay; a weak solution works inward at about a millimeter an hour.

Which consumer-goods giant pledged to phase out a formaldehyde-releasing preservative from its cosmetics by 2015?

Johnson & Johnson bowed to consumer pressure over quaternium-15, an ingredient that kills microbes by slowly giving off small amounts of formaldehyde.

What did newspapers nickname Harvey Wiley's volunteers, who ate meals dosed with formaldehyde and borax?

The Poison Squad ate every meal at a common table from 1902 while the doses rose, and the publicity built pressure for a federal food and drug law.

Formaldehyde reacting in sunlight with nitrogen oxides helps form which gas, a key ingredient of smog?

Ozone near the ground is a pollutant, and formaldehyde also supplies the reactive radicals that keep the lower atmosphere able to break down other pollutants.

Most formaldehyde over remote oceans forms when sunlight-driven reactions oxidize which greenhouse gas?

Methane oxidation dominates far from land, while over the continents the main source is isoprene and other vapors given off by vegetation.

Which shape does the formaldehyde molecule have, with its bond angles close to 120 degrees?

Trigonal planar is the shape, flat like boron trifluoride, and the measured angle between formaldehyde's two hydrogens is 117 degrees.

Which US flooring chain did 60 Minutes accuse in 2015 of selling laminate with excess formaldehyde?

Lumber Liquidators was also in the sights of a hedge fund manager who had shorted its stock and paid $5,000 to have three pieces of its wood tested.

Which precious metal is the catalyst in the industrial route that makes formaldehyde from alcohol vapor at about 650 °C?

Silver does the job in one of the two main industrial routes; the other, the Formox process, uses iron and molybdenum oxides at far lower temperatures.

In 1861 a Russian chemist found that formaldehyde can link up to form which class of biological molecule?

Sugars such as ribose, a building block of RNA, emerge from the formose reaction, which is why it was long studied as a possible step toward life.

Formaldehyde and which pungent gas combine to make hexamine, the solid fuel in camping stove tablets?

Ammonia and formaldehyde lock into a cage-like molecule, and tablets of it burn without smoke or ash, so hikers and soldiers use them to heat food.

Formaldehyde is classed as a known human carcinogen chiefly for causing cancer in which part of the body?

The nasopharynx, the passage behind the nose, was the cancer site that led the World Health Organization's cancer agency to upgrade formaldehyde; later studies also linked exposure to myeloid leukemia.

Which Russian chemist, a pioneer of the theory of chemical structure, was the first to make formaldehyde?

Alexander Butlerov stumbled on it while trying to make a different compound, and he got its formula wrong because atomic weights had not yet been settled.

Which German chemist, first head of London's Royal College of Chemistry, showed formaldehyde is an aldehyde?

August von Hofmann made it by passing alcohol vapor and air over a hot metal wire, and that method, with modifications, is still the basis of the industrial process.

Formaldehyde mixed with concentrated sulfuric acid makes which test mixture, used to spot-check pills for drugs?

Marquis reagent starts out clear, and a drop on a scraping of the sample points to the drug by the color it turns and by how fast the change appears.

Hexamine made from formaldehyde is the starting material for which powerful military explosive?

RDX, patented in Germany in 1898, is made by treating hexamine with concentrated nitric acid, and both sides used it widely in the Second World War.

Which DuPont engineering plastic, used for gear wheels and ski bindings, is a polymer of formaldehyde?

Delrin is DuPont's name for polyoxymethylene, a stiff, low-friction plastic that the company began producing at its Parkersburg plant in 1960.

Which country banned formaldehyde-based foam insulation in homes in 1980, two years before a US ban?

Canada acted first; the US Consumer Product Safety Commission followed with a nationwide ban in 1982, only to see it reversed the next year.