Deadly yet beautiful, chlorine is a gaseous element most of us are familiar with as the pungent active ingredient in bleach. And as offputting as that smell is, bleach is a cocktail of chlorine that has been tamed with several other chemicals to take the edge off. Pure chlorine gas is so nasty that a hundred years ago during the first world war canisters containing it were vented downwind to the gasping horror of the enemy. It was quickly abandoned because the Hand of Fate would just as often blow that breeze right back onto the soldiers that unleashed the monster.

What makes chlorine such a a feared and aggressive member of the periodic table is its chemistry. The chlorine atom’s outer electron shell is one electron short of a perfect and stable whole. And that slight imperfection gives it a voracious appetite endlessly looking to close the gap with another atom’s electrons.

In a sense, forcing chlorine into its elemental state is a chemical tease akin to putting together two magnets very close without allowing them to touch. That buffer is in this case the notoriously deadpan chemical that is silicon dioxide - glass - two atoms which are so right for each other that even bullies like chlorine can’t come between them.

The infamous pale yellow gas that was the trench soldier’s bane turns to a viscous, deep yellow-orange liquid when pressurized to the unearthly pressure of 1000 pounds per square inch. We’ve trapped a little of this infamous entity and squeezed the bejeezus out of it into this little ampoule that you can look at it and wonder about its nature. If you were to heat this cube in boiling water (and, uh, we're not saying you should) you would cross the supercritical liquid-vapor point and the ampule’s contents would appear to vanish. After cooling down it would suddenly condense back out into a half and half state as in the photo.

This is one of our most attractively displayed offerings and is cast within a 2x2 inch (50x50mm) cube of Lucite as a permanent display.