Well we're talking about 40+ years ago and it poisoned the whole family (though no one knew it at the time). The best I can come up with is that it was accidentally bought home by my father. He was an engineer working on aircraft hydraulics. The oil used in all planes is called Skydrol and is not exactly like any oil that you would put in your car engine. It has to function in extremes of temperature and pressure without breaking down. Dad said the oil sometimes went everywhere when something blew apart. He used to come home and I remember an oily metallic odor from his clothes. Well, the thing that makes me think it was this oil that contained Hg is that Dad developed a rash on his scalp and the back of his neck, very bad. He had to take the company he worked for to an industrial tribuneral to get compensation. They said it was contact dermatitis. It's a trade secret what is in the oil, but Dad was able to get some and send it off to a lab. Funny thing is that the lab wouldn't tell Dad what was in it, only presented the results to the court, sort of secret everyone knows but you, and these people were supposedly working on his side. The lab was basically afraid to get sued by the company that makes it. A few years ago I was trying to look up Skydrol on the internet and I came across a site, I think from the US Navy describing how to handle Skydrol on aircraft carriers. Basically they said that you had to wear a space suite while adding it to fighter aircraft. Dad said that he’d had to take allot of time off work, but that he’d trusted that he would have at least the backing of the Union. They were evidentially complicit in Dad not getting anywhere with the case. He said he should have taken pictures of conditions before he started the case too. When he got back to work they’d cleaned everything up and even painted the floors. The result was one of those small nothing payments from the company and a none admittance of wrong doing. I’m pretty sure that was it, but I only found out when I was in my 40’s what was going on with my and my families health. Well, the company went out of business and they knocked the factory down, then, they built houses on the site. Bet there’s massive contamination of Hg in the soil.