0:00:00.000,0:00:07.813
Hi, I'm Brady and you might remember last year the professor met a man named Max Whitby the element collector.

0:00:07.813,0:00:12.085
He's a guy who makes real life periodic tables

0:00:12.085,0:00:15.337
and we remember what Max told us.

0:00:15.337,0:00:17.707
I'll invite you to our lab to see some being melted

0:00:17.707,0:00:20.169
which is quite a nice thing to see.

0:00:20.169,0:00:22.982
So I've been down to London to make a few videos with Max

0:00:22.982,0:00:25.832
and well, here's the first one.

0:00:29.532,0:00:37.167
We're in the world headquarters of the red, green, and blue company, RGB research, which is where we make our periodic tables.

0:00:37.167,0:00:46.384
The displays that we make here are really mainly for museums and for schools and occasionally for very wealthy individuals who fancy a periodic table in their study.

0:00:46.504,0:00:52.724
And actually what I'm about to do now is to make a sample to go into one of these periodic tables

0:00:53.004,0:00:54.421
This is what we're starting with

0:00:54.421,0:00:59.215
and it's, um, a beautiful one kilogram jar of silver.

0:00:59.443,0:01:03.927
Sadly, if I bought this about a year ago I could have got it for maybe 200 pounds.

0:01:03.927,0:01:06.868
But now silver shot up in price.

0:01:06.868,0:01:15.213
This is one of the terrible problems of being in the element selling trade. And now this is almost a thousand pounds worth of silver.

0:01:15.213,0:01:21.417
And what I'm going to do, I hope, is to turn it into a beautiful cylinder.

0:01:21.417,0:01:26.334
This is even more expensive. Feel the weight, just feel the weight of that.

0:01:26.338,0:01:28.686
(man off screen) whoa yea, what's that?

0:01:28.686,0:01:33.508
Yea, well, what you're looking at is pure gold. So that's a one kilogram cylinder.

0:01:33.508,0:01:41.637
Um, and, um, if we make an equivalent size cylinder in silver it's going to be about half the weight. It's going to be about half a kilogram.

0:01:42.081,0:01:44.522
Um, so I'm hoping to get two cylinders out of this.

0:01:44.812,0:01:49.166
Now, the very first step in making a cylinder - do you know what it is?

0:01:49.336,0:01:51.771
You have to do a risk assessment,

0:01:51.771,0:01:55.316
cuz what we're doing is dealing with hot molten metal.

0:01:55.316,0:02:00.681
And so, um, we've actually gone through quite carefully, thinking of all the things that can go wrong

0:02:00.681,0:02:03.656
and, Brady, we've actually had a chat about that.

0:02:03.706,0:02:06.042
That's why I'm going to be standing out here.

0:02:06.042,0:02:09.960
And, um, I'm going to load the furnace. See that's glowing nicely red-hot?

0:02:09.990,0:02:13.571
This is a graphite crucible. In fact, stay there and I'm going to go and turn the light out.

0:02:17.015,0:02:18.256
Is that glowing still?

0:02:18.366,0:02:19.118
man off screen - yea

0:02:19.567,0:02:26.672
Yea so that is hot. I've set that to one thousand and fifty degrees Centigrade, so that's quite a bit above the melting point of silver.

0:02:27.513,0:02:36.217
Um, so I'm going to start by filling that up. And now, of course, doing this is going to reduce the temperature, uh, very considerably.

0:02:36.217,0:02:47.160
Um, so, once we've filled it up with the pieces of silver, well then you can actually see it cooling. And silver is a superb conductor of heat.

0:02:47.257,0:02:52.732
And that's got a lot of thermal inertia. You can see that's gone almost now back to the color of graphite.

0:02:52.732,0:02:56.416
Cause all that heat that was in the graphite has gone into the silver very very quickly. Superb conductor.

0:02:56.416,0:03:01.361
And now we're going to close the little lid and leave it to, leave it to cook.

0:03:01.977,0:03:04.636
So (whooooo)

0:03:12.939,0:03:18.788
And well, this is, uh, slightly overkill but it provides a full face mask.

0:03:18.798,0:03:23.107
Gloves again, and, uh, fingers crossed!

0:03:37.007,0:03:38.796
Fantastic!

0:03:40.415,0:03:43.242
Now that's a sink hole appearing

0:03:51.822,0:03:53.251
Hopefully that will fill up the sink hole.

0:04:04.401,0:04:07.991
Um, ok. Well I'm very relieved. That seems to have come out ok.

0:04:07.991,0:04:11.554
It's a bit like making jelly, only a thousand degrees Celsius more.

0:04:12.574,0:04:15.514
Now what's going to happen is that's gonna cool down.

0:04:15.514,0:04:27.385
And then we'll take it to our marvelous engineer, Davey Brotnell, and he will machine it down to a beautiful cylinder 55 mm long and 35 mm in diameter.

0:04:27.385,0:04:31.655
And then it will go to America to a periodic table.