WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.813 Hi, I'm Brady and you might remember last year the professor met a man named Max Whitby the element collector. 00:00:07.813 --> 00:00:12.085 He's a guy who makes real life periodic tables 00:00:12.085 --> 00:00:15.337 and we remember what Max told us. 00:00:15.337 --> 00:00:17.707 I'll invite you to our lab to see some being melted 00:00:17.707 --> 00:00:20.169 which is quite a nice thing to see. 00:00:20.169 --> 00:00:22.982 So I've been down to London to make a few videos with Max 00:00:22.982 --> 00:00:25.832 and well, here's the first one. 00:00:29.532 --> 00:00:37.167 We're in the world headquarters of the red, green, and blue company, RGB research, which is where we make our periodic tables. 00:00:37.167 --> 00:00:46.384 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. 00:00:46.504 --> 00:00:52.724 And actually what I'm about to do now is to make a sample to go into one of these periodic tables 00:00:53.004 --> 00:00:54.421 This is what we're starting with 00:00:54.421 --> 00:00:59.215 and it's, um, a beautiful one kilogram jar of silver. 00:00:59.443 --> 00:01:03.927 Sadly, if I bought this about a year ago I could have got it for maybe 200 pounds. 00:01:03.927 --> 00:01:06.868 But now silver shot up in price. 00:01:06.868 --> 00:01:15.213 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. 00:01:15.213 --> 00:01:21.417 And what I'm going to do, I hope, is to turn it into a beautiful cylinder. 00:01:21.417 --> 00:01:26.334 This is even more expensive. Feel the weight, just feel the weight of that. 00:01:26.338 --> 00:01:28.686 (man off screen) whoa yea, what's that? 00:01:28.686 --> 00:01:33.508 Yea, well, what you're looking at is pure gold. So that's a one kilogram cylinder. 00:01:33.508 --> 00:01:41.637 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. 00:01:42.081 --> 00:01:44.522 Um, so I'm hoping to get two cylinders out of this. 00:01:44.812 --> 00:01:49.166 Now, the very first step in making a cylinder - do you know what it is? 00:01:49.336 --> 00:01:51.771 You have to do a risk assessment, 00:01:51.771 --> 00:01:55.316 cuz what we're doing is dealing with hot molten metal. 00:01:55.316 --> 00:02:00.681 And so, um, we've actually gone through quite carefully, thinking of all the things that can go wrong 00:02:00.681 --> 00:02:03.656 and, Brady, we've actually had a chat about that. 00:02:03.706 --> 00:02:06.042 That's why I'm going to be standing out here. 00:02:06.042 --> 00:02:09.960 And, um, I'm going to load the furnace. See that's glowing nicely red-hot? 00:02:09.990 --> 00:02:13.571 This is a graphite crucible. In fact, stay there and I'm going to go and turn the light out. 00:02:17.015 --> 00:02:18.256 Is that glowing still? 00:02:18.366 --> 00:02:19.118 man off screen - yea 00:02:19.567 --> 00:02:26.672 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. 00:02:27.513 --> 00:02:36.217 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. 00:02:36.217 --> 00:02:47.160 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. 00:02:47.257 --> 00:02:52.732 And that's got a lot of thermal inertia. You can see that's gone almost now back to the color of graphite. 00:02:52.732 --> 00:02:56.416 Cause all that heat that was in the graphite has gone into the silver very very quickly. Superb conductor. 00:02:56.416 --> 00:03:01.361 And now we're going to close the little lid and leave it to, leave it to cook. 00:03:01.977 --> 00:03:04.636 So (whooooo) 00:03:12.939 --> 00:03:18.788 And well, this is, uh, slightly overkill but it provides a full face mask. 00:03:18.798 --> 00:03:23.107 Gloves again, and, uh, fingers crossed! 00:03:37.007 --> 00:03:38.796 Fantastic! 00:03:40.415 --> 00:03:43.242 Now that's a sink hole appearing 00:03:51.822 --> 00:03:53.251 Hopefully that will fill up the sink hole. 00:04:04.401 --> 00:04:07.991 Um, ok. Well I'm very relieved. That seems to have come out ok. 00:04:07.991 --> 00:04:11.554 It's a bit like making jelly, only a thousand degrees Celsius more. 00:04:12.574 --> 00:04:15.514 Now what's going to happen is that's gonna cool down. 00:04:15.514 --> 00:04:27.385 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. 00:04:27.385 --> 00:04:31.655 And then it will go to America to a periodic table.