Hi, I'm Brady and you might remember last year the professor met a man named Max Whitby the element collector.
He's a guy who makes real life periodic tables
and we remember what Max told us.
I'll invite you to our lab to see some being melted
which is quite a nice thing to see.
So I've been down to London to make a few videos with Max
and well, here's the first one.
We're in the world headquarters of the red, green, and blue company, RGB research, which is where we make our periodic tables.
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.
And actually what I'm about to do now is to make a sample to go into one of these periodic tables
This is what we're starting with
and it's, um, a beautiful one kilogram jar of silver.
Sadly, if I bought this about a year ago I could have got it for maybe 200 pounds.
But now silver shot up in price.
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.
And what I'm going to do, I hope, is to turn it into a beautiful cylinder.
This is even more expensive. Feel the weight, just feel the weight of that.
(man off screen) whoa yea, what's that?
Yea, well, what you're looking at is pure gold. So that's a one kilogram cylinder.
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.
Um, so I'm hoping to get two cylinders out of this.
Now, the very first step in making a cylinder - do you know what it is?
You have to do a risk assessment,
cuz what we're doing is dealing with hot molten metal.
And so, um, we've actually gone through quite carefully, thinking of all the things that can go wrong
and, Brady, we've actually had a chat about that.
That's why I'm going to be standing out here.
And, um, I'm going to load the furnace. See that's glowing nicely red-hot?
This is a graphite crucible. In fact, stay there and I'm going to go and turn the light out.
Is that glowing still?
man off screen - yea
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.
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.
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.
And that's got a lot of thermal inertia. You can see that's gone almost now back to the color of graphite.
Cause all that heat that was in the graphite has gone into the silver very very quickly. Superb conductor.
And now we're going to close the little lid and leave it to, leave it to cook.
So (whooooo)
And well, this is, uh, slightly overkill but it provides a full face mask.
Gloves again, and, uh, fingers crossed!
Fantastic!
Now that's a sink hole appearing
Hopefully that will fill up the sink hole.
Um, ok. Well I'm very relieved. That seems to have come out ok.
It's a bit like making jelly, only a thousand degrees Celsius more.
Now what's going to happen is that's gonna cool down.
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.
And then it will go to America to a periodic table.