Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos
-
0:00 - 0:08Hi, I'm Brady and you might remember last year the professor met a man named Max Whitby the element collector.
-
0:08 - 0:12He's a guy who makes real life periodic tables
-
0:12 - 0:15and we remember what Max told us.
-
0:15 - 0:18I'll invite you to our lab to see some being melted
-
0:18 - 0:20which is quite a nice thing to see.
-
0:20 - 0:23So I've been down to London to make a few videos with Max
-
0:23 - 0:26and well, here's the first one.
-
0:30 - 0:37We're in the world headquarters of the red, green, and blue company, RGB research, which is where we make our periodic tables.
-
0:37 - 0:46The 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.
-
0:47 - 0:53And actually what I'm about to do now is to make a sample to go into one of these periodic tables
-
0:53 - 0:54This is what we're starting with
-
0:54 - 0:59and it's, um, a beautiful one kilogram jar of silver.
-
0:59 - 1:04Sadly, if I bought this about a year ago I could have got it for maybe 200 pounds.
-
1:04 - 1:07But now silver shot up in price.
-
1:07 - 1:15This is one of the terrible problems of being in the element selling trade. And now this is almost a thousand pounds worth of silver.
-
1:15 - 1:21And what I'm going to do, I hope, is to turn it into a beautiful cylinder.
-
1:21 - 1:26This is even more expensive. Feel the weight, just feel the weight of that.
-
1:26 - 1:29(man off screen) whoa yea, what's that?
-
1:29 - 1:34Yea, well, what you're looking at is pure gold. So that's a one kilogram cylinder.
-
1:34 - 1:42Um, 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.
-
1:42 - 1:45Um, so I'm hoping to get two cylinders out of this.
-
1:45 - 1:49Now, the very first step in making a cylinder - do you know what it is?
-
1:49 - 1:52You have to do a risk assessment,
-
1:52 - 1:55cuz what we're doing is dealing with hot molten metal.
-
1:55 - 2:01And so, um, we've actually gone through quite carefully, thinking of all the things that can go wrong
-
2:01 - 2:04and, Brady, we've actually had a chat about that.
-
2:04 - 2:06That's why I'm going to be standing out here.
-
2:06 - 2:10And, um, I'm going to load the furnace. See that's glowing nicely red-hot?
-
2:10 - 2:14This is a graphite crucible. In fact, stay there and I'm going to go and turn the light out.
-
2:17 - 2:18Is that glowing still?
-
2:18 - 2:19man off screen - yea
-
2:20 - 2:27Yea 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.
-
2:28 - 2:36Um, 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.
-
2:36 - 2:47Um, 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.
-
2:47 - 2:53And that's got a lot of thermal inertia. You can see that's gone almost now back to the color of graphite.
-
2:53 - 2:56Cause all that heat that was in the graphite has gone into the silver very very quickly. Superb conductor.
-
2:56 - 3:01And now we're going to close the little lid and leave it to, leave it to cook.
-
3:02 - 3:05So (whooooo)
-
3:13 - 3:19And well, this is, uh, slightly overkill but it provides a full face mask.
-
3:19 - 3:23Gloves again, and, uh, fingers crossed!
-
3:37 - 3:39Fantastic!
-
3:40 - 3:43Now that's a sink hole appearing
-
3:52 - 3:53Hopefully that will fill up the sink hole.
-
4:04 - 4:08Um, ok. Well I'm very relieved. That seems to have come out ok.
-
4:08 - 4:12It's a bit like making jelly, only a thousand degrees Celsius more.
-
4:13 - 4:16Now what's going to happen is that's gonna cool down.
-
4:16 - 4:27And 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.
-
4:27 - 4:32And then it will go to America to a periodic table.
- Title:
- Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos
- Description:
-
Dr Max Whitby - the element collector - melts half a kilogram of silver and casts a solid cylinder of the precious metal.
Max's website is http://www.periodictable.com/
Our website and videos can be found at http://www.periodicvideos.com/
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- Captions Requested
- Duration:
- 04:37
pinkmonkguin edited English subtitles for Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos | ||
pinkmonkguin edited English subtitles for Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos | ||
pinkmonkguin edited English subtitles for Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos | ||
pinkmonkguin edited English subtitles for Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos |