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Melting Silver - Periodic Table of Videos

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    Hi, I'm Brady and you might remember last year the professor met a man named Max Whitby the element collector.
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    He's a guy who makes real life periodic tables
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    and we remember what Max told us.
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    I'll invite you to our lab to see some being melted
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    which is quite a nice thing to see.
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    So I've been down to London to make a few videos with Max
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    and well, here's the first one.
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    We're in the world headquarters of the red, green, and blue company, RGB research, which is where we make our periodic tables.
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    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.
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    And actually what I'm about to do now is to make a sample to go into one of these periodic tables
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    This is what we're starting with
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    and it's, um, a beautiful one kilogram jar of silver.
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    Sadly, if I bought this about a year ago I could have got it for maybe 200 pounds.
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    But now silver shot up in price.
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    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.
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    And what I'm going to do, I hope, is to turn it into a beautiful cylinder.
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    This is even more expensive. Feel the weight, just feel the weight of that.
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    (man off screen) whoa yea, what's that?
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    Yea, well, what you're looking at is pure gold. So that's a one kilogram cylinder.
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    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.
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    Um, so I'm hoping to get two cylinders out of this.
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    Now, the very first step in making a cylinder - do you know what it is?
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    You have to do a risk assessment,
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    cuz what we're doing is dealing with hot molten metal.
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    And so, um, we've actually gone through quite carefully, thinking of all the things that can go wrong
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    and, Brady, we've actually had a chat about that.
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    That's why I'm going to be standing out here.
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    And, um, I'm going to load the furnace. See that's glowing nicely red-hot?
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    This is a graphite crucible. In fact, stay there and I'm going to go and turn the light out.
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    Is that glowing still?
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    man off screen - yea
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    And that's got a lot of thermal inertia. You can see that's gone almost now back to the color of graphite.
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    Cause all that heat that was in the graphite has gone into the silver very very quickly. Superb conductor.
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    And now we're going to close the little lid and leave it to, leave it to cook.
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    So (whooooo)
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    And well, this is, uh, slightly overkill but it provides a full face mask.
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    Gloves again, and, uh, fingers crossed!
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    Fantastic!
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    Now that's a sink hole appearing
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    Hopefully that will fill up the sink hole.
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    Um, ok. Well I'm very relieved. That seems to have come out ok.
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    It's a bit like making jelly, only a thousand degrees Celsius more.
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    Now what's going to happen is that's gonna cool down.
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    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.
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    And 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/
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Video Language:
English
Team:
Captions Requested
Duration:
04:37

English subtitles

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