Mankind has learned to process metals a long time ago, but progress has not stopped. New alloys, in demand in the industry, appear constantly, but the old ones are still used. Many metals have amazing properties …
The Swiss company Valcambi produces bars of gold, silver, palladium and platinum in the form of chocolate bars. Such “chocolates” can easily be broken into individual boxes, after which small ingots weighing 1 gram can be presented or paid by them for purchases.
Gold Olympic medals are actually made of silver. According to the recommendations of the International Olympic Committee, the main sports awards should be covered with at least 6 grams of gold, and that’s all. For example, the gold content in the medals of the 2012 Olympics, which was held in London, was just over 1%.
Some metal alloys have a shape memory effect. An example of such an alloy is nitinol, consisting of 55% nickel and 45% titanium. Due to a special internal structure called martensite, a deformed article made of this alloy, when heated to a certain temperature, regains its shape.
The edges of the coins, covered with small slits, are called the edge, and by their appearance they owe the famous scientist Isaac Newton, who worked, in particular, at the British Royal Mint.
The ribbed edges of the coins were a way to deal with scammers who cut off small pieces of precious metals from them and made money out of these grains bypassing the official authorities.
For all history people have extracted about 161 thousand tons of gold, cost of such quantity of a precious metal makes approximately 9 trln dollars. Most of all gold was discovered in South Africa. If you melt all this gold into one cube, its side will be about 20 meters.
People every 45 minutes extract from the earth’s interior as much iron as they managed to extract gold for all of their existence.
Gold jewelry is always made from an alloy of this precious metal with copper or silver, because otherwise they would be too soft.
French actor Michel Lotito went down in history as a man who absorbed things that were absolutely not intended for that. It is assured that in his speeches he ate about 9 tons of various metals and alloys.
The cost of production of all Russian coins, up to 5 rubles, exceeds their nominal value – for example, chasing 5 kopecks costs the treasury at 71 kopecks.
American scientists were forced to make satellites to measure cosmic radiation from metal extracted on the ship “Kronprinz Wilhelm”, which was sunk in 1919. They had to take such a step, because the radiation background of steel produced after 1945 hinders the proper operation of sensitive instruments.
Platinum for a long time was valued twice as low as silver and was not used because of its refractoriness. In Spanish, platinum means “silver”, which reflects well the disdainful attitude towards this precious metal, currently worth a hundred times more silver.
In the Japanese city of Suva, they invented an unusual way of extracting gold, which turned out to be 50 times better than the best gold mines in the world. Precious metal is obtained from ash, which is the product of burning dry sewage residues. For gold mining, however, not any sewage is suitable – in the city of Suva there are a lot of electronics companies, which in their work widely use gold and gold alloys.
