Only $50

Just trying to make cents of it.

 

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I forgot my glasses

 

It's OK. You're not missing much.

 

From your own source... "The most ductile metal is platinum and the most malleable metal is gold."

 

...still is tradition, but remember, burning witches and bleeding people to cure ills were also tradition.

 

Careful, sometimes you almost make sense...

 

They had to use heroic measures to draw platinum out finer than gold (coat it with silver, then draw, then etch away the silver). It looks like platinum is, at the very most, the not-undisputed champion.

 

I think burning witches was more like "pass time" than tradition.

 

The fact that modern U.S. gold coins can be $50.00/oz. or $100.00/oz. indicates that the assigned dollar value is meaningless.

 

It's not meaningless, bring it to a bank and try to deposit it. Your ledger will show a $50 deposit. That is meaningful to me.

 

Did you pay $50 for your ounce of gold? No? Then you already were on notice its not an item that trades for face value. Anyone can be stupid, no stopping you. Your comment is identical to someone worrying why a Chain Cent is only one cent. Sure, deposit into a bank today and you get credited for 1 cent, even though you might have paid $30,000 for it. Same difference.

 

I didn't know that... Platinum is also the densest (or one of the most dense) metals known. Edgar Varese wrote a composition called Density 21.5 for flute for an acquaintance who had a flute made of solid platinum!!! If silver bells sound nice, imagine what platinum bells would sound like.

 

Platinum is an interesting metal, I worked with a machine that used a platinum sample pan that had to be burned off to clean it, I would handle the sample pan with a platinum wire embedded in a glass handle, and you could hold it in the hottest part of a Bunsen burner flame until it glowed white hot!!!

 

That would depend a lot on how the metal had been treated. If it was annealed "dead soft", the bell would just go "thunk", and then you'd have a bell with a big dent in it.

 

Yep. I've got a few square inches of platinum foil that I expect to use someday for electrodes, but making it into a little tray is also tempting. (It's that "dead soft" stuff I mentioned above, though, so it probably wouldn't hold up very well.)

But apparently if you melt lye or another strong alkali in it, it'll get chewed up very quickly. I was kind of disappointed to learn that -- I always wanted to try making some potassium, and it's discouraging to think that I could trash a very expensive electrode in the process. (I tried it at a very small scale with a steel wire and plate, and got ferrate, which I also never knew existed. I eventually got somewhere with a graphite electrode, reproducing Davy's original discovery. Got some tiny metallic-looking lumps that tarnished instantly, and flashed purple when I tossed them into water.)

Oh, um, sorry for the threadjack...

 

WOW...fun

 

Lol

 

Well, I was having fun. And the home insurance company didn't have to get involved at all, so everyone's a winner.