Did you know that rhodium is the rarest of all precious metals? It was discovered in 1803 in London by English chemist William Hyde Wollaston. He obtained the metal from an original sample of platinum ore in South America. The product was a dark red powder that Wollaston treated with hydrogen gas in order to get what we now call rhodium. The element name is derived from the Greek word Rhodon, which means rose-colored (Thomas Jefferson NAF). First, rhodium is one of the platinum group metals along with the other elements ruthenium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum. It is considered a member of the transition metals family and is generally classified as a metal. On the periodic table it is located in group nine, period five (Thomas Jefferson NAF). Now, this rare element has many interesting attributes that are unlike other elements. Rhodium is a silver and white metallic color with …show more content…
Its hardness is as follows: Mohs- 6.0, Vickers (MPa) 1100-8000, and Brinell (MPa) 980-1350. Lastly, the element has a density of 12.4 grams per cubic centimeter (Rhodium Element Facts). Additionally, the nuclear and chemical properties of rhodium are quite unique. The only significant natural isotope is 103Rh. It has a mass number of 103, a natural abundance of 100 percent, and is stable. This element has no important man-made isotopes. Furthermore, rhodium is a relatively inactive metal. It has no reaction with water and no found reactions with bases or acids. In regards to its reactivity with air, rhodium is greatly immune to atmospheric attack. Heating it with oxygen at 600 degrees celsius, it produces rhodium oxide. As for the halogens, rhodium only reacts directly with fluorine gas to form a highly corrosive rhodium fluoride. Rhodium’s inactivity makes it a harmless element ("Rhodium: The
In chapter 8 titled "Radium (Ra)" of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, the most interesting story developed within this chapter was the death of dial workers at Orange, New Jersey after been exposed to radium every day. It was interesting due to the fact that radium was used everywhere in the community and was never thought it could harm anyone. Radium was a super element that was used everywhere, but its continuous use unmasked its fatal habits. As it was stated in the text, "Radiant health, the ads proclaimed-beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight." (Blum 179). People were accepting radium as a natural gold element but they haven't realized constant contact
Strontium was discovered by Adair Crawford, an Irish chemist, in 1790 while studying the mineral witherite (BaCO3). When he mixed witherite with hydrochloric acid (HCl), he did not get the results he expected. He assumed that his sample of witherite was contaminated with an unknown mineral, a mineral he named strontianite (SrCO3). Strontium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy, an English chemist, in 1808 through the electrolysis of a mixture of strontium chloride (SrCl2) and mercuric oxide (HgO). Strontium reacts vigorously with water and quickly tarnishes in air, so it must be stored out of contact with air and water. Due to its extreme reactivity to air, this element always naturally occurs combined with other elements and compounds. Strontium is very
This element when becoming an isotope can become radioactive due to its high activity as a metal. In its natural state it is a soft metal and it has a shiny “ wax “ like silver/white color to it, it is so soft that a knife could cut through it without a problem.
The Beryllium element, an alkaline earth metal which belongs to group II of the periodic table, was first discovered in 1798 by L.M. Vauquelin. Vauquelin,a French chemist, was doing work with aluminum and noticed a white powder that was nothing like that of aluminum or any of its derivatives. Vauquelin named this mystery powder, gluinium because of its sweet taste was like that of glucose. In 1828, Wohler, a German metallurgist reduced it to its metallic form and renamed it beryllium.(figure 2)
The element neon was discovered by Morris Travers and Sir William Ramsey. The chemists first isolated neon in 1898 by evaporating argon using low pressure. Neon was the third noble gas discovered by Ramsay and Travers, after argon and krypton. Neon has an atomic number of 10. The first neon lamp was produced by Georges Claude. Neon produces a reddish-orange color. Argon produces a faint purple. Neon most commonly used in advertising signs. Neon creates light through the application of electricity to neon in a glass tube.
Scandium is a member of the transition elements group which is a silver-white element that has been categorized as a rare earth element. Scandium was discovered by Nilson in 1879. Its existence was originally predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev ten years before being discovered by Nilson, but Dmitri was unable to isolate the element
Astatine (85At) and Francium (87Fr) are both rare elements found in nature, and are highly radioactive. Astatine was produced by Dale R. Carson, K.R. MacKenzie and Emilio Segrè, by accelerating Bismuth ions in a device called “Cyclotron”, but also found in the waste uranium. Francium was discovered by Marguerite Catherine Perey, a French chemist in 1939, and it is found in its purest form in nature, but is really scarce in the Earth’s crust.
German chemist, in 1900 while studying radium’s decay chain” (Facts About Radon). It was originally
The Radium Luminous Material Corporation was founded in 1914 (renamed in 1921 to the United States Radium Corporation) by Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis becoming the first U.S. company to produce radioluminescent paint. The paint used by this particular company was the trademarked "Undark", invented by William J. Hammer through mixing radium, zinc sulfide and glue with the help from Marie and Pierre Currie and Henri Becquerel. The corporation hired hundreds of women having no trouble finding employees, being one of the few companies at the time to hire women. Business was surging with the defense contract obtained by filling the demand during World War I by making equipment for soldiers luminescent, enabling reading at night. The company even marketed other i...
The element Radon was discovered in 1899. Friedrich Ernst Dorn discovered Radon in Halle, Germany when he was experimenting with Radium. In 1908, Robert Gray and William Ramsey isolated the gas. They named the element nitron. Since 1923 the element has been called Radon. It’s name is derived from the element Radium. Radon was first detected as an emission from Radium. Radon’s element symbol is Rn. Radon’s atomic mass is 86 and it’s in the noble gas family. It contains 86 protons, 136 neutrons and 86 electrons. Radon’s electron configuration is 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d10 4p6 5s2 4d10 5p6 6s2 5d10 4f14 6p6. Radon is a gas at room temperature and its density is .00973 g/cm3. Radon is the most densest gases at room temperature. Radon begins
Germanium is a type of hard luster. It is structure is a diamond like crystalline in a grayish-white metallic color. It is a part of the carbon group. Germanium was discovered in 1886 by Clemens Winkler. Mr. Winkler was a German chemist. He was born in December 26, 1838 in Freiburg, Germany. Clemen passed away on October 8th, 1904.
Every kind of gemstone’s chemical formula is unique and its very own, and is used as a way to identify what kind of stone it is. More specifically, a chemical formula is a the way you identify a stone or any substance by the arrangement and quantity of it’s atoms and elements. The ruby’s chemical formula happens to be Al2O3, meaning it contains aluminum 2 atoms of aluminum, and 3 atoms of oxygen. These two elements are found in the quantities stated in Ruby’s, therefore introducing us to the chemical formula shown.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
A metal is deemed “precious” because of its rare quality and high economic value. Precious metals are naturally occurring metallic elements characterized by their impressive resistance to both corrosion and oxidation. Precious metals known today include the coinage metals; gold and silver, and the platinum group metals; platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, ruthenium, and osmium. In general, precious metals are less reactive than most elements. They are also ductile and have a high luster.