But gold’s other great claim–its resistance to change–left room for sceptics to wonder whether it did anybody any good, or in fact did anything at all. Thomas Browne, the Norwich physician and author, tackles this question in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an erudite and entertaining catalogue of seventeenth-century urban myths scientifically debunked. ‘That gold inwardly taken,’ wrote Browne, ‘is a cordial of great efficacy, in sundry medical uses, although a practice much used, is also much questioned, and by no man determined beyond dispute.’ Observing its ‘invincible’ passage through fire, he finds it easy to believe gold could also pass through the body without alteration or effect–a thought that prompts him to take a moment to discredit the tales of Midas and the golden goose. But then he changes tack to admit that, though it may not be materially changed, gold might yet exert some effect, perhaps similar to the magnetic force of the lodestone or the electrical charge of amber. In the end he equivocates: ‘it may be unjust to deny the possible efficacy of gold’. However, Etienne-François Geoffroy, a French physician and chemist of the following century, had no such doubts. ‘Gold,’ he wrote drily, ‘of all the Metals is the most useless in Physick, except when considered as an Antidote to Poverty.’
I got my chance to try ‘gold inwardly taken’ one Christmas when I bought some ‘gold, frankincense and myrrh’ chocolate. The frankincense and myrrh could not compete for flavour with the cocoa solids, but the gold was at least visible as little flakes on each square. I observed no ill effects as I ate. Perhaps it was doing me a power of good, but I felt no elixir boost either. I turned over the wrapper and idly read the list of ingredients. Gold, I was surprised to learn, merits its own E number, E175. It seems that the food regulators, like Browne, want to keep their options open.
Going Platinum
Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American socialite who in 1937 married the former King Edward VIII to become the Duchess of Windsor, was not renowned for her attention to correct social procedure. But on the matter of jewellery she was adamant: ‘Any fool would know that with tweeds and other daytime clothes one wears gold; with evening clothes one wears platinum.’
Platinum rose during the first part of the twentieth century to be seen as the preferred jewellery metal of those who found silver simply too common. It is one of the heaviest lustrous metals, fully twice as dense as silver, but not as purely white. It rarely dazzles, but shines with what John Steinbeck called a ‘pearly lucence’. Platinum’s appeal is particularly relative: it is heavier than silver, trendier than gold. It is fashion’s answer to these timeless elements, full of its own importance, and self-ordained in its rank.
At a time of widespread economic suffering, platinum fulfilled the need of an increasingly disconnected high society for a substance more precious, and possibly less obvious, than gold. It is odd in a way, then, that the material chosen for this task is if anything a little more abundant than gold–although both metals are equally scarce in the earth’s crust, there is ten times more platinum than gold in the soil. No matter. In due course, platinum–if not the bullion itself, then at least the idea of it as the most valuable of all metals–would percolate down to be understood even among the lower social strata and secure its symbolic place above gold in the league table of luxury. Platinum immediately signified a new kind of rich, a badge of wealth not amassed over ages like a hoard of gold, but acquired suddenly, boldly, speculatively–and liable to be lost the same way. In the second book of his America trilogy, The Big Money of 1936, John Dos Passos depicts an array of characters as they struggle to reconcile their ideals with the need to get on in the febrile years leading up to the Depression. The ‘ghosts of platinum girls’ haunt the novel like sirens warning against the temptation of the new riches.
Frank Capra’s film of 1931, Platinum Blonde, made capital out of the emerging symbolism of the metal, and donated its title to the language in return. The platinum blonde in question is another rich socialite who seduces, marries and then controls a reporter who is investigating a scandal in her family. Jean Harlow took the lead. Originally, the film was to have been called Gallagher, the name of the girl who loses and then regains the reporter’s affections. But the producer, Howard Hughes, had Harlow under personal contract and insisted on the change of title in order to promote his starlet. It worked, launching both Harlow and a craze for the etiolated hair colour. Through his studios, Hughes even offered a prize to the main-street hair-dresser who could best replicate the shade. But perhaps his money was safe: only those who had been on set would have been in any position to know if they had got it right since the film was made in black-and-white.
Platinum was recognized as an element by European chemists in the eighteenth century, hailed then as ‘the eighth metal’, an exciting addition to the seven known since antiquity: gold and silver, copper, tin, lead, mercury and iron. But it was effectively discovered by the indigenous peoples of South America 2,000 years ago. The native form of the element known as platina–the diminutive of the Spanish for silver, plata–occurs as granules or nuggets of largely pure metal with inclusions of other precious metals or iron. It is typically revealed in rivers or during panning for gold when heavy pale grains are seen amid the potentially precious residue after lighter minerals have been washed away. Platinum melts at a temperature far higher than gold, bronze and even iron, and higher than can be reached by charcoal fires. It should have been impossible for indigenous smiths to convert these granules into a form which could then be worked into jewellery and other items. Yet archaeological finds in Ecuador have revealed just such pre-Columbian artefacts, forcing European metallurgists to acknowledge the mastery of the native smiths, who had perfected a method of sintering, whereby a granular material coalesces into a mass without melting, by adding gold dust to trigger the fusion of the metal.
Hell-bent for gold, the Spanish conquistadores had paid no heed at first to the dull grey platina. Some gold mines were even abandoned because the presence of platina rendered them uneconomic. That attitude changed, however, when the work of a young French chemist, Pierre-François Chabaneau, sequestered at the Royal Seminary at Vergara in the Basque country, came to the attention of King Charles III of Spain in 1786. The seminary was in fact something of a mineralogical hothouse and must have concealed quite a hoard of exotic specimens by the time that Chabaneau arrived: the brothers Fausto and Juan José Elhuyar, who had been engaged to teach there, had already isolated the element tungsten from wolframite, an exceptionally dense ore which they had obtained during their studies in Germany. They put Chabaneau to work extracting platinum metal from the raw platina they had accumulated from South America.
In due course, the Elhuyars were promoted to direct the new mines in the Spanish colonies, while Chabaneau was brought to Madrid and given a luxurious private laboratory in which to carry on his researches into platinum. The king’s minister, the marquis of Aranda, saw to it that the state’s entire stock of the metal–seen as less valuable even than silver–was turned over to the Frenchman. One reason for the low estimation of platinum at this time was that the Spanish were unable to emulate the New World craftsmen and convert the metal into a malleable form that could be worked into objects. Chabaneau soon thought he had managed to isolate the pure metal, removing the gold, iron and other impurities that made it unworkable. But he was puzzled to find that its properties refused to settle down to a standard pattern (this was because it still contained other, as yet unknown, elements more closely related to platinum such as iridium and osmium). Chabaneau abandoned the work in frustration, but his patron persuaded him to persist. ‘Three months later, the Marqués found on a table in his home a ten-centimeter cube of metal. Attempting to pick it up, he said to Chabaneau, “You are joking. You have fastened it down.” The little ingot weighed 23 kilograms; it was malleable platinum!’
At first, samples of platinum were passed around among the aristocracy of Europe, with nobody very sure what to do with it. The difficulty of handling the metal m
eant that it remained essentially useless. (The Spanish crown had learnt the hard lesson that even well-funded scientific research doesn’t always yield a quick return on its investment.) The eighteenth-century memoirist Giacomo Casanova records a visit to a lady alchemist, the marquise d’Urfé, who planned to convert hers into gold. Gradually, however, Chabaneau’s method caused the new metal to begin creeping up in value. A platinum chalice presented to the Pope by the king of Spain was the first precious object made from his malleable form of the metal. Chabaneau saw that he was in a powerful position and went into business selling platinum ingots, crucibles and other specialist utensils. At the same time, the Spanish government increased shipments of platina from its South American colony of New Granada. In August 1789, a single vessel landed 3,000 pounds of platina. Although the metal was strictly placed under a crown monopoly, it was still cheap enough to appeal to smugglers and counterfeiters who could plate it and pass it off as solid gold because of its comparable density. Spain’s brief ‘age of platinum’ came to an abrupt end with Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1808 and the rise of the revolutionary independence movement under Simón Bolívar in New Granada. Platinum’s odd combination of great density and resistance to corrosion made it the perfect choice for casting the standard kilogramme and metre of the French republic, but grander ideas of using it for decorative objects requiring the services of talented craftsmen were soon forgotten.
In the nineteenth century, the price of platinum declined again as new sources were found in Russia and Canada and more economic means were developed for refining it. Russian aristocrats did not find the metal bright enough for their tastes and, in the absence of other demand, Russia in 1828 began minting three-rouble platinum coins in order to make use of its resource. But even this had to stop when the worldwide price of the metal tumbled still further.
Having reached this low point so soon after it was introduced to Europe, how did platinum then rise to overtake gold in value? The law of the markets suggests that if the answer is not to be found in shortage of supply then it must lie with excess of demand. The expansion of technical applications–in electrical equipment and in many industrial chemical processes where the metal serves as a catalyst–is undoubtedly a factor. But more interesting is the perceived increase in platinum’s value that arose solely for reasons of social status rather than market economics.
In 1898, Louis Cartier succeeded to his father’s Parisian jewellery business and made the family name by popularizing the wrist-worn timepiece in place of the pocket watch. Cartier had experimented with platinum for some years and now made the decision to use it wherever he could in place of silver and even gold. The ‘white jewels’ such as diamonds that were favoured for evening wear ideally required colourless settings. Gold clashed and was seen as vulgar, and silver had a propensity to tarnish. Furthermore, both metals were inconveniently soft. Hard platinum ensured that Cartier’s settings, especially of the largest stones, could be made almost invisible and yet still prove highly durable. The slightly grey lustre of the metal compared with gold or silver ensured that attention would be focused on the gemstones alone. Cartier’s innovation unleashed a fashion for platinum in the grandest jewellery that lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War when the metal was promptly rationed because of its usefulness as a catalyst in important chemical processes such as the manufacture of explosives. By then, though, platinum had secured a new cachet, capped by the setting of the famous Koh-i-noor diamond in a crown made entirely of platinum for Queen Elizabeth, the wife of George VI, for the coronation in 1937. (Wallis Simpson must have sickened to know her sister-in-law had this bauble!)
As Cartier was changing the rules of high-society jewellery, the revival of the Olympic Games meanwhile implanted the idea of indicating degrees of excellence according to a scale of different metals. The Olympics of ancient Greece had merely awarded laurels to the best athletes. At the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896, the winner of each event was awarded a silver medal, with bronze going to the runner-up. Only at the St Louis Games in 1904 did the International Olympic Committee decide there should be gold, silver and bronze medals for the first three places, retrospectively amending the medal table for the two preceding Games in line with the new system.
So it has remained ever since. The hierarchy of gold, silver and bronze has become the conventional way to rank performance in sport and the arts. Record companies introduced the gold disc as a way of congratulating their artists–and themselves–when they sold a million copies of a song. Perry Como was the first international artist to strike gold. When record sales grew and gold discs became too common, the music industry, rather than do the obvious thing and simply raise the sales threshold for gold, saw the marketing advantage of introducing instead the higher tier of a platinum disc in 1976. Under today’s rules, an album goes gold when it sells 500,000 units, and platinum at a million. American Express soon followed, trumping its ‘gold’ charge card with ‘platinum’ in 1984.
None of this was any longer about the appearance or properties of platinum metal. Nor was it really about its rarity, which is, as we have seen, no greater than that of gold. For most of us–no Wallis Simpsons–platinum’s status is the product of a more complicated snobbery. If we perceive it as more desirable than gold, it is entirely by reverse association–by knowing that a record goes platinum after it has gone gold or that a platinum credit card is harder to get hold of than a gold one. In an era when instant coffee, cheap chocolates and lavatory paper are branded ‘gold’, something had to be found with greater prestige. For now at least, that something is ‘platinum’.
Noble Metals, Ignobly Announced
In April 1803, a small quantity of shiny metal went on sale in a Soho curiosity shop. A leaflet distributed anonymously to London scientists trumpeted it as ‘palladium; or, new silver’, and promised that it was ‘a new noble metal’. It went on to describe the material’s properties in some detail: the ‘greatest heat of a blacksmith’s fire would hardly melt it’, for example, and yet ‘if you touch it while hot with a small bit of Sulphur it runs as easily as Zinc’.
The announcement caused an instant furore. Who had placed it? And could it even be true? If it was true, then why had the announcement not been made in the civil spirit of open cooperation that had become the norm in science by this time?
Suspecting a fraud, a talented Irish analytical chemist, Richard Chevenix, visited the shop and bought up all of the substance that had not been sold (three-quarters of an ounce) and immersed himself in a series of analyses to expose the deception. He must have been surprised to find that what he had bought did in fact possess the novel properties claimed for it. Chevenix nevertheless communicated to the Royal Society his opinion that it was not a new metal ‘as shamefully announced’, and was more likely just an amalgam of platinum and mercury. Other scientists could not confirm Chevenix’s result, but scarcely wanted to contemplate the only alternative interpretation–that a major scientific announcement might be made in the guise of an unsigned commercial hand-bill.
In the end, it was almost that bad. For it soon turned out that the metal really was new to science. Only the fact that the author of the flyer, and of the discovery itself, was one of their own mitigated the disaster: he was the already noteworthy chemist William Hyde Wollaston, who was known to be deeply engaged in a project involving platinum. But why had he conducted himself in such a peculiar fashion in this case?
For fifty years, European governments had eyed the platinum brought from South America with a mixture of lust and despair, aware that it had the potential to be transformed into a lustrous precious metal, dreaming perhaps that it would boost their economies as New World gold and silver had done a couple of centuries before, but lacking the means to effect this transformation. In Spain, Chabaneau had kept his method a close secret and had only found a market for occasional decorative objects. Wollaston and another chemist, Smithson Tennant, separately took up the problem, and,
when they became of aware of one another’s interest, decided to go into partnership to see if they could produce Pierre-François Chabaneau’s malleable platinum on a larger scale and find new applications for it in science and industry.
Wollaston and Tennant were both the sons of clergymen, and both had studied medicine at Cambridge but then turned to natural philosophy. There, however, the similarities ended. Tennant lost both his parents in childhood and was largely self-taught. Wollaston grew up in a family with fourteen siblings and enjoyed a comfortable path to academic success. Tennant, five years older, was a humorous and kindly man, untidy in his work, often indecisive about his projects, yet always properly observant of the rules of experimental method and reporting when he did finally settle on a course of action. Wollaston was precise and self-controlled almost to the point of obsession–it was said he could write on glass with a diamond a script so small that it could only be read using a microscope. He was also secretive and eccentric and not always easy to get along with. The fruit of their collaboration was to be a substantial fortune from the platinum enterprise and a permanent place in the annals of science, as each man would add two new chemical elements to the thirty-five or so then known. But the way each chose to announce his respective elemental discoveries to the world would reflect their difference in temperament.
Periodic Tales Page 4