INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT PLATINUM.

After an excellent day of weakfishing on Barnegat Bay and an exceptionable supper of the good, old fashioned, country tavern kind, a social party of anglers sat about on Uncle Jo Parker’s broad porch at Forked River, smoking and enjoying the cool, fragrant breath of the cedar swamp, when somehow the chat drifted to the subject of assaying and refining the precious metals.  That was just where one of the party, Mr. D.W.  Baker, of Newark, was at home, and in the course of an impromptu lecture he told the party more about the topic under discussion, and especially the platinum branch of it, than they ever knew before.

“Our firm,” he said, “practically does all the platinum business of this country, and the demand for the material is so great that we never can get more than we want of it.  The principal portion, or, in fact, nearly all of it, comes from the famous mines of the Demidoff family, who have the monopoly of the production in Russia.  It is all refined and made into sheets of various thicknesses, and into wire of certain commercial sizes, before it comes to us; but we have frequently to cut, roll, and redraw it to new forms and sizes to meet the demands upon us.  At one time it was coined in Russia, but it is no longer applied to that use.  We have obtained some very good crude platinum ore from South America and have refined it successfully, but the supply from that source is, as yet, very small.  I am not aware that it has been found anywhere else than in Colombia, on that continent, but the explorations thus far made into the mineral resources of South America have been very meager, and it is by no means improbable that platinum may yet be discovered there in quantities rivaling the supply of Russia.

“A popular error respecting platinum is that its intrinsic value is the same as that of gold.  At one time it did approximate to gold in value, but never quite reached it, and is now worth only $8 to $12 an ounce, according to the work expended upon it in getting it into required forms and the amount of alloy it contains.  The alloy used for it is iridium, which hardens it, and the more iridium it contains the more difficult it is to work, and consequently the more expensive.  When pure, platinum is as soft as silver, but by the addition of iridium it becomes the hardest of metals.  The great difficulty in manipulating platinum is its excessive resistance to heat.  A temperature that will make steel run like water and melt down fireclay has absolutely no effect upon it.  You may put a piece of platinum wire no thicker than human hair into a blast furnace where ingots of steel are melting down all around it, and the bit of wire will come out as absolutely unchanged as if it had been in an ice box all the time.

“No means has been discovered for accurately determining the melting temperature of platinum, but it must be enormous.  And yet, if you put a bit of lead into the crucible with the platinum, both metals will melt down together at the low temperature that fuses the lead, and if you try to melt lead in a platinum crucible, you will find that as soon as the lead melts the platinum with which it comes into contact also melts and your crucible is destroyed.