Number three gets bronze, number two silver and the best gets gold; That’s how we are used to it. But there will be something above gold: the precious metal platinum.
A golden plate is beautiful, but for a platinum plate (generally) Sold or streamed twice as many copies. A platinum credit card is more expensive and more exclusive than one golden Credit card. You can reach a golden jubilee after fifty years, for a platinum jubilee you have to keep up for seventy years (such as Queen Elizabeth II). Platiniblond is more extreme (and stands fewer people) than golden blonde.
Yes, the latter is of course a color issue: gold and platinum have also become color names. Gold is a yellow -brown honey color, platinum is glossy gray white. And platinum blond may shine, but is not really gray -white. It is also called that because it sounds chic.
What does Platina think it is? Why would it be better than gold? Is it rarer, harder, heavier, more expensive? Well, not always more expensive, but the rest is. A (liter) milk suit platinum is approximately 21.5 kilos, a milk suit gold 19.3 kilos. Platinum scores 4-4.5 and gold 2.5-3 on the Hardness scale of Mohs (where talk = 1 and diamond = 10). And in 2024, 170,000 kilos of platinum became worldwide docked And no less than 3,300,000 kilos of gold, about twenty times as much.
Yet gold is currently almost three times as expensive as platinum: for the aforementioned milk suit with gold you have to deposit around 1.67 million euros, you will get the milk suit platinum for more than six and a half tons (while there is more mass in it) . This has partly due to the greatly risen this century and still rising gold price, but the prices of platinum and gold have been fluctuating strongly compared to each other for more than a hundred years. Ten years ago And almost the whole twentieth century Was platinum more expensive than gold.
And that for a metal that the Spaniards secretly through the gold mixed When they found it in Colombia in the 16th century, and that they culminated ‘silver’ (platinum is the diminutive of platasilver). Only in 1748 was platinum scientifically described by the Spanish soldier and explorer Antonio de Ulloa (1716-1795). On his return trip in 1744, the French ship on which he traveled was hijacked by the British, but he was immediately allowed to become a member of the Royal Society and then back to Spain.
The Brit William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) found out around 1800 how you can edit the difficult platinum grant (and then discovered rodium and palladium, elements that are often in platinum-gres). But platinum only became popular in the 20th century: first for jewelry, during World War II in the arms industry and then (and still especially) as a catalyst in the oil industry. It is also used in three -way catalysts to ‘clean’ exhaust gases. And the platinum connection Cisplatin is used as chemotherapy. Platina is therefore wanted, but the price fluctuates with financial crises and trends in the (auto) industry.
Those fluctuations can lead to trouble At the source. More than two-thirds of the platinum are mined in South Africa; Underpaid, heavy, sickness -making. In 2012, a strike for more wages ended in the village of Marikana in one massacrewhen the police shot 34 miners and injured 78.