![]() Gold happens to melt at a much lower temperature, which made it much easier for pre-industrial people to work with. The melting point for platinum is over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That leaves platinum and gold, both of which can be found in rivers and streams.īut if you were in the ancient world and wanted to make platinum coins, you would have needed some sort of magic furnace from the future. So Sanat says it's not the best choice.Įarly civilizations couldn't have used rhodium or palladium, because they weren't discovered until the early 1800s. Silver has been widely used as money, of course. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.īut even here we can cross things out. That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. So osmium - which apparently comes to earth via meteorites - gets the axe. This lets him cross off a lot of the boxes near the top of the table, because the elements clustered there tend to be more abundant.Īt the same time, you don't want to pick an element that's too rare. Now Sanat adds a new requirement: You want the thing you pick to be rare. So we're down from 118 elements to 30, and we've come up with a list of three key requirements: ![]() They're always broken out separately from the main table, and they have some great names - promethium, einsteinium.īut it turns out they're radioactive - put some einsteinium in your pocket, and a year later, you'll be dead. Then we ask him about those two weird rows at the bottom of the table. So Sanat crosses out another 38 elements, because they're too reactive. But sometimes they corrode, start to fall apart. And it turns out that a lot of the elements in the periodic table are pretty reactive. In fact, you don't want your money undergoing any kind of spontaneous chemical reactions. Money that spontaneously bursts into flames is clearly a bad idea. "If you expose lithium to air, it will cause a huge fire that can burn through concrete walls," he says. Then he swings over to the far left-hand column, and points to one of the elements there: Lithium So Sanat crosses out the right-hand column. You could put all your gaseous money in a jar, but if you opened the jar, you'd be broke. ![]() They're chemically stable.īut there's also a big drawback: They're gases. The elements there have a really appealing characteristic: They're not going to change. Sanat starts with the far-right column of the table.
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