Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And let's take it back to Christmas Eve. The year's eighteen hundred, and I'm an English scientist named William Hyde Wallaston. Who are you, Chuck?
I guess that would make me your colleague Smithson Tenant.
Neil Tennant's great great great great grandfather.
I don't believe you have not falling for anything anymore.
Okay, so what are we doing on this Christmas Eve eighteen hundred.
Well, we're coming. We're unwrapping a very special thing, a precious metal platinum or that's right. We paid got to stop that.
We paid a pretty penny for it too. It came from what we would call Columbia today, what Wallaston and Tenant us called Nueva Granada, which is fancy. But they paid something like seven hundred and ninety five pounds for it, which in eighteen hundred that'd be one thousand dollars and today it'd be like twenty three thousand dollars. I would have thought inflation would have made that way more, but still, that's a decent amount of money to pay for a
hunk of platinum. Even back then, the reason why they paid so much for it and why they had to smuggle it out is because it was essentially pure platinum, which is very, very hard to find. And one of the reasons that Wallaston wanted it was because he was trying to figure out how to create a chemical reaction that could make platinum malleable and therefore even more useful than it already was.
That's right. He's like, I think I can do it. I'm pretty smart, and I think we can get a lot of uses out of valuable platinum. And so he worked on it for a few years, or rather you worked on it for a few years.
And you helped.
I helped a little bit. I got your tea and stuff like that, latch at your jokes, kind of like this podcast, Oh here's your tea, by the ways. And he eventually would or you eventually would get that chemical process down pat and isolate that platinum, and it was in fact malleable. But what he noticed was was like, wait a minute, there's something left over here, these reddish salts, and like, what in the world could this be? And it turns out that Wallaston, Wallaston and Tenet had also
discovered not just one other precious metal. But two we're going to focus on rhodium, but they also discovered palladium.
Yeah, pretty neat stuff.
That's a big bang for your buck.
And the reason they called it rodium it was after the Greek word for rose, which is rodin, right, which sounds like kind of like a robot that assembles from different parts and fights.
I was gonna say the same thing.
So, and the reason why is because those salts are kind of like a reddish rose color. Oh that's pretty cool. That's a great name right off of the bat. But even more than that, they figured out that roodium and palladium were related to platinum. They're part of what's called the platinum group metals. I don't know if that's a band or not.
I was waiting for it, maybe like.
A prog rock like an all star prog rock band. Yeah that's not metal, No, not at all. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's one of the noble metals.
It is. The roodium has a chemical it's a chemical element with the symbol r H atomic number forty five, and it is in the group with iridium and ruthenium and platinum pladium.
What else don't iridium and osmium. Yeah, so it's a.
Pretty big deal that they found this, and also obviously gold and silver also precious metals, and it turns out that rhodium is super valuable today and very useful today.
Yeah, one of them be rare. It is rare. It's incredibly rare. Actually, it's I guess almost never found or never found in pure form. It's found in alloys with other stuff, and it's usually found in just minuscule So it's rare. It's scarce, and it's it was until very recently in really high demand, so much so that the price of an ounce of rhodium in April of twenty twenty one was approaching thirty thousand dollars in ounce.
Yeah, that was the peak, that rodium peak.
That's one of the most expensive like commodities on the planet, if not the most expensive. I'm not sure. What's interesting, Chuck, though, is that it's now down to about four thousand dollars an ounce. And I say, we don't tell anybody why until we come back from a message break.
Sounds good, all right, So we left quite a cliffhanger. Rodium peaked at about close to thirty thousand dollars not too long ago, and just march in April of twenty twenty one. Now it's abound down to about four grand I saw like thirty nine today forty two hundred yesterday in that area, and the forecast is for it to be about the same, which is still one of the most valuable medals.
In the world, more than gold for sure.
Yeah, I mean it's like still twice as much as gold, so it's still very, very valuable. But like anything, it's all about supply and demand. And while the supply is still low because it's still rare, it's not like they found some huge supply of it somewhere. The demand has gone way down for a lot of reasons that are
pretty boring. If you're someone who talks about things like financial instruments, then you might really enjoy hearing about like the twelve reasons that I found that it's not a demand. But one of the big reasons that everyone can understand is that rodium is one of the biggest uses is that it's used in catalytic converters, which is one reason why catalytic converters are stolen because they contain palladium, platinum, and rodium, and people can cut them off very easily
and sell them for a lot of money. But catalytic converters are on the decline because of the rise of electric vehicles, so thus rodium the demand is down.
Isn't that interesting? Like just the price of rodium indicates that the world turned a corner and it's like, yeap, electric vehicles are here to stay and we don't really need catalytic converters like we used to.
Yeah, it'll go back up though, because the other eleven reasons are much more volatile and not as locked in.
Okay, but still it's just not in demand. I think something like eighty percent of the use or the demand for rodium was with the automotive industry, largely for catalytic converters. The reason why they use it for catalytic converts because it is just aces at converting nitrous oxide emissions. Yeah, which it's crazy there, well, some that comes out of your tailpipe, but nothing like it would without a catalytic converter.
Like we would not be breathing basically right now with all the cars on the road if there weren't catalytic converters featuring rodium. And the solution to that is not more rodium, it's fewer catalytic converters.
Turns out. Yeah, I wrote the catalytic converter article years ago at how stuff works.
How was it?
It was a slog my friend, Yeah, as someone you know, I think for both of us were not super car guys so or at least how cars work, so it was tough.
Well, can you take ten minutes and explain how they work real quick?
I have no memory of it, but what I do remember is you said eighty percent as far as their use in catalytic converters, also, eighty percent. That's how much rodium South Africa is putting out, about eighty percent of the world supplies coming from South Africa. Russia is number two on that list, Zimbabwe is number three, and there's
also a and again, these aren't rhodium mines. I think they're generally platinum mines for the most part, right, but there's a platinum mine in Montana that is producing some rodium as well.
Pretty neat, not bad. One of the cool things about rodium is that it's super shiny. It's got a beautiful, silvery white sheen to it, so it makes it very alluring, like momo. Yeah, exactly. It has like a lot of attractiveness. It also is very hard, which is a double edged sword for jewelers. It makes it really hard to make jewelry out of. But if you can figure out how to plate rodium onto other kinds of jewelry, it will
make it super shiny and super hard and durable. And that's one way that they have figured out how to use rhodium is they plate it. And to plate it you actually have to dissolve it in certain kinds of acids, and that causes fumes, and you do not want to breathe those fumes. But if you can successfully avoid breathing the fumes, you can plate jewelry with roodium and you'll be pretty happy with the result afterwards. I hear.
Yeah, it is actually one of the least toxic of those precious metals, but it is that the fumes that are harmful for sure, So they have found ways to work on it as jewelers to avoid those fumes. Another great part about rhodium on jewelry is that it's hyper hypoallergenic, so you're not you know, sometimes if you wear bracelets and rings and things that will turn your skin a
different color. This avoids that that plating of rodium will not turn your skin different colors, so that's another big plus. And it's also because it's hard. It's very scratch resistant, it's corrosion resistant. It's pretty hardy. But they have to do it in such a then layers it will wear down. So they say if you do have a rodium plated piece of jewelry or something, they say that you should
probably not do it on like a ring. You should probably do it for like ear rings or a necklace or something that doesn't get rubbed around a lot in your skin. And you might want to think about getting it replated every few years. And it sounds like, oh my gosh, it's the most expensive thing in the world. Why would I do that. They need so little of
it to plate your jewelry that apparently isn't that much money. No, I'm sure that's relative, but it's not like you would think like, oh, it costs like ten grand to get this thing replated.
Right, because you don't need an ounce of this stuff.
No, you don't need a little tiny bit.
And that's all it takes. All it takes one other use for it that I think we should end on. Not only does it catalyze nitrous oxide into less harmful stuff, it is the catalyst for the reaction that produces menthol. Yeah, so if you like chewing gum or you can thank roodium for that.
Aren't they getting rid of mental cigarettes?
They should?
I thought I just saw something about that recently.
I don't know, but I could. I could definitely see us reaching that point.
Finally, I'm not sure why I would have dreamed that up, even though I had the weirdest dream ever last night, so you never know, but I thought I saw something. So anyway, I'm sure we'll figure that out.
You're not going to share last night's stream.
Oh no, no, no no, but it involved Michael Douglas and Catherine Zada Jones.
Awesome. So if you want to know more about this wonderful topic, Rodium, you can go on to how Stuff Works, because that's where we got this article, and that means short stuff is out.
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