Ah, the Lone Ranger.... or as Jasper Carrot once pointed out, the Lone Ranger... and Tonto. (Yes my last post was a bit heavy, so time to lighten the mood)
Despite warnings to the contrary by American critics I went and saw the new 'Lone Ranger' film anyway. And despite its narrative short comings (which is the main issue) it sort of played out like a live action cartoon complete with implausible survival from ridiculous injuries and a quasi-supernatural horse. The plot about maybe-maybe-not-cursed silver was silly but at least I wasn't bored at any particular point which is at least a point in its favor.
But I'm not here to review the film more use it as a jumping off point to talk about precious metals and silver in particular.
Gold, Silver, Platinum and the more exotic Palladium and Rhodium very much call to mind a certain romance. Throughout human history where ever precious metals have been located humans have coveted it. It's quite easy to tell if an element was known about by an ancient people because it usually don't have an '-ium' on the end of the name. Copper, lead, zinc, tin, sulphur, iron et cetera as well as gold and silver have been known about for a good number of years either because the element was found in a native, pure, form (like silver) or was easily liberated from an ore. Silver is found, often, with native copper although several ores exist.
So here's a few quick (fairly) interesting facts about silver (no not the horse):
1. Many silver compounds, including silver nitrate, are used in photography development.
2. Mirrors were often made by 'silvering' glass. During 19th century silvering was produced by the direct coating of silver onto the glass surface. The process is quite simple, requiring a few chemicals that will cause the precipitation of silver onto roughed glass (to provide a surface of deposition).
3. High quality wind instruments will often have solid silver mouth pieces or whole bodies for superior sound quality.
4. Silver has anti-bacterial properties. You might have noticed silver plasters for cuts in pharmacies.
5. Sterling silver bares the hallmark '925'. Pure silver is marked as 999. Since this is a total out of 1000 (the millesimal system), sterling silver is therefore 92.5% pure silver with the remaining 7.5% often made up with copper. Silver is alloyed like this to improve silver's relatively soft nature.
6. Silver bullets are quite popular in fiction. In myth a werewolf can only be killed using silver bullets. The Lone Ranger also carried silver bullets to symbolize how valuable a life is.
And we're back around to the Lone Ranger again,
Hi, ho, Silver, away!
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