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Platinum is used as an alloying agent for various metal products, including fine wires, noncorrosive laboratory containers, medical instruments, dental prostheses, electrical contacts, and thermocouples. Platinum-cobalt, an alloy of roughly three parts platinum and one part cobalt, is used to make relatively strong permanent magnets. [38]
Rank Country/Region Platinum production (kilograms) Year World 180,000 2019 1: South Africa: 130,000 2019 2: Russia: 22,000 2019 3: Zimbabwe: 15,000 2019 4: Canada
Platinum as an investment. American Platinum Eagle, the official platinum bullion coin of the United States. Platinum as an investment is often compared in financial history to gold and silver, which were both known to be used as money in ancient civilizations. Experts posit that platinum is about 15–20 times scarcer than gold and ...
Naturally occurring platinum and platinum-rich alloys were known by pre-Columbian Americans for many years. [5] However, even though the metal was used by pre-Columbian peoples, the first European reference to platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) as a description of a mysterious metal found in Central American mines between ...
Gold nuggetA selection of precious metal elements; gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, ruthenium, rhodium, rhenium, osmium, iridiumand mercury. They are labeled and arranged by their location on the periodic table. Precious metalsare rare, naturally occurring metallicchemical elementsof high economic value.
Platinum coin. Common obverse of the American Eagle coins. Platinum coins are a form of currency. Platinum has an international currency symbol under ISO 4217 of XPT. The issues of legitimate platinum coins were initiated by Spain in Spanish-colonized America in the 18th century and continued by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. As a form ...
Platinum–iridium alloy. The international prototype of the kilogram (IPK) is an artifact standard of platinum–iridium alloy that was defined as having a mass of exactly one kilogram. Platinum–iridium alloys are alloys of the platinum group precious metals platinum and iridium. Typical alloy proportions are 90:10 or 70:30 (Pt:Ir).
The International Prototype of the Kilogram (referred to by metrologists as the IPK or Le Grand K; sometimes called the ur -kilogram, [ 1 ][ 2 ] or urkilogram, [ 3 ] particularly by German-language authors writing in English [ 3 ][ 4 ]: 30 [ 5 ]: 64) is an object whose mass was used to define the kilogram from 1889, when it replaced the ...