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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]
American Platinum Eagle, the official platinum bullion coin of the United States. Investment in platinum 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 approximately 60–100 times scarcer than ...
Platinum was first used for minting coins in Spanish-colonized America. Following the discovery of platinum in gold rocks, the Spaniards were unable to use it for a long time because they had no technology for processing this metal. The then-cheap platinum was used for various kinds of frauds, such as substituting it for the more expensive silver.
All the noble metals can act as catalysts. For example, platinum is used in catalytic converters, devices which convert toxic gases produced in car engines, such as the oxides of nitrogen, into non-polluting substances. [citation needed] Gold has many industrial applications; it is used as a catalyst in hydrogenation and the water gas shift ...
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 ...
Platinum prices tumbled to 10-year lows as the collapse of Turkey's lira rippled through markets and weakened the currency of top producer South Africa, underlining persistent oversupply of the ...
Other precious metals include the platinum group metals: ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum, of which platinum is the most widely traded. [1] The demand for precious metals is driven not only by their practical use but also by their role as investments and a store of value. Historically, precious metals have commanded ...
The contact process is a method of producing sulfuric acid in the high concentrations needed for industrial processes. Platinum was originally used as the catalyst for this reaction; however, because it is susceptible to reacting with arsenic impurities in the sulfur feedstock, vanadium(V) oxide (V 2 O 5) has since been preferred.