So I’ve brought you to the Royal Society
of Chemistry. This is the professional society for chemists in the UK and some other countries.
And we’ve come here because I want to see the Presidential Badge of Office. I’ve heard
about it lots of times but never actually seen it and it’s meant to have all sorts
of interesting elements in the badge itself. So let’s go inside and see if we can see
it. I’ve never been down these stairs before.
It’s like Alice in Wonderland through the little door.
So we’re now in the vault, never been here it’s quite, quite unusual. It’s a tiny
room I can hardly move in here. And so I’ve been shown where the Presidential Badge is,
so let’s get it out. So here it is, let’s see what’s inside
the box. So this is the badge. The ribbon is quite
interesting because the ribbon itself is dyed with a sample of mauveine, which was the first
artificial dye that had ever been made, was made by Perkins, discovered it when he was
18, was a millionaire by the time he was 30, a good role model for chemists nowadays. And
it was the first dye that had ever been made that was purple. Suddenly purple became really
fashionable, everybody was wearing purple clothes. And this was in the mid-nineteenth
century and was really the start of the chemical industry in the United Kingdom. So we’ll
turn our attention now to the badge. So this is the badge that is worn by the President
of the Royal Society of Chemistry on official occasions when he is being the President.
Here in the middle we have Priestley, and Priestley is standing inside a hexagon which
is meant to represent benzene. Really in benzene all the sides should be exactly the same length,
but here you can see it has been distorted a bit in this direction because Priestley
is taller than he is fat. Priestley was the discoverer of oxygen, although
there is some argument that the chemist Scheele might have discovered it at the same time.
This rim here, like the rim of the cartwheel, is made out of gold and you can see it, it’s
a nice golden colour. And then all of these spokes are made from metals and each spoke
is made from a different metal. But the first thing you can see is that they all look pretty
much the same because if a metal isn’t coloured like gold they all look shiny and a silvery
colour, and so unless you’re a specialist you probably can’t tell the difference between
them. Are there people who could look at those metals
then, without doing any chemistry on them, and tell me what they were made from?
There’s probably some, most people would be able to tell the difference if they started
lifting them up because some are very much denser than others. Tungsten for example would
be much denser than zinc, and so if you could actually feel them individually they would
be much easier to tell the difference. So this one here is zirconium, which is quite
a light metal. This is the one that is used for cladding and nuclear power plants. And
next to that is cobalt which is a metal that is used quite widely in catalysts, it’s
also used for some sorts of magnets that are very powerful. Then after that, I can’t
read what this one is, I think this one is platinum here which is one of the very valuable
metals, it’s not the most valuable, but one of the most valuable. This one here is
nickel which again is used in some catalysts. Very finely divided nickel is used for hydrogenation
catalysts, adding hydrogen to organic compounds. And nickel is also interesting because it
was the first metal that was discovered to react with carbon monoxide to make a volatile
compound, it boils at room temperature. Think of that, a metal compound that’s a gas if
you heat it just above 25°C. Then going round here we have titanium. Titanium is a very
light metal and very strong. And next to that one is iridium, which is another metal similar
to platinum and rhodium, it is very expensive, it is used in some catalysts. It’s used
in the catalyst to make ethanoic acid or acetic acid, one of the components of vinegar. On
an industrial scale iridium makes a really good catalyst for this. Here we have niobium
which is used, I’m not sure what niobium is used for, I think it can be used to reinforce
steel and it is not nearly as important a metal as some of the others. And then going
round here we have tungsten. Tungsten is the highest melting point metal there is. The
one down here is palladium, it’s lighter than platinum, but again it’s in the same
group in the periodic table as platinum. But it is used quite a lot in catalysis, and there
was a belief that perhaps palladium could catalyse nuclear fusion, cause deuterium atoms
to fuse together to produce energy. There was a lot of excitement in the late 1980s
but now most people feel that those experiments actually were not very reproducible and something
else was happening. This one is molybdenum. Molybdenum is particularly interesting as
it’s one of the few heavy elements which appears in enzymes.
Then round here we have tantalum which is the metal that is particularly used in so
called electrical capacitors. These are tiny components in electronic circuits which can
store electrical charge for a short time. They are a vital component in making mobile
telephones for example, without tantalum you couldn’t have mobile telephones. That’s
why people are beginning to recycle mobile telephones so they can recover some of these
metals. And finally we come down to this element here which is rhodium. Rhodium is one of the
best metals for catalysing chemical reactions. You haven’t seen it before, now you seen
it with your own eyes what do you think of it?
Well I don’t think it’s enormously beautiful but it would be really nice to have in my
office to teach students about the different metals.
Somebody told me just here, as we were coming down the stairs that in fact, when this was
made, about 60 years ago, some of these metals bars were the first time that that particular
metal had ever been made into a bar, so this is really quite a metallurgical achievement.
And presumably the people who made it learnt quite a lot about processing some of these
metals. You know what anyone who sees this, who isn’t
a chemist, and gets excited by metals are going to have one question, what’s it worth?
I’ve no idea, we’ll have to ask the guys from the Royal Society of Chemistry, but I
think it will be worth quite a lot because of the metals themselves, but it’s probably
the labour in making this might be quite as great as the value of the metals themselves.
The person who wears it is the current President of the Royal Society of Chemistry. At the
moment the President of the Royal Society of Chemistry is one of my colleagues from
Nottingham, Dave Garner. And it’s rather nice he’s a specialist in the chemistry
of molybdenum so when he goes round he will be wearing a thing with his favourite element
there. So I think most of the presidents will be able to find one of their favourite elements
there, and those that are organic chemists of course will have benzene in the middle.
And for the physical chemists who are closer to physics they probably like it because they
can look at the properties of the different metals.
You happy with all that? Yes I think we’d better put it back again
now. Okay I’ll leave you in the vault, I’ll
see you later man. Bye
Ha ha, okay, bye-bye. Let’s lock him in. No we better not do that.
