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.