Gold and silver

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at University College London, celebrates the art and science of chemical elements. In this episode he looks at two elements we have valued for millennia – gold and silver. Nina Gilbey at the London Jewellery Workshop teaches him how to work the metal and make a silver ring, and Rupert Cole, Curator of Chemistry at the Science Museum, shows him the handiwork of silversmiths who fashioned an elaborate microscope for King George the Third and a silver thimble that was used (with some zinc and a few drops of an acid) to generate an electric current that was sent through a transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866. And Andrea finds out about silver's anti-bacterial properties from Jean-Yves Maillard, Professor of Pharmaceutical Microbiology at Cardiff University. For the Egyptians gold was the ultimate symbol of wealth, power and eternal life. For this reason they buried their Pharaohs with extraordinary amounts of gold artefacts. As a noble metal, gold doesn’t tarnish which added to its status and association with the sun god Ra and the afterlife. Andrea talks to Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres of Cambridge University at an exhibition of Tutankhamun’s riches, and to Professor Lynne Macaskie of Birmingham University about ways to recycle gold from our electronic waste using bacteria. The method offers a greener way to satisfy our lust for gold. Picture: Gold and silver bracelets, Credit: krfletch/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know, I also know that comedy is really
0:24.3	subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from
0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	Welcome to Discovery from the BBC.
0:42.0	I'm Andrea Seiler, Professor of Chemistry. Welcome to Discovery from the BBC.
0:42.6	I'm Andrea Sele, Professor of Chemistry at University College London.
0:47.0	In my work, I've always thought of the periodic table as a palette,
0:51.0	a basic set of colors from which we start when we paint the chemical world.
0:56.0	You combined this one with that one to make new colors
1:00.0	with hidden shades of property, function, and yes, even meaning.
1:05.0	This is the first of my guides to the science and art of some of my favorite chemical elements.
1:11.0	And today I've chosen two elements that societies have always
1:14.9	valued highly. Gold, but first silver. To me silver is the most beautiful metal.
1:22.0	I'm at the London Jewelry in
1:24.0	in Hackney in East London, where Nina and Gilby is about to teach me a new skill,
1:29.0	Silversmithing.
	...

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