Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey Brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

On Christmas Eve, in the year 1800, English scientist William Hyde-Walliston and his

colleagues, Misson Tenet, unwrapped a gift to themselves.

It was a piece of nearly pure platinum ore, secretly purchased and smuggled from the

Spanish colony of Nuevo Granada in South America, oh what's Colombia today?

The price tag was 795 pounds, worth a little over a thousand American dollars at the time

and over 23,000 dollars today.

The pair had high hopes for this hunk of rock.

A Walliston believed he could create a new chemical process that would make the solid

ore a malleable platinum.

Olden Walliston know that his Christmas ore was the gift that would keep on giving.

Their sample had secrets of its own hidden away.

A new, rare, elemental metal never known to science before then.

Today, it's one of the most valuable and precious metals on the planet, Rhodium.

With his chunk of smuggled platinum ore, in a few years, Walliston did what earlier

scientists could not.

He achieved a chemical process that isolated platinum and rendered it malleable.

As he dissolved the platinum ore in his backyard garden laboratory, he produced both a soluble

and a non-soluble residue.

After precipitating the soluble solution, he noticed reddish salts remained.

Red salts are not typical of platinum, and Walliston suspected something else was present

...