59 Fun Facts About Platinum

Which chemical symbol stands for platinum, element 78?

Pt is element 78, one place before gold. Europe's chemists only recognised it around 1750, though smiths in the Americas had been working it for centuries.

Platinum's name comes from the Spanish 'platina', which means what?

Little silver was a put-down. The Spanish who met it in the rivers of their American colonies rated it a worthless impurity in the metal they were after, and often simply threw it away.

Which 1930s Hollywood star was known as the 'Platinum Blonde'?

Jean Harlow insisted the shade was natural, but her hairdresser later revealed it took weekly rounds of ammonia, bleach and soap flakes.

Which gemstone names the US music award that ranks above multi-platinum?

Diamond has a shortcut: each disc of a multi-disc set counts as a unit, so OutKast's double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below got there with half the usual sales.

What made platinum so hard for early European metalworkers to use?

Their furnaces could not melt it: platinum liquefies near 1,770°C, about 700 degrees above gold. Smiths in the Americas had long got round that by heating its grains with gold until they fused.

Platinum resists single acids but dissolves in which of the alchemists' liquids, famed for dissolving gold?

Aqua regia, 'royal water', is a blend of two acids that each fail alone. Alchemists gave it the name because it could dissolve gold, the metal that shrugged off their other acids.

Platinum gauze is the catalyst that turns ammonia into which acid?

Nitric acid. Wilhelm Ostwald's process is still how it is made, and the acid goes on to become ammonium nitrate fertiliser, so platinum has a hand in growing the world's food.

Which car engine part is often tipped with platinum so that it lasts far longer than a copper one?

Spark plugs. Platinum shrugs off both the heat and the electric arc at the tip, so the electrode can be made finer and sharper without melting or corroding away.

Gerhard Ertl's 2007 chemistry Nobel honoured his work on how a platinum surface makes which poisonous gas harmless?

Carbon monoxide picks up an extra oxygen atom on the platinum and leaves as carbon dioxide. Ertl found that this seemingly simple reaction speeds up, slows down and can even turn chaotic.

Because US law lets the Treasury mint platinum coins of any face value, commentators in 2013 proposed a single coin worth what?

$1 trillion. The plan was to deposit the coin at the Federal Reserve and keep paying the bills without Congress raising the debt ceiling; the Treasury and the Fed turned it down.

The La Tolita people, early workers of platinum, lived on which country's Pacific coast?

Ecuador. Some 2,000 years ago its smiths heated platinum grains with gold until they fused into an alloy they could shape, long before Europe's scholars knew the metal.

In 1799, which country cast its brand-new unit of length, the metre, as a bar of platinum?

France. Revolutionary scientists defined the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, then fixed it in a platinum bar locked away in the national archives.

Antonio de Ulloa, the Spanish officer who first described platinum for science, was captured on his voyage home by which country's navy?

Britain. Ulloa was taken to London as a prisoner in 1745, but scholars there took up his cause and he was soon released to sail home to Spain.

Which metal, found in platinum ore by William Wollaston, did he name after the rose colour of its salts?

Rhodium, from the Greek for rose. Wollaston found it in the leftovers when he dissolved platinum ore for a business selling the purified metal, a venture that made him rich.

Henrik Scheffer's 1752 description of platinum called it by what name?

White gold. Scheffer found the newcomer resisted corrosion just as gold does, and his study helped establish it as a precious metal instead of a nuisance.

At oil refineries, platinum catalysts reshape low-grade fuel mainly to raise which property of gasoline?

Its octane rating. Refiners found that platinum could rearrange cheap naphtha into high-octane gasoline, and after the Second World War their demand for the metal soared.

Which metal did William Wollaston find in platinum ore in 1802 and name after a newly discovered asteroid?

Palladium honours the asteroid Pallas. Wollaston first sold the metal anonymously through a London shop, and a rival chemist dismissed it as a mere alloy before he owned up.

Roughly how much would a one-litre milk carton weigh if it were filled with solid platinum?

About 21 kg: platinum is over 21 times as dense as water and denser even than gold, so its heavy grains sink to the bottom of a prospector's pan, which is how the Spanish first met it.

Hans Merensky's 1924 discovery of a platinum-rich reef lay in which country?

South Africa. The Merensky Reef, part of the Bushveld Complex, turned the country into the world's leading platinum producer, and a century on it still mines most of the supply.

Which jewellery house sold the famous blue Hope gem, now set in a platinum pendant, to a Washington heiress in 1911?

Cartier. Evalyn Walsh McLean had turned the gem down, so Pierre Cartier had it reset in a more modern style, and she changed her mind.

Chemistry students traditionally dip a loop of platinum wire into a sample to carry out which classic test?

A flame test. Held in a burner, the sample shows its colour while platinum adds none of its own, which is why the costly wire is the classic choice.

Which US state holds the country's largest platinum deposit, the Stillwater Complex in the Beartooth Mountains?

Montana. The Stillwater Complex is the only place in the United States that mines the metal on any scale, yet it is far smaller than the world's three giant deposits.

Which African country's Great Dyke, a long ridge of ancient rock, holds one of the world's biggest platinum deposits?

Zimbabwe. Despite its name, the Great Dyke is not a single wall of rock but four igneous complexes in a row, mined for chromium, nickel and gold as well as platinum.

A small town named Platinum, after the metal once mined there, lies in which US state?

Alaska. The metal turned up near Goodnews Bay in 1926, and within about a decade a boomtown with its own post office had taken its name; dredges worked the creeks there for decades.

Platinum-group metals settle to the bottom of copper electrorefining cells as what?

Anode mud. The precious metals are too unreactive to dissolve along with the copper, so they drop out as sludge; far from being waste, that mud is where refiners collect their platinum.

Platinum is a standard metal in which implanted medical device?

Pacemakers. Their parts sit bathed in body fluids for years, and platinum neither corrodes there nor reacts with the body, which is also why dentists have long used it.

Which car part is the biggest single use of platinum, ahead even of jewellery?

Catalytic converters. They reached most new American cars with the 1975 model year, and because lead ruins the catalyst they also forced the switch to unleaded gasoline.

Which Michael Jackson album has been certified platinum more than 30 times over in the United States?

Thriller. A title is no guide to these things: Kiss named a 1978 greatest-hits set Double Platinum, and it was certified platinum just once.

Humphry Davy made strips of platinum glow white-hot with an electric current, an early step toward which invention?

The light bulb. Davy's glowing strips soon burned out, and platinum cost far too much for a lamp in every home, so later inventors turned to carbon.

From 1889 to 1960 the world's standard metre was a bar of platinum hardened with 10% of which metal?

Iridium made the bar significantly harder than pure platinum. It kept the job until 1960, when physicists redefined the metre by wavelengths of light and freed it from any object.

Le Grand K, a cylinder of platinum alloy cast in London in 1879, defined which unit until 2019?

The kilogram. Le Grand K was retired because it seemed to be drifting: over a century it and its official copies crept about 50 millionths of a gram apart.

Platinum wire's electrical resistance is the laboratory standard for measuring what?

Temperature. A platinum wire's resistance climbs smoothly as it warms, so the official scale is defined by platinum thermometers all the way from about -259°C to 962°C.

In which sport is the Platinum Glove a step above the Gold Glove?

Baseball. The award arrived in 2011 on the logic that puts platinum cards and platinum records above gold ones: fans pick each league's best fielder from that year's Gold Glove winners.

Which groom chose a platinum wedding ring in 2018, while his bride's was made of traditional Welsh gold?

Prince Harry. Brides in his family have worn Welsh gold since 1923 and Meghan's ring kept the custom, but his band is platinum; his brother William had chosen to wear no wedding ring at all.

Which American retailer began selling one-ounce platinum bars on its website in October 2024, following its hit gold bars?

Costco. Its gold bars had brought in more than $100 million in a single quarter, yet analysts saw the bullion as marketing for its treasure-hunt image more than a money-maker.

Which platinum drug, first made in the 1840s, became a cure for most testicular cancers?

Cisplatin. For a century it was just Peyrone's chloride, a laboratory curiosity; approved in 1978, it now cures more than 90% of testicular cancers when combined with other drugs.

Barnett Rosenberg stumbled on platinum's cancer-fighting power in 1965 while passing an electric current through what?

E. coli bacteria. The cells stopped dividing and grew into long threads, and Rosenberg spent two years crediting the electric field before realising a compound from his platinum electrodes was responsible.

Which cyclist's advanced testicular cancer was cured in the 1990s by chemotherapy built around a platinum drug?

Lance Armstrong. The cancer had already spread to his lungs and brain when he was diagnosed in 1996, yet within months he was declared cancer-free, and by 1998 he was winning races again.

The data layer in which computer part is a magnetic film of cobalt alloy containing platinum?

Hard disk drives. Platinum mixed with cobalt makes strong permanent magnets, and a very thin film of such an alloy on each spinning disk is what holds the data.

Platinum-lined equipment is essential for melting and shaping which material, used in flat screens and optical fibres?

Glass. Platinum survives the heat of the furnace without corroding, which is why it lines the equipment that makes high-quality glass.

In the US, an album is certified 'platinum' after selling how many copies?

1 million. Gold had been the top award since 1958, but by 1976 record sales had grown so much that the industry added platinum at double the gold figure.

Which band's greatest-hits album became the first record ever certified platinum, in February 1976?

Eagles. Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) went on to become America's best-selling album, even though it came out ten months before the band released Hotel California.

Which British monarch celebrated a Platinum Jubilee?

Elizabeth II. Her Platinum Jubilee in 2022 marked 70 years on the throne, and she opened its concert in a filmed sketch, sharing tea and a marmalade sandwich with Paddington Bear.

The platinum crown made for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1937 carries which famous jewel?

Koh-i-Noor. The 105-carat stone had already sat in the crowns of two earlier queens, and India and several other countries have demanded its return.

Which country circulated platinum coins as regular national currency between 1828 and 1845?

Russia. Newly rich in platinum from the Ural Mountains, the empire struck 3-, 6- and 12-ruble coins as an easy way to sell the metal.

Despite its name, the American Platinum Eagle bullion coin shows which figure on its front?

The Statue of Liberty. The eagle soars on the back, and the one-ounce coin's $100 face value, though far below the worth of its metal, is the highest ever to appear on a US coin.

Platinum prints, patented in 1873 and prized for permanence, are a kind of what?

A photograph. William Willis's process stayed popular until the metal's price soared in the early 20th century and makers such as Kodak stopped producing the paper.

Which metal found in platinum ores is nature's densest element?

Osmium, about twice as dense as lead. Its name comes from the Greek for smell, after the pungent fumes of its oxide, and its hard alloys long tipped the nibs of fountain pens.

A 7th-century BC casket, among the oldest objects containing platinum, comes from which civilisation?

Ancient Egypt. The casket comes from the burial of Shepenupet II at Thebes, yet the platinum in its gold inlay probably got there by accident, and its makers may never have known they had it.

Ontario's Sudbury Basin, a great source of nickel and platinum, was created by what?

An impact from space. The blast melted a vast sheet of crust 1.85 billion years ago, and as the melt cooled its nickel, copper and platinum metals settled into the rich ores now mined at its base.

Platinum is the key catalyst in which green-energy technology?

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Platinum splits hydrogen at one electrode and joins it to oxygen at the other, so the only exhaust is water, a trick first shown with platinum electrodes in the 19th century.

Platinum is the catalyst used to set which rubbery material, found in many medical implants?

Silicone. Traces of the catalyst stay in the finished implants, which led US regulators to investigate; they found no evidence that the platinum left behind does any harm.

Because platinum will not tarnish or corrode even when white-hot, chemists class it as what kind of metal?

A noble metal. Like gold, platinum is so unwilling to react that it turns up in riverbeds as grains of pure metal, where most metals are locked away in ores.

Platinum-based cancer drugs work by binding to and damaging which molecule inside tumour cells?

DNA. The platinum latches onto the strands so they cannot be copied or repaired, and a cell that cannot copy its DNA cannot divide, so the tumour stops growing.

Platinum metal is inert in the body, but years of breathing its soluble salts can give refinery workers what?

Allergies: the salts sensitise the lungs and skin, bringing wheezing and rashes, so US workplace rules cap them at just 2 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

On which games console does collecting every other trophy in a game unlock a Platinum trophy?

PlayStation: Sony added trophies in a 2008 PS3 update so players could show off their feats and compare them with friends, with platinum ranked above gold as the top grade.

To whom did William Brownrigg present a detailed account of platinum in 1750?

The Royal Society heard Brownrigg's account nine years after metallurgist Charles Wood first sent him samples, and chemists across Europe soon began probing the new metal.

Which company launched the invitation-only Platinum Card in 1984, a tier above its Gold Card?

American Express traded on the metal's rarity: the card cost $250 a year and went only to invited customers with heavy spending and good payment records. A black Centurion Card topped it in 1999.

Damien Hirst's 2007 artwork For the Love of God is a gem-encrusted platinum cast of what?

A human skull, set with 8,601 gems. Hirst says the title came from his mother, who used to ask, 'For the love of God, what are you going to do next?'