SILVER

Silver by some measure is one of the metals which is more romanticised; perhaps owing to the fact that it is one of the metals that is unreactive enough so that it occurs in nature in some quantity. But being a precious metal, like gold, silver is a rather rare element in nature. And annoyingly for some number of people, since the industrial revolution, which has put a good chunk of pollutant gas into the atmosphere, the shine of silver known to the ancients is now somewhat obscured by the tarnished, brown layer it forms upon reaction with atmospheric sulphur. Silver is unreactive, but still manages to sleep around the periodic table and form compounds with a number of elements. Such that the halides of silver seem to be a common point of teaching in regards to teaching about the halogens and such. Large deposits of silver exist in South America, and so goes the story that some Europeans went in search for Silver in the most southern end of South America, which was somewhat unsuccessful, but ended up influencing the name of one of the largest countries on the continent; Argentina, whose name is derived from the Latin name of silver, argentum. [Hence, Ag as its symbol]

Silver was one of the first elements that came into the collection. The sample itself is not one to write a whole lot about. It's a machined piece of silver foil, likely pretty pure except for a contamination of whatever felt tip marker is made out of, since one of the sides of this thing has 'Ag' written on it. So is a trend with some of the metals of the element collection that were aquired pretty early on. And I have a suspicion why - since these metals look pretty interchangeable with each other, in a chemistry environment, particularly if you are not going to be doing reactions with them where whatever felt tip marker contains might contaminate the reaction, it can help to distinguish the individual pieces of metal in some way. And felt tip marker seems to be a pretty efficient way of doing such thing.

More recently I have acquired two 'silver coins'; one of the 20th century which is 50% silver and one Victorian coin which is 92% or so. However both of these coins are too big to fit in the vial, so they are stored separately. But perhaps some day I will get a coin that is small enough so it fits...