Rare Elements In Use To-day

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 274, 15 August 1936, Page 20

Rare Elements In Use To-day

MANY of the rarer elements (metals) are now no longer museum curiosities, but are essential constituents of many of our highly developed, products and institutions. For example:— Neon: This is a gas derived from our atmosphere, iu which it occurs as but one part in 50,000. Yet it not only dominates the advertising sign industry of to-day, but plays an even more important function in the neon lamp of our talkies and the neon lamp of television. Caesium is the most essential detail of the electric eye. It occurs in nature so seldom that the supply is far below the demand. There is only 1 part of caesium in the earth’s crust for every 100,000 parts of the sister element, potassium. Radium, which has brought about a revolution in our physical sciences, is selling for £5OOO to £BOOO per ounce. Barium, close sister of radium, is the very heart of our modern automatic telephone system. Beryllium, at £lO a pound, added to copper in small percentages, produces an alloy that will cut steel and is now used for millions of springs. Tellurium, which occurs in modern copper ores to the extent of only

three parts in a million, is nowadays all recovered and sold to the electrolytic zinc industry for cobalt removal. Columbium, an extremely rare metal, is regularly added to stainless steels to stabilize them. Rhodium, more precious than its sister metal, platinum, supplies the permanent reflecting surface of the trans-continental airway searchlight reflectors. What has brought about this new rare metal industry? First of all, the highly improved methods of ore dressing, namely flotation and leaching in place of mechanical concentration; and secondly, the highly developed electro-refining methods for copper, zinc, lead, nickel, and others. Many of our rare metals now form important by-produets of these major metal industries. For example, our modern zinc plants furnish indium, germanium, and gallium in quantities sufficient to supply dozens of laboratories for study and possible practical application, such as indium for plating on silver, and gallium for quartz thermometers. The young research metallurgist looking for new fields to conquer will do well to consider the rare metals, select one of them, and carefully investigate its properties. He is bound to find applications even more startling than those recorded above. Who can tell what the important role of strontium, scandium, of rhenium or of hafnium may be to-morrow?