Paper 1 Cobalt

Cobalt

The chemical element associated with the atomic number 27 is cobalt. This element is found naturally in the Earth’s crust, however it is found only in chemically combined form with other elements. The form that cobalt occurs naturally is cobalt-59, the only stable isotope of its species.[i] Cobalt eluded the scientific community for centuries before being accurately discovered by Swedish chemist Georg Brandt in 1735.ⁱ This discovery of cobalt was the first metal to be discovered since the previously known metals were founded in the pre-historical period.ⁱ This element has been found in pottery, art, glass works, glazes, and ceramics that date back to the BC eras. Today cobalt is still utilized as a pigmentation for coloring still, but it also has uses in battery operation and oxidation catalyst capabilities.

When George Brandt discovered cobalt in 1735 he realized that there was a distinct difference between bismuth and cobalt. For years people, mainly alchemists, confused bismuth with cobalt, so George Brandt decided to list down several characteristics that cobalt and bismuth do not share in order to differentiate between the two.^vi One important aspect that he noticed that allowed future scientists to separate bismuth and cobalt was the melting point. Cobalt has a very high melting point compared to bismuth, so bismuth’s lower melting point would separate it from any ore that cobalt was also found within inside of mines. It is imperative to keep in mind that when the topic of mining cobalt is discussed it means the mining of compounds that have cobalt containing elements in them. Cobalt is commonly a by-product of nickle and copper mining, not abundantly independent of other minerals in the Earth.

Now known to be a hard and lustrous gray metal element, cobalt went centuries undetected due to more known metals and alloys it has been associated with. The alchemists of ancient times believed the blue color associated with ceramics, pigmentation, and glass coloring was thought to derive from bismuth. Once cobalt was finally regarded as an element in itself, rather than being confused with bismuth, credit of the blue coloring within glass and art from ancient times started to turn to cobalt. The first mining of cobalt originated in Norway, Sweden, Saxony, and Hungary.ⁱ The form of this cobalt was in its smalt form, which was a powdered form of cobalt.

The largest deposits of cobalt mining are in the cobalt belt, located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and some in Zambia. These places produce thousands of tons of cobalt per year, despite the fact that cobalt only accounts for 0.002% of the Earth’s crust. Because of its low concentration and wide-spread nature it is usually found and produced as a by-product of another metal.ⁱⁱ This metal is now utilized for military purposes, batteries, catalytic reactions, and continued pigmentation and coloring. Separated from the other metals, cobalt products can now be more concentrated into utilizing the element with other compounds to create alloys that are stronger than previously discovered alloys. The production of these alloys have been utilized in prosthetics and dental prosthetics, where the cobalt alloys have been proven to be highly resistant to corrosion and wearing down. Medically cobalt provides a substitute for nickle for those who have allergic reactions to nickle. Outside of the medical field the military and commercial airliners have utilized these cobalt-based alloys to make turbine blades for jets and aircraft engines.ⁱ

The element cobalt has influenced society to the point where without it a lot of today’s technical and medical workings. Aside from providing non-side effect prosthetics in lieu of nickle, cobalt has effected technology greatly to the point where society has utilized this element to further itself. Cobalt is a transition-metal that can be excited into a permanent state of magnetism.^iv This element is also known for its ability to improve oxidation capabilities of nickle, so it is utilized in NiCd and NiMH batteries. Lithium ion battery cathodes are also made up of a cobalt oxide, where its presence helped release lithium ions between the layers of cobalt oxide.ⁱ

Cobalt is a known irritant if it has direct contact with skin or a mucus membrane. It’s LD50 orally is approximately 6170 mg/kg.ⁱⁱⁱ  The element is flammable, but its explosive capabilities are not available for data which allows the assumption it isn’t combustible. Cobalt has a very high melting point, having to be at 1493^OC for it to become liquid from its solid state. According to InvestmentMine, the price of cobalt is constantly fluctuating. The most median of prices being 13.86 USD per pound over the course of January 2015.^V Because cobalt is a known pigmentation method utilized by many manufacturers in order to produce blue colored goods, it is relevant to acknowledge that a major method of instrumental analysis that can be conducted on this element is the utilization of a UV-Vis spectrophotometer. The absorption of cobalt is a specific wavelength, so even if it is utilized with another element it can still be detected. For example, if a blue mixture had both cobalt and chromium in it the cobalt wavelengths would not coincide with the chromium wavelengths that the instrument would produce readings.

Throughout history cobalt has been utilized by civilizations that date back to the earlier BC eras. The cobalt compounds that created vibrant and rich blue colors were used in glass, glazes, and ceramics of the ancient Egyptians and Persians. Persian jewelry with cobalt containing compounds have been recovered, and even societies as far away as China during the Tang dynasty utilized cobalt containing compounds to color jewelry and sculptures.ⁱ These compounds were used heavily by the rich and those who could create such art, and over the centuries cobalt containing compounds have been continuously utilized, even to this day. Society has continued to adopt these compounds to color different plastics, glasses, metals, and other products.

Aside from coloring cobalt has also been put to the test of being fused with other durable metals in order to create tools and devices that need rotating metal for high speed. Cobalt has proven to be durable, and in the presence of other elements it can enhance the capabilities of instruments and tools even more so than if it was utilized alone. Its high melting point has been taken advantage of in order to create turbines and engines for airplanes and jets, a much cheaper way to support a system that emits high heat.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, is the center of many rich minerals and mines. This country has thrived and suffer off of the fact that so many resources can be mined off of its lands. Wars have constantly plagued the DRC for many years because of non-domestic armies and governments trying to control the mineral resources.^vii The state is constantly in a conflict within itself, if not from outside forces. Production of cobalt and everything else within the country have forced people to dive into the country uninvited, seeking profit and resources at the cost of the country’s downfall. Despite being democratic it is still unstable. This instability constantly influences the pricing of cobalt for the mining and mineral industry given that the majority of cobalt is obtained from the mines in the DRC.

In summary it is known that cobalt was used in ancient times by civilizations and societies that didn’t even have contact with each other. This element was utilized in a lot of jewelry and sculptures for Egyptians, Persians, and Chinese. This pigmentation was passed down through the millenniums up to today. With cobalt finally being individually identified by chemist Georg Brandt in 1735 it was finally categorized as its own unique element, paving the way for its current day usages in technology and medicine. Its alloys have proven to be effective in turbines, tools, and instruments given its high melting point. Its medicinal purposes involve primarily prosthetics, where cobalt is replacing nickle in order to alleviate any allergic reactions people might have to nickle. Cobalt has made its way through society, and society will continue to utilize cobalt for its general purpose and hopefully practical usage.

[i]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt, Accessed 25 Jan, 2015.

ii http://www.thecdi.com/cdi/images/documents/facts/Cobalt%20Facts%20-%20Supply%20%20Demand%20-%2010.pdf, Accessed 25

Jan, 2015.

iii MSDS: Cobalt, ScienceLab. http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsld=9923518, accessed 26 Jan, 2015

iv Somika, “History, Properties, Minerals, Extraction, and Applications,” Cobalt.

http://www.somika.com/cobalt-properties-ores-minerals-lubumbashi.php

v InvestmentMine: Cobalt Prices and Cobalt Price Charts. http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/cobalt/

vi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Brandt, Accessed 26 Jan, 2015

vii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo, Accessed 26 Jan, 2015

Assignment 4

The culture of Europe during the Middle Ages to the Renaissance focused more towards a mechanical and natural method of explaining why science happens the way it does. The basis of this starts with the atomistic theories left behind by Greek atomists. Greek atomists had their work translated at the end of the Middle Ages by Europeans, and their concepts carried over into the 16^th century and Renaissance era of thinking. Through this theory, the idea that a substance can retain itself, or stay the same through various chemical changes, revolutionized the way scientists thought. The ideal of something skeletal in all chemicals, atoms, became apparent by the end of the Middle Ages (1). Before the idea of atom exchange and electron transferring physicians, chemists, and other scientists described chemical phenomena as transmutations, an idea that had stuck with them for centuries thanks to the alchemists before them. It wasn’t until physicians started explaining chemical changes as an exchange of atoms, and separation, that the idea of transmutation started to become obsolete (1). The famous scientists Galileo formulated the basis of mechanical philosophy. This concept describes particles as moving matter, rather than standing still atomic structures. This idea of motion translated over to other scientists’ theories of atoms. This forever changed the views of physicists and chemists in this era (1). In the seventeenth and eighteenth century chemists and scientists wanted to find out the nature of combustion and the forces behind it in order to utilize it for practical uses and understand what had a “nature of fire”(1). The atomistic theories developed earlier, at this point, have been widely accepted by the scientific community at this time in Europe. They also searched for a means of neutralizing acids and bases, experimenting greatly with mixing the two together in hopes of neutralizing or saturating one or the other (1).

Assignment 3

The advancements of chemistry, in the practical sense, did not seem to occur until the fourteenth and fifteen centuries. Paracelsus popularized the subject of iatrochemistry, the utilization of chemicals for healing human illnesses (88-89). It would be, however, that John of Rupescissa would be considered the founder of medical chemistry given his acquaintance with alchemy and his description of its methods (89). Rupescissa viewed alcohol as the main substance that makes up wine ,and he developed the theory that alcohol could be extracted from all things, utilizing antimony through extracting the suflide variation with vinegar (89). By the sixteenth century chemical methods could be described in full detail despite the fact that it wasn’t a foundation on its own. These sixteenth century scientists paved the way for the first chemists to arise in the seventeenth century. A scientist by the name of Hieronymus Brunschwygk published an important book that laid the foundation of understanding distillation. His work the Great Book of Distillation, is an enlarged edition of his work (93). Mineralogical and metallurgical chemistry emerged from the miner’s who were willing to share and explain the methods they utilized in order to benefit younger workers. The books centered around around quantitative determinations and helped spread influence to other fields of chemistry (94). These handbooks proved that chemistry was involved in many interests, not just the study of alchemists. A man named Paracelsus laid the foundation of modifying the older theories of medicine. His work to find remedies for illnesses hastened the discovery of new chemical substances as well (97).

Assignment 1

Greek Thought

The scientists of ancient Greece were not called scientists, but rather named philosophers of their filed of study. These philosophers brought the human race forward incredibly fast, so fast that some people doubt it ever happened. As Leicester explains in his fourth chapter, the major flaw that ancient Greek philosophers had in their scientific knowledge was their tendency to generalize without sufficient data and not checking their hypotheses with experimentation. Greek thoughts also centered around cosmological ideas such as everything being real thanks to fire or air. The elements fire, air, water, and earth were the focus of many studies in alchemy, the earliest form of chemistry, rather than the individual components of substances. Most of the sciences try to explain the origin of the universe and what is in store, but Plato started looking to the future rather than the past in an attempt to understand the end goal of the universe. He also went in to explain atoms as a planar type structure that could bind together to only form cubic type structures. All of these thoughts trace back to the four elements of Empedocles. Any progression of the thoughts towards atomic structure was tossed aside in Greek society after alchemy was introduced. All of this halted any progression in chemistry for 1000 years.

Gold Article

This article focuses on the making of colloidal gold through older methods that date back to the 18^th century in order to possibly create sub-nanometer gold nanoparticles that are widely sought out for their oxidation capabilities of organic substrates when utilizing oxygen. These methods were at first used to color glass and create a medicine utilizing gold. Through notes of chemists from the two periods they were looking at they concluded that gold particles were formed in the process of oily mixtures and distilling methods used to create these colloids. Through the utilization of current technology they were able to recreate the reactions and see for themselves the possibilities and results of these nanoparticles forming. The oils used in these reactions seem to allow the production of gold clusters and nanoparticles without hindrance. All in all the article’s author seemed confident that these methods should be looked into in order to produce these particles given the success they seemed to bring.

Ransom Calculation

41,025.64  gold per kg

Today’s Price of gold and silver per kg

568.43  silver per kg

Inca’s Ransom:

6,087 kg gold x 42,025.64 USD/kg =  2.497 x 10⁸ USD

11,793 kg silver x 568.43 USD/kg = 6.703 x 10⁶ USD

2.564 x 10⁸ USD total for Inca’s Ransom