The Discreet Charm of Platinum
Mariana Sanchez-Daza, and John R.R. Christie.
Platinum (Pt, atomic number 78) is a precious transition-metal, a ‘noble metal’, it is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust (only an average hundred tons are produced annually,) and one of the least reactive metals: platinum is remarkably resistant to oxygen and acidic corrosion and to high temperatures, having an exceptionally high fusion point. This latter characteristic emerged forcefully in the world of the 18th century European science, but its resistance to corrosion is the reason why it became the material from which the International Prototype of the Meter and the Kilogram were made.
Today platinum is employed as a catalyst, as well as in the automobile industry and the manufacture of fertilizers. It is also used in the production of electronic components, plastics, synthetic fibers, and pharmaceuticals. Platinum is also present in the manufacture of optical glasses and fuel cells. It is used in almost half of chemotherapy cancer treatments (platinum-based antineoplastic drugs, like cisplatin, oxaliplatin, and carboplatin.) Since 1957 it has had its own journal, The Platinum Metals Review. What now follows engages a sequence of temporalities: the cosmological or astro-physical, the geological; the phases of human cognizance (practical, technical, scientific) and human production, these in turn entangling platinum in the historical temporalities of empires, markets and politics.
Platinum, like gold, is a heavy metal that is not formed in the stars through the normal process of absorption of neutrons. In the stars, the fusion reactions turn light atoms like helium into heavy atoms like iron or nickel, but, during the slow neutron capture process, some other heavy elements like mercury or tin can be formed; it is only in the supernovas that a fast process of neutron production takes place and the atoms are forced to absorb those neutrons in large quantities before radioactive disintegration: this is how the heaviest but stable elements like platinum1 are formed. Thanks to the rotation of the disk that originated the Solar System and its gravitational forces, the proto-Earth becomes spherical and the heavy metals sink to the nucleus of the planet.
Also, and crucially, some four billion years ago, an event known as Late Heavy Bombardment occurred. During this period, the number of meteoritic impacts grew considerably—probably because of the organization of the outer Solar System—, and the impact of these comets and meteorites changed the composition of the Earth’s mantle; precious metals found today in mining deposits come from those impacts2
Platinum got to the Earth in those two ways, and it is possible to find it in two types of deposits: in the mantle, coming from meteorites, and in volcanic deposits. Today platinum is found mostly in South Africa (with more than 70% of the global production), but also in Russia, Zimbabwe, North America, China, Colombia, and Finland.
In South Africa, it can be found in the Bushveld Igneous Complex (BIC), the largest igneous intrusion within the Earth’s crust, which has been tilted and eroded, forming the outcrops of what appears to be a great geological basin called The Transvaad Basin, which is about two billion years old. The BIC contains some of the richest ore deposits on Earth and the world’s largest reserves of platinum-group metals3 .
In Russia, the principal source of platinum is the Kondyor Massif (the only circular mountain ridge in the world), which most probably formed from a dyke. The platinum there comes from the core of the planet4. In Chocó, Colombia, where platinum was discovered, the principal hypothesis was to consider the alluvial origin of this metal, but evidence has shown a pyroclastic character of the rocks containing platinum, many of which probably come from the inferior Cenozoic Era when great magmatic activity took place in the west Andean Mountains5.
‘Discovery’
Some samples of platinum have been found in ancient Egyptian objects, and in objects produced in the Esmereldas (Ecuador) by indigenous peoples, preceding the Spanish colonization of the South American continent. These indigenous objects indicate the first, most long-lasting and still current of platinum’s human uses, namely for personal and/or ceremonial adornment. It is accepted that the first written reference to platinum appears in 1557 in the Exotericarum exercitationum written by the Italian physician Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558)6; he tells of a metal found in the New World that the Spanish had not been able to liquefy. Scaliger knew about this metal because of news coming from the Americas, but it was also mentioned by José de Acosta (1539-1600) and by Álvaro Alonso Barba (1569-1662), who explored and worked in the Indies7.
However, it is not before the mid-18th century with the voyage of Antonio de Ulloa (1716-1795) and Jorge Juan y Santacilia (1713-1773) as part of the French Geodesic Mission that the first samples of platinum arrived in Europe and, with them, the interest of studying this resistant material. Ulloa traveled from Cartagena to Quito and, during this voyage, he went through Chocó, a region of what is today Colombia, where through gold panning was found another metal that looked like silver but was harder than gold and very resistant to heat: it was not possible to melt it with the technology of that time8. Ulloa, in the Relación histórica del viaje a la América meridional (1748)9, explains that in those mines there was a mineral that he called “Platina,” which we might translate as ‘petty silver’. It was very resistant, could not be broken, crumbled nor melted, so it was often necessary to abandon the mines because it was very expensive to extract gold in presence of this “Platina”10, a process undertaken by mercury amalgamation
Because of this official mention of the existence of the material, Ulloa is considered today as the discoverer of platinum. It is important to consider that in his report, Ulloa puts platinum as a subject of interest for science because of the difficulty of treating it like gold or silver. During the voyage back to Europe, the ship was seized by the British. Once in London, Ulloa met Martin Folkes (1690-1754) president of the Royal Society, and Ulloa became a member of the Society in 174611. The research on platinum was first presented in the Royal Society in 1750 by William Brownrigg (1711-1800), who said that he had not seen any previous accounts of this material, that platinum had an extremely high melting point and was resistant to borax. Two years later, Henrik Scheffer (1710-1759) published a detailed description of this material that he called “white gold”12.
Refractory Times
In England, one of the first to experiment to obtain platinum from the original mineral was Charles Wood (1702-1774). He took some intermediate steps with other metals, like silver, copper, lead, and tin, which he heated and finally treated with nitric acid, and so was able to isolate platinum. The middle decades of the century saw increased European experimental attention to platina by Andreas Sigismond Margraaf in Berlin, Pierre-Joseph Macquer in Paris and William Lewis in London. Lewis’s work, awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in the 1750’s, was then extended in his Commercium Philosophico-Technicum (1763), and it gave accountsof platina’s mineral and recent experimental history in addition to his own experimental work. 171 pages long, Lewis’s work was the most thorough and rigorous account of platina in the third quarter of the 18th– century, with lengthy analyses via acids and alkalis and other metals. He confirmed that platina was indeed an authentic new metal, miscible with other metals, soluble only in aqua regia, and he inevitably emphasized what he called its ‘refractory’ nature, that is its lack of chemical reactivity, its resistance to many standard chemical stimuli. Its high fusion point meant in addition that furnaces burnt or melted before platinum did, and he was further concerned that the most likely use of it, were enough platina producible, would be as an adulterant for gold, having deleterious effects on precious metals markets. Here Lewis echoed Spanish government fears. In France, some melting was achieved with the use of a powerful burning glass, but only in small quantities. It was proving singularly difficult to produce substantial quantities of platina. Samples were at times obtainable from Madrid, otherwise from alluvial platina grains smuggled across the Atlantic. The workability of metals depended on producing them in a form where they were malleable and ductile, that is capable of being molded, shaped, and capable of being drawn out, stretched. Although occasional platinum artefacts appeared at this time (sword hilts, decorative buttons, objets, d’art), platina was becoming an object-lesson in resistant materials history. The production method was known as ‘sintering’, a form of ‘powder metallurgy’ which combined heating and amalgamating platinum grains to produce a spongy mass, then compressing it. The process was not fully reliable, some samples containing mercury, because such samples had been subject to mercury amalgamation to extract gold. Other samples contained other impurities, and this could result in the platina mass becoming unworkably brittle.
In Spain, some progress was made, by the French chemist Pierre-Francois Chabaneau (1754-1842), who achieved a procedure to isolate the platinum from the mineral, dissolving it first in aqua regia, then creating a precipitate of ammonium chloroplatinate, and finally heating it until he obtained platinum. This procedure eventually allowed Spain to become a leader in the purification and use of platinum by the end of the 18th century10 . Spanish imperial policy was one of sequestration, but for two different reasons. Platina was first excluded from circulation for fears of its adulterant potential. It was then the subject of attempted monopoly as plausible processes promised to give it positive rather than negative value. Chabaneau’s lengthy encounters with platina nevertheless provide a singular and instructive episode, a punctuation point, from this refractory temporality. Having long persevered with it to no great success, and much frustration, he finally became enraged, and defenestrated his laboratory equipment.
Workability and Industrialization
This refractory history only concluded in the opening decades of the 19th century. The work of William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828), essentially still a sintering process, produced a method of processing platinum ore into malleable ingots and his analytical work (with James Smithson) discovered that the mineral not only contained platinum but also ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium, the ‘Platinum Group’ metals This now allowed quantities of relatively pure platina for manufacturing purposes, and early uses were for firing plates for small fire arms (high temperature resistance, immunity to oxidation) and jewelry. Its resistance to acids soon also moved platina into production of other chemicals, replacing the lead vat process for acid production with platina vats just as basic staple chemicals manufacture began a process of rapid and massive expansion to industrial scales of production. Platina’s refractory properties had now become precisely its entry points to the markets of industrializing economies. It was then during the second half of the 19th century that the economic and commercial aspects of platinum created intense interest in the techno-scientific communities of Europe, whose members started refining the ore and processing the metal to endow it with characteristics which catered for increasing industrial diversification13. This period also produced a further notable use of platinum, simultaneously symbolic and utilitarian and deriving from its exceptional stability and durability, as platinum assumed a role in metrical standardization. It is the material used for the fabrication of the International Prototype of the meter (IPm), and the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPk). Until 1889 the meter was the measure of a platinum bar, and from 1889 to 1960 the IPm was made of platinum-iridium alloy. For the IPk, the Kilogram was defined by the mass of a cylinder of the same platinum-iridium alloy fabricated in 1889. Platinum had become a standard-bearer.
Imperial and Post-Imperial Temporality.
Today, platinum is used mostly as a catalyzer: 45% of the annual production is used as a catalyst for vehicle emission control, 9% as a catalyst for petroleum refining, 34% of platinum annual production is used in jewelry, almost 3% in electrical applications, and the remaining 8% is used in a variety of fields, like medicine or glassmaking. Its market has been and potentially remains volatile. The extraction and processing of much the raw material is located in South Africa, and in terms of the politico-economic temporality inhabited by platinum in the 20th and 21st centuries, the imperial origins and development of the mineral wealth of South Africa, particularly by the British, has inevitably entangled platinum in the grievous history of imperial settlement, exploitative, servile labour by indigenous populations, and in the dire history of bantustans and apartheid.14 As South Africa moved into post-imperial times, these long-term legacies were not left behind, particularly as regards the extraction industries and their exogenous ownership and capitalization by anglo-american interests, which continue exploitative labour practices to minimize costs of the labour-intensive process of platinum extraction. This had a recent and tragic culmination, in the massacre at Marikana in 2012 of 34 platinum miners, many of them low-paid underground rock-drillers working in a difficult and unhealthy environment. The politics underlying the massacre were complex, involving two violently opposed labour unions, wild-cat strikes, the initial obduracy of the mining companies toward negotiation, and eventually the South African security forces responsible for the massacre. Settlements were eventually reached after striking spread throughout mining populations, and at the behest of high-level state interventions, but further strikes have persisted throughout the last decade. The massacre and its causes provide a profound temporal point, illustrative of the ways in which in which the action of long-term and persistent causes can accumulate the kind of massive charge resulting in such tragic punctuation. Noble metals at times entail ignoble human actions.
Conclusion
The platinum temporalities we have evoked are qualitatively different. Astro-physical and geological temporalities are the temporal outcomes of natural processes, and they provide the conditions of possibility for the temporalities of human interaction which follow. These natural temporalities continue wherever there are supernovas and geologies Because these are temporal extensions they may be narrated, temporal extension being an essential property of narrative discourse. As platinum enters the temporalities of human action, the temporalities change qualitatively. All stories have the temporal extension characteristic of narrative, but not all narratives are stories, because stories have plots, and not all narratives have plots. The temporalities of human interaction we have utilized have actual or potential plots mostly familiar to us all: the struggles to understand and control the refractory metal, the empires of discovery and exploitation, the comical punctuation point of Chabaneau’s rage, the tragic punctuation of the Marikana massacre. One of us (John) is soon required to give a speech at the wedding of his younger daughter. The wedding ceremony will involve the exchange of platinum rings, extending the longest temporality of human use of platinum. He will speak of platinum’s stability and durability, its resistance to time itself, appropriate symbolically to represent hopes for a marriage; and he will think that the noble metal can serve noble as well as ignoble human purposes.
- K Krishan, « Kinetics of void-lattice formation in metals », Nature, 287-5781, 1980, p. 480 481. [↩]
- Jean-Pierre Lorand, Ambre Luguet et Olivier Alard, « Platinum-group elements: a new set of key tracers for the Earth’s interior », Elements, 4-4, 2008, p. 247 252. [↩]
- [iii] S . A Hiemstra, « The role of collectors in the formation of the platinum deposits in the Bushveld Complex », Canadian Mineralogist, 17, 1979, p. 469 482. [↩]
- Grant Cawthorn, Stephen Barnes, Christian Ballhaus et Kreshimir Malitch, « Platinum-group element, chromium, and vanadium deposits in mafic and ultramafic rocks », Economic Geology, 100, 2005, p. 215 249. [↩]
- Jaime Galvis Vergara, « El Origen del Platino en el Chocó », Geología Colombiana, 20, p. 107 112. [↩]
- Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericarum exercitationum, Frankfurt, Wechel, Marnius & Aubrius, 1592. [↩]
- Donald McDonald et Leslie Hunt, A history of platinum and its allied metals, London, Johnson Matthey, 1982, p. 14. [↩]
- Andrea Aristizábal Fúquene, « El platino: contribuciones sociohistóricas y científicas desde el siglo XVIII. Parte I », Educación química, 26-2, 2015, p. 146 151. [↩]
- Antonio De Ulloa et Jorge Juan, Relación histórica del viaje a la América meridional, Madrid, Antonio Marín, 1748. [↩]
- A. Aristizábal Fúquene, « El platino: contribuciones sociohistóricas y científicas desde el siglo XVIII. Parte I »…, op. cit. [↩] [↩]
- D. McDonald et L. Hunt, A history of platinum and its allied metals…, op. cit., p. 17. [↩]
- [xii] Leslie Hunt, « Swedish Contributions to the Discovery of Platinum », Platinum Metals Review, 24-1, 1980, p. 31 39. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- This highly compressed account of recent South African platinum mining history is indebted to the work of the contributors to ‘White Gold: new class and community struggles in the South African platinum belt.’ Special Issue, Review of African Political Economy, 46, 2015. Other articles from this journal in the 2010’s are of immediate interest for platinum’s recent history. [↩]

