Retired metal merchant, Anthony Lipmann, illuminates trading for the young entering the world of metals.
Cabinet at Lipmann Walton ©Anthony Lipmann
It’s all very well giving unwanted advice to the young via this column (as I have been doing for a couple of years), but how about entering a classroom and facing thirty sullen 16-year-olds?
That was my job this week at The King Alfred School, High-bridge – the main state school in a down-at-heel West of England seaside town, with school buildings dating from the 1950s and 1,500 inmates looking to be inspired by exhausted and underpaid teachers.
But I like a challenge, and so I was curious to find out how my words of wisdom would go down in the real world.
The invitation was to give a talk about our world of minor metals first to the economics class, and then business and chemistry. An hour each.
I debated with myself whether to take props. In the end I took my ukulele, a 1 kilo bar of silver, two off-cuts of zirconium sheet, and two Union flags on sticks.
I opened with a photograph of our office metals cabinet and was surprised by an almost imperceptible intake of breath at the sight of it. “This is the glass cabinet in my office”, I told the young people, “every piece is a sample of one of the most unusual elements in the periodic table, taken from a real parcel of metal. If you were at my office, I would put a lump in your hand.” A piece of tungsten in one and silicon in the other maybe. To show how one is dense and heavy, the other voluminous and light. I told them about the toothpaste-shaped tube of indium (so soft you can cut it with a penknife) and yet most likely present as indium tin oxide in invisible circuits in the smartphone screen in your pocket, the phial of thallium (a teaspoon of which if ingested equally would most likely kill you all and be tonight’s good excuse not to do homework).
That thallium, I tell them, despite its toxicity, is still needed; a molecule doped in each lens in the array on your optical scanner or school photocopier. Its purpose is to unbend the light and so reproduce your classwork pixel by pixel. I hold up my own mobile phone with its broken glass and wonder aloud, “Is it not amazing that there is not a person in the globe who knows how this works?” I mean, not how to turn it on and off, but a single human who knows how every part of it works. What a wonderful triumph of human collaboration!
Then I point to the zirconium Van Arkel bar glinting in the photo with its obvious crystal structure, which spurs me to mention how not more than two miles away from here, across the Bridgwater estuary, the UK’s largest infrastructure project would not be built were it not for the zirconium fuel assemblies containing Uranium 235 pellets. I digress briefly into describing how through these zirconium tubes neutrons are directed to bombard the U235 atoms, how the element is one of very few low neutron absorbers, allowing the neutron to execute its purpose of splitting the weak uranium atom, releasing more neutrons to split more atoms in a controlled manner to release the energy that heats the water that turns the turbine and so — in due course — will produce 3.2GW of constant baseload power for the next 60 years. The plant visible, from Highbridge and Burnham’s answer to Nice’s Promenade des Anglais.
But you can only hold a young person’s interest for so long by strafing them with facts. Time for the ukulele. My idea is to play and sing Tom Lehrer’s The Elements while instructing them to call out any element they like with the promise I’ll tell them something about it. Luckily, a girl doing Chemistry class calls out “strontium!” This leads me to mention that this is the only element to be named after a Scottish town “Strontian”. Even more fortunately I also traded it, so I can talk about how it is reduced from celestine in China, how readily it oxidises (like calcium), how if you were to put some out on the desks it would in a few hours turn to ash. I also then say how it is usually placed in hermetically sealed tins (like baked beans in cans – except made of aluminium) and how, as the stuff is needed in aluminium-strontium alloys, the can is thrown into the melt. Another student shouts out “arsenic!”
So I tell them about Cornish Pasties – how the tin miners in Cornwall would carry their lunch underground holding the crimped expendable edge to avert poisoning themselves with arsenic particles found while mining tin and copper. I tell them how the Victorians loved green wallpaper coloured by pigments of arsenic oxide which slowly killed them through inhalation of fumes while writing their novels. Then someone asked about dysprosium, and I was on a roll telling them about how just 1% is used in permanent magnets to increase their thermal properties and prevent wind turbines catching alight from overheating.
“What is my favourite element?” someone asked. “Rhenium”, I replied, describing the travails by which I came to be involved with this metal. “It’s very dense, 21 grams per cm3,” and, taking my Union flags and stretching out my arms, I describe a cubic metre. “In this space is 21 mt. The whole world production of rhenium per year is just three cubic metres worth — and it could all fit in your classroom.” Why does the world need it? Where does it come from? Who buys it? Who sells it? Who melts it? Who engineers with it? That is our job — to be interested in all that stuff and to know it.
I show a picture of the small 2 kgs Russian crucible in our cabinet made out of rhenium, that came in a parcel of scrap in the 1990s. “That was worth $600 in 1993, and in 2008 it was worth $25,000, and today its worth $2,000.” “Why didn’t you sell it?” they ask? “Because it looks like a tooth mug, and I like it,” I say.
We are coming to the close. Teachers do this work every day. I have done two hours, and I am wrung out. I have only admiration for the teachers, and also admiration for the young people bothered enough to listen. For a last game I suggest they call out any country in the world and I will tell them something about the resources of that country. “Russia!” someone says. (That’s easy). “Slovakia!” another shouts. (More difficult but not too bad). “Somalia!” a kid shouts from the back. They’ve got me.
Time to go home — and a deserved closing victory for the students, having generously given me their time.
By Anthony Lipmann
