I’ve been doing a lot of reading about silver recently (more correctly, a lot of the things I’ve been reading have written about silver) and I’m perplexed by one thing - silver does’t combine with other metals.
Not that there’s a problem with that in and of itself, but as I read more, I realized that
silver is, for all intents and purposes a “scrap” product, that is, when other ores are mined and smelted, silver often runs off (if that’s the right term)
I can’t seem to find any 100% silver for sale, or even any mention. “Pure” silver seems to be .995 and is the most common and I’ve read about people using .999 for various purposes. Why not 100%?
My thoughts:
the statement that silver can’t be combined with other metals is incorrect. I figure this meant that there were no silver alloys, but since silver is often found in veins with other metals, this shoots that theory
The .999 is due to some CYA on the part of the mining companies (or whoever’s assaying the silver), in effect saying, “we can’t say for 100% that there are things other than silver atoms in this sample, but if there are, our instrumentation is not sensitive enough to find it.” I recall my high school Physics teacher saying that a given measurement was accurate only to the last digit. Could this .999 business be this in action?
“Gold readily alloys with silver in all proportions, and the resulting products are harder, more fusible, and more sonorous than gold.” – Mellor’s Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic Chemistry, vol. III, pp. 5764-5. Silver also alloys with copper and, I’m sure, other metals. Before they started jacketing “silver” coins (actually copper alloy), US silver coins were all silver alloy.
IANAmetallurgist, but I would imagine that the answer is simply that 0.999 is pure enough.
To guarantee almost total purity (eg silicon for microchips has to be extremely pure) you need to go through all manner of expensive purifying steps.
So I’d say, yes, it’s a bit of CYA. The molten silver may have picked up some other bits and pieces, but they can guarantee that impurities are present at less than 0.1%.
It is wrong to say that you can’t combine silver with other metals - sterling silver, for instance, is an alloy of 92.5% (minimum) silver and the remainder usually copper.
In any case, the fact that the silver isn’t in a compound doesn’t mean a given amount of it is 100% pure. If the ore contains another substance with a similar melting point it’ll be hard to get all of either out of combination.
Silver does combine with other elements. Although it’s far more abundant in nature than gold is, most of that is in the form of some compound, often as a byproduct in other metals’ ores. Before people learned to smelt, pure silver was actually more valuable than gold.
I’d hazard a guess that you’d have a hard time finding any metal available at 100% purity. Metals are all mashed together in the ground, and no separation technique is 100% effective. That’s just life.
Unless I am thinking to much into this, that is exactly right. I am assuming that by saying it does not combine is the same as saying that it only forms metalic bonds and not ionic or polar bonds with other elements.
Then again, that is a type of bond. Am I far off base thinking that because the electrons will only be decentralized that it is correct to say silver will not bond in the polar or ionic sense?
I think you’re on the right track, but I think you might be confused.
Solid metals (by which I mean the extended structure of metal atoms in the zero oxidation state) aren’t held together by “metallic bonds.” There really aren’t any bonds holding a metal together. Rather, the valance eletrons exist in band that sort of distrubuted evenly across the entire metal. I am not sure how much of a role this plays in keeping the metal together. I believe metals are mostly held together by the simple fact that the atoms are too heavy and don’t have enough thermal kick to get away. Of course, if you heat them up enough, eventually they will begin to slide easily into a liquid and eventually blast off into a gas.
But I think you’re right in saying that silver won’t for ionic or covalant bonds with other metals. Although it will readily do it with a host of non-metals. This is generally true of most metals. You don’t really see compounds with molecules that have metal-metal bonds. But salts are an example of a very common class of compounds that have bonds between metals and non-metals. And there are plenty of silver salts.
I suspect it’s the “shaker” that’s used to mix the amalgam. If you’ve been in a small dental office you can hear them mixing it up fresh as they’re working on your teeth.
Pepper Mill used to be a dental assistant, but I never heard the term “wigglebug” used to describe this. Maybe it’s a regionalism.
Silver most assuredly forms ionic bonds with many nonmetals, like chlorine, ie, silver chloride, a common chemical in labortories. Most metals can’t enter into covalent bonds commonly, anyway. And a metal-metal ionic bond most definatley wouldn’t be naturally occuring, since metals exist in the plus something state, which means they ionically bond to something in the negatively something state, like silver (plus 1) and chlorine (minus 1).
