Elemental oddities: (Why it Tin Sn?)

Element Oddities: 11 Confusing Chemical Symbols Explained

        Sometimes I just get to a sidetrack I feel I have to take. Here’s one stemming from a trivia question from last night. The question was “what is the common name for the element which appears in the Periodic Table (chart of the elements) as “Sn”?

        I correctly remembered from Nuclear Power School, over 50 years ago, that it is Tin. It was difficult to convince the other five team members, who thought the name had to begin with “T” but I persevered, they conceded, and we won the points. The reason they balked, was that the symbol isn’t really indicative of the word we use today. This prompted me to look at the other cases where we use a name which is seemingly not related to the thing it names.

        Not surprisingly, there are 11 Latin named elements, all metals. I say “not surprisingly” because metals were far more interesting, useful, and more tangible in most cases to early observers than, say, any of the gases or other less plentiful elements. Additionally, pure versions of some are, or can be, naturally occurring as elemental, volcanic or even meteoric sources, Silver and Gold occur in veins in rocks while others were observed as the unintended consequence of fire. So, ignore this if you don’t like science, otherwise, here goes.  

Sodium … Natrium (Na) Sodium's (Latin name, 'natrium', derives from the Greek 'nítron' (a name for sodium carbonate). Melts (boils actually) at 98F. Oxidizes, releases hydrogen, and usually explodes in air. Not good for any use in elemental form. In fact. elemental sodium is stored under oil to prevent interaction with air.

Gold … Aurium (Au) … melts at 1984 F, soft, malleable, good bling, lousy weapon.

Lead … Plumbum (Pb)… melts at 621 F.  A wood fire (not charcoal) burns as high as 1112 F, so Lead or Tin in earth near the fire would have melted and been left and discovered as a hardened bit soft metal in the ashes. All the other “weapons grade” metals would have had to wait for the advent of charcoal, which burns at 2010 F.

Potassium… Kalium (K) ...  melts at 146.3   very soft can be cut with a knife.   

Mercury … Hydrargyrum (Hg) Liquid down to minus 39 F! original Latin name was actually ‘argentum vivum’ (living silver), but Latin later borrowed from the Greek ‘hydrargyros’ (liquid silver). Looks like silver and was called quicksilver by alchemists.

Iron – Ferrum (Fe) ... melts at 2800 F, “weapons grade” hard but melt point is high

Copper – Cuprum (Cu) ...  melts at 1984 F, harder than Gold, still soft enough to be marginal as weapon material.

Silver – Argentum (Ag) ...  Melts at 1763 F, good bling, poor weapon.

Tin … Stannum (Sn) ... melts at 449 F, soft in elemental form, but when someone accidently mixed it into a melt of Copper, the Bronze Age was born.

Antimony… Stibium (Sb) ...melts at 1167, soft, malleable early use was ground up as medicine and as a makeup base (??)

Tungsten … Wolfram (W)  melts (if you can do it) at 6,192 F, hard, but difficult to fabricate, good light bulb filament, alloyed with steel, (iron and carbon) makes cutting tools for cutting other metals, would have made great swords but no one in the past could melt it.

        I was curious (as I occasionally am) as to the naming of Tin.  As it turns out, all of the metals were known at the time of Rome  and were given Latin names, and these were kept into the (relatively) modern, principally because snotty European “natural philosophers” (scientists) published in Greek and/or Latin. It was all metals (as you can see), because it wasn’t until much later that any gasses or rare earths were isolated, identified as elements and named.

        However, even when smelting copper, or gold or silver, other metals at other melting points were sometimes in the mix. Copper was probably the earliest, in a close tie with lead, because of their (relatively) low melting points.  Both were probably identified while smelting gold or vice versa. Copper and gold decorative items, (think small statues and pendants) dating as far back as 7000 BC, were made from elemental veins of both metals near the surface, probably as a result of ancient volcanic temperatures. It was the innovation of charcoal that revolutionized the use and availability of copper and then, soon after, it’s harder alloy, Bronze.

       The World’s earliest known (“known”, not necessarily the “first”) smelting site is in Serbia and dates to c. 5000 BCE. Early furnaces could only create a copper-rich slag which had to be further treated in a clay crucible, but with the development of charcoal-burning furnaces (sort of like brick kilns) and the use of bellows, 2190 F  (still below the melt point of iron) was reachable and copper and gold smelting became more common.

       As far back as 3500 years ago, in the Mid-east, those smelting copper (used for a brief period for weapons, although really too soft. ) found that  when tin was mixed in, even in small amounts such as 2 to 3 % of the mix, the resulting metal mixture, or alloy, became much harder. Welcome to the Bronze age! The Romans mined both tin and lead in Britain, and Romans even had some lead pipes in higher class homes.  Lead was one of the earliest metals discovered by the human race and was in use by 3000 B.C. The ancient Romans used lead for making water pipes and lining baths, and the plumber who joins and mends pipes takes his name from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead.

        Iron would have been found from early on, and appears in very small Egyptian  beads or images, but is meteoric in origin, with nickel mixed in, not made on earth. By 1600 BCE, the earliest crude iron furnaces were being developed. These prototypical forced air operations were fed with iron oxide (think rust) in ore concentrations which were placed into furnaces of brick, layered with charcoal.             

      After several hours with a bellows forcing  air to boost the charcoal’s already high combustion temperature, the molten iron, chemically reduced to pure iron by the CO (carbon monoxide) in the furnace, would be drained via a plug in the bottom of the furnace into a stone trough mold, or similar container. Turning it into weapons still required reheating until it was malleable and then beating it into shape. Welcome to the Iron Age, which seems to have happened in numerous and divergent places world-wide, the earliest probably in the Mid-east.

         We know the Hittites, based originally in Anatolia (Asian Turkey), used iron weapons by 1200 BCE.  In Britain, prior to Roman conquest, iron was in use from as early as 850 BCE. Vikings used iron-rich, naturally occurring ore called “Bog iron” in their furnaces as well. Bog iron is so called because it forms in low lying poorly drained areas, which if they dry a bit are better known as peat bogs. What happens is that in areas like much of the UK coastal regions and Scandinavia as well, water draining from elevated areas rich in iron stagnates in these bogs. The bogs’ chemical constituents produce an anerobic bacteria which prevents oxygen from reaching the elemental iron so little or no oxidation (rust) occurs. These pure iron atoms cluster (“accrete”) in spongy clumps. These semi-porous clusters of iron, much purer than almost any mined ore, gave the Vikings and Celts a jump start in the smelting process. Rather than digging for iron ore, Bog Iron can simply be picked up.   

          The Celts, who had an iron culture in mainland Europe for centuries, brought Bog Iron, and the technology to smelt it, to Wales and Ireland (plenty of Bogs!) as they were pushed west by Angles and later Romans.  The Iron Age began in China during the Zhou Dynasty's reign around 600 BCE, however, earlier dynasties like the Shang first used iron during the Bronze Age, but it was rare meteoric iron. Being scarce, it was not used to equip armies until after the 600 BCE figure.

        India's Iron Age emerged in an era of transition known as the Vedic period (ca. 1,500-600 BCE). The period It gets its name from the Vedas, which are Hindu liturgical texts containing details of life during this period that have been interpreted to be historical and constitute the primary sources for understanding the age,much like some westerners refer to the Bible as historical writing. The Vedic period covers both the end of the Bronze Age following the collapse of the Harappan civilization around 1,400 CE and the start of the Iron Age.

        During this period of transition from Empire (Harappan) to smaller more concentrated local fiefdoms, the first Indian culture to start systematically smelting and using iron appeared. They are generally referred to as the “Painted Grey Ware” culture, after their characteristic style of pottery. Thriving from about 1,200 to 600 BCE along the Indus and Ganges river valleys, the Painted Grey Ware people began smelting and using iron for agricultural tools, domesticating horses, and re-organizing into more complex social and political units.

        In the western hemisphere there has been no reliable evidence in support of indigenous metallurgy beyond gold, silver and copper, (all lower temperature melts) although in an  interesting side note, beginning with the La Tolita culture circa 600 BCE,  Ecuadorian cultures mastered the soldering of platinum  (Pl, named in the modern period) grains through alloying with copper, gold and silver, producing platinum-surfaced rings, handles, ornaments and utensils. This was unknown technology to Europeans as late as the 1700s! These ancient uses of platinum didn’t consist of the pure metal itself, since Platinum melts above 3000 F! They likely were made from commonly found platinum mixtures (or “alloys”) that included palladium or iridium, probably of volcanic origin. A simple example of this reduction in melting point when a metal is alloyed is sen in common solder, which is an alloy of lead, tin and antimony. Lead melts at 621F, Tin at 449 F, and antimony at 1167 F, but alloyed into solder, the compound melts at about 350 F, easily obtainable with an electric soldering iron.

       There is an interesting recent possibility however for the “Iron saga” in pre-Colombian North America. Satellite images have shown what appears to be a Viking settlement of some size on the southern end of Newfoundland, far south of L’anse au meadows, which was once considered to be the only “permanent” (as in Vikings lived there) Viking site in North America. Excavation has bared what seems to be part of an iron smelter, where Viking settlers made iron, probably from melting Bog iron which is plentiful in the region. In addition to a stone hearth of Viking style, slag globules have been found, indicating the iron smelting process occurred there. This is probably the first iron “made” in the West, long after the Iron age began.

        Finally, just because again I find it interesting, there are things about metals which sometime defy what seems logical. For example, Steel is the strongest alloy in the world, but because of the carbon used in the alloy, it melts at a lower temperature than Iron. Steel – harder and stronger yet melts at lower temp. Wha? Or Aluminum, steel, and nickel, none close to as strong as Tungsten, yet, properly mixed – strength of tungsten, same weight! Another the odd effect, yet commonly used is the addition of carbon and nickel to iron. carbon is soft, smudgy soot, yet properly admixed it produces carbide, one of the hardest cutting tools known. Soft copper mixed with even softer tin yields bronze - harder than either. Go figure.

         These and other odd effects happen generally because metals have crystalline structures, meaning their atoms form or align in geometric (crystalline) patterns. This could be a 3-D cube (like a die)  with an atom at all the corners(8 atoms). It could also, depending on the metal and its temperature have another atom in the middle of the cube (9 atoms) or an atom in the center of each face of the cube (14 atoms),. It could also be several other more or less complex geometric forms with similar variations, even 3D hexagons!  These positions of the atoms in the crystal lattices of the same metal can even change as temperature varies. When a metal(s) is alloyed with another, however, instead of forming a chemical compound, the properties of the whole can change but the individual metal atoms, instead of chemically bonding with one another, simply form new integral (and different) crystalline structures (like an iron crystal with several carbon atoms in the spots iron once held) and probably 
 with new properties. 

       A Sodium ion bonding with a Chlorine ion in a chemical reaction  forms ordinary salt, which is not explosive like Sodium or deadly like Chlorine, but instead forms edible salt, essential to life. In alloys this doesn’t happen, atoms just occupy different geometries in the crystals sometimes with unexpected results. Metallurgists are about as close to Alchemists as exist in the modern era.       

 OK I’m done. This isn’t political or humorous, like most of what I write, but I think it is interesting, so there.