Elementymology & Elements Multidict

memory peg	Very bright, dense white metal melting point 1772 °C; 3222 °F boiling point 3827 °C; 6921 °F density 21.45 g/cc; 1339.08 pounds/cubic foot
(Described by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1557), and Antonio de Ulloa y Garcia de La Torre (1748) 1750 sir Charles Wood (& William Brownrigg and sir William Watson), England
platina (del Pinto) = small silver (beads) of the river Pinto (Spanish)

Impure, native platinum seems to have been used unwittingly by ancient Egyptian craftsmen in place of silver, and was certainly used to make small items of jewellery by the Indians of Ecuador before the Spanish conquest. To the South American Indians Platinum was available only in the form of fine, hand-separated grains which must have been fabricated by ingenious, if crude, powder metallurgy. Despite being worked with some skill by those Indians over 1,000 years ago, it was not until after the Spanish conquest of the New World during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that news reached Europe of a new white metal with unusual properties.

The first European reference to Platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558) as a description of a metal impossible to melt found in Central American mines between Darién and Mexico (note):

Præterea scitio, in Fundaribus, qui tractus est inter Mexicum, & Dariem, fodinas esse orichalci: quòd nullo igni, nullis Hispanicis artibus hactenus liquescere potuit. Adhæc non omnibus metallis uerbum, liquescere, uidemus conuenire.

By the end of the 17th century, the Spanish conquistadors invaded the Chocó region (now Colombia). They started developing the riversoil looking for gold and to their big surprise they found some gray looking beads together with the gold. They called those little silver beads "Platina" meaning small silver (diminutive of plata = silver). They became known as platina del Pinto, that is, granules of silvery material from the Pinto River, a tributary of the San Juan River in the Chocó region of Colombia.

The Spanish astronomer and naval officer don Antonio de Ulloa y Garcia de La Torre (1716-1795) was in 1735 with don Jorge Juan y Santacilia (1713-1773) appointed by King Philip V as members of a scientific expedition which the French Académie des Sciences was sending to Peru to measure a degree of the meridian at the equator. They remained there for nearly ten years. Among other things, he observed the Platina del Pinto, the unworkable metal found with Gold in New Granada (now Colombia). This metal was so difficult to separate from Gold that the labour wasn't worth it. When goldminers found those little silverlike beads they just tossed them away. The native inhabitants believed that if they give these beads back to the river,the river would take care of them for a further ripening proces and after a while they should return as little gold beads.

In 1745, having finished their scientific labours, Juan and De Ulloa returned to Spain on different ships, to cover the loss of their papers. De Ulloa's frigate Déliverance was attacked by privateers and finally captured by the British navy. He was brought to London and his papers confiscated, but was fortunately befriended by members of the Royal Society and was made a Fellow of that Society in 1746 when his papers were returned. With Juan, he published in 1748 the Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional the account of his expedition in which he refers to platinum. (note).

In 1741, the British metallurgical scientist Sir Charles Wood got some grains of "Platina" on Jamaica and brought those to England in 1741 in the hope to find a commercial application for this metal. They were researched and described by William Brownrigg (1712-1800), physician, chemist and country gentleman of the town of Whitehaven in Cumberland, in a letter to the English physicist Sir William Watson (1715-1787), who also received some of these grains. Watson read Brownrigg's account for the Royal Society of London on 13 December 1750. Here Platinum was first described as a new metal (note). The full text of this contribution from the Philosophical Transactions is at the bottom of this page.
Wood and Brownrigg did not know about De Ulloa's work, but Watson knew and he translated it at the end of his paper. It became known as "white gold" (a term now used to describe an Gold/Palladium alloy) and the "eighth metal" (the seven metals Gold, Silver, Mercury, Copper, Iron, Tin, and Lead having been known since ancient times).
In 1763 William Lewis described the grains of the Royal Society as easy meltable alloys (note). Also Carl Graf von Sickingen described them as an alloy of Copper, Tin, and Platinum (note).

William Hyde Wollaston and Smithson Tennant, who had befriended at Cambridge, formed in 1800 a secret partnership to share expenses and income from ventures in commercially production of platinum. They knew that malleable platinum, if it could be produced, could replace gold in a number of applications where an inert, noble metal was required. They worked for over 15 years in the treatment of South American ores. First they intended to market small Platinum implements such as crucibles and evaporating pans, but later large markets opened up in the gunnery business and sulphuric acid manufacture (platinum boilers). Sales of platinum up to the 1820s amounted to about £30,000, some shared with Tennant until his death in 1815, but most going to Wollaston himself (Usselman, 2001).
The process to purify platinum was developed by Wollaston. The crude platinum ore was selectively dissolved into aqua regia (a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids), precipitated by sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride), and heated to give residual platinum powder. The resulting solution was initially thrown away. However, Wollaston studied this solution leading to the discovery of Palladium (1802), and of Rhodium (1804). Tennant examined the insoluble residue and found Osmium (1803) and Iridium (1803). Forty years later Ruthenium was found in this waste.

Watson (after Wood and Brownrigg) and De Ulloa named the metal with the Spanish name "platina del pinto", or shorter just "platina". By this name it was obviously known in South America. A variant name mentioned by Wood is "Juan blanco". Henrik Theophilus Scheffer (1752) named the new metal "white gold" since it was very much like gold, or the "seventh metal" (note). This name is still in use in jewelry, and is the official name of the metal in Greek. Claude Morin, however, considered it as the eighth metal, counting mercury as a metal instead of a semi-metal as his colleagues did (note).

The Greek name means "white gold", just as the former Dutch name witgoud (still in use for jewelry) and the Japanese name (the two Chinese characters are 白 haku, byaku = white and 金 kin, kon = gold).

Many websites with periodical systems write that Scaliger discovered Platinum in 1735 (or even 1750) in Italy! Others give "De Ulloa 1735" as date and name of discovery, which is incorrect too. The year has to be 1748.
When the first European description is considered as the "discovery", it should be "Scaliger 1557", the first description as a new metal would be "Brownrigg 1750".

• Platinum. Gmelins Handbuch der anorganische Chemie, 8. Aufl.; System-Nummer 68 (1951).
• Gold and Siver Mines.com, "More About Platinum" (on-line).
• Hunt, L.B. Platinum Metals Rev. 24,31 9 (1980)
• Petrus, Tracy, "Platinum - Nature's Most Precious Metal". 2001 at http://www.talkwithtracy.com/platinum.htm (now gone).
• Robertson Research Int'l Ltd., Dr. Rob's Chem4all, Quote of the week
• Usselman, Melvyn, "A secret history of platinum". Chembytes e-zine, December 2001 (on-line).
• Weeks, Mary Elvira, Discovery of the Elements, comp. rev. by Henry M. Leicester (Easton, Pa.: Journal of Chemical Education, 1968), pp. 385-407.
• McDonald, Donald, A History of Platinum. Johnson Matthey & Co Ltd., 1960. (not seen).

Philosophical Transactions 46 (1749/50), pp. 584-596.

Authorship is complicated: William Watson reads on 13 December 1750 to the Royal Society a letter (I) and a memoir (II) from William Brownrigg; in the memoir (II) Brownrigg describes experiments done by Charles Wood, which were repeated by himself. Watson adds himself a extract from the book by Antonio de Ulloa (III). On 20 December a short note was added by Emanuel Mendes da Costa (IV) and finally, on 28 February 1751 Watson reads a second letter of Brownrigg (V). [p. 584]

I. Extract of a Letter from William Brownrigg M.D. F.R.S. to Wm. Watson F.R.S.

II. Memoirs of a Semi-metal called Platina di Pinto, found in the Spanish West Indies.

Specimens of Platina presented to the Royal Society.

No. 1 Platina, in Dust, or minute Masses, mixed with Black Sand, and other Impurities, as brought from the Spanish West Indies.
2. Native Platina, separated from the above mention'd Impurities.
3. Platina that has been fused.
4. Another Piece of Platina, that was Part of the Pummel of a Sword.

III. To the Royal Society.

IV.

V. Extract of a Letter from Wm. Brownrigg M.D. and F.R.S. to Wm. Watson F.R.S. containing some further Experiments upon the Platina.