Osmium was briefly used as the first type of metal filament in light bulbs. It was better than a carbon filament, but the Osmium was so expensive back then (circa 1920s) you got a refund if you returned a blown bulb for recycling. Also thieves would break into houses to steal Osmium light bulbs. The brand name Osram came from this use of Osmium. Then Tungsten was found to work better as a filament and was a lot cheaper (at the time), and this lead to the brand name Tungsram which technically still exists but they went back to using Osram. Originally a Hungarian company.
Interesting, but only half-true. Osram has always been a German company. The name Osram was registered as a trademark by the "Deutsche Gasglühlicht Anstalt" ("German gas light association") located in Berlin in 1906! They later named the company after the product. The German name of Tungsten is Wolfram, hence the international standard symbol for tungsten is W. So Osram is a port-manteau of "OSmium" and "WolfRAM". From the late 1970s to 2013 Osram was owned by Siemens and is now the subsidiary of an Austrian corporation. Tungsram is the Hungarian company you're talking about, they never used Osmium in their light bulbs but tungsten only. Their product- and later company name is made up from the English and Hungarian name of Tungsten "TUNGsten" and "VolfRAM".
Osmium is used to make other metals and alloys harder. It's always used in very small amount. As a rule of thumb, anything over 0.1% will make the alloy to hard and brittle. Rarely used at more than 0.01% for pretty much any use. The highest concentration is used to make turn table needles that are almost as durable as the diamond ones.
I learnt about the deadly consequences of this as a teenager when my chemistry teacher dropped his display piece and immediately ordered the class out of the lab to be safe. That was fun 🙄😏
Even if he dropped it, it probably broke into a couple of pieces. It is osmium dust that will cause the problems but at least he took precautions anyway just to be safe. Chemistry was my favorite class as you can tell :)
@@KickAssScience92 You're not going to make osmium dust. I just recently tried grinding up some tiny crystal fragments of osmium into powder with a tungsten rod, and even though tungsten is harder than osmium, it still got scratched to hell. Also failed to make osmium powder.
Osmium tetroxide is the standard fixative for biological material in transmission electron microscopy. It binds to lipids and gives superior contrast, especially when the material is post stained with uranium acetate.
@@michaelrenper796 I worked with these substances for more that 60 years, am now 82 and am still in relatively good health. Safe laboratory practice is always a good idea.
@@nettewilson5926 The uranium acetate is basically harmless. If eaten it's mildly poisonous, much less than lead (but still poisonous, causes kidney damage, don't eat it.) The radiation is low, and made of alpha particles so completely harmless outside the body, and less dangerous than the heavy metal toxicity even if eaten. Using osmium tetroxide is the only really dangerous part of the procedure. It polymerizes the unsaturated fatty bonds of your body, turning them black and impervious. There are a lot of unsaturated fats in your eyes and lungs. Neither organ works well when polymerized.
In high school I had a part-time job where they kept osmium tetroxide in a mini-fridge in one of the lab rooms. There was a post-it note saying "Don't put your lunch in here!" with a skull and crossbones, crudely drawn with a ball point pen. None of us put our lunch in there.
That is oddly terrifying. Once I kept a bottle of bromine in the freezer because it kept outgrowing and corroding the shelf it was on. The tiny amount that did outgass from the bottle was enough to prevent mold from growing on anything in the fridge portion. OsO4 plus lunch now that would be too spicy for me.😅
It should be noted that sintered osmium is at risk of breaking and shattering, not fully dense osmium (the beaded form). Fully dense osmium beads are anything but fragile. You can strike it with a hammer many many times and it will remain entirely intact. I had to jerry-rig myself a tungsten hammer and even then it took 8 whacks to break it.
Correct the sintered osmium is fragile. Wow it took that many hits to break it! What size were the beads. The ones I have are the arc melted 1 gm beads from Luciteria. They also have osmium bullion bars but they are sintered.
@@KickAssScience92 It was a five gram test bead that I've used for hundreds of chemical tests. It's also worth noting that osmium, being a platinum group metal, is ridiculously corrosion resistant. There's very little it reacts with. We tested osmium in manganese heptoxide and it took 30 minutes just to dissolve 1 milligram.
@@KickAssScience92 Hi I was thinking of buying these beads, are they worth it? Can those beads be used to form jewellry to have constant contact with human skin? Thanks for the video.
@@ejkalegal3145 Thanks for watching. The beads are available on Ebay or Luciteria. Luciteria sells 1 gram beads for around $50 USD. Osmium in this form is safe to handle.
@@ejkalegal3145 Yeah, I've been wearing an osmium pendant 24/7 for nearly a year now. I can say it's perfectly safe for skin contact, and I also have no skin allergies with it.
Lots of very intelligent people in this thread. Reading through the comments I learned just as much as the video. I appreciate the sharing of knowledge.
Worth mentioning is the use of its hardness by the Osmiriod pen company to slow the wear in the tips of pen nibs. I remember the brand from my school days in the Sixties.
Wow that takes me back!! I was in secondary school from 1958 to 1963 and used an Osmiroid fountain pen the whole time. I remember using little bottles of Quink ink to fill the pen although I can't remember how I did it. There was a little lever on the side so I suppose I used that. There were two types of fountain pen available, the Parker pen and the Osmiroid. I liked the Osmirois because it had a selection of wide nibs for my Italic style handwriting.
@@patrickcorliss8878 Well, well, I also learned to write Italics around 1962 - 63, here in NZ. I was quite happy with it, but I believe all the parents thought our Headmaster was a bit odd and too progressive, what with his Classical music and Yoga, LOL! The lever compressed a rubber bulb inside. You raised the lever, put the nib in the ink, dropped the lever and the bulb expanded to suck up the ink. Blotting paper after that!
You can grow crystal clusters like thus by putting osmium sponge, osmium tetroxide, and a tiny amount of iodine in a sealed quartz tube. Heat the osmium tetroxide/sponge side gently to get it to make vapor in the tube, heat the other end very strongly. The crystals will grow on the hot end. 😁
Osmium was also used to tip Gold Nibs used in Fountain pens decades ago. It was prized for its abrasion resistance when applied to just the tip of the gold nibs. It was fused to the gold nibs via a high voltage electrical arc.
Its use in TEM preparation involves using OsO4 solutions to stain tissue blocks. It is generally purchased inside sealed glass ampules as a clear fluid = a small amount of the material dissolved in water. The ampules are broken open and the fluid used immediately and then disposed of (disposal of such a toxic material is really dicey as well). This needs to be done in a fume hood or in some other way to isolate the gas. To show students how nasty the stuff is, and to be able to recognize it what was happening if some was accidentally spilled, a prof I once had, had us students stand across a room from a small amount (a few grams ) of an OsO4 solution in a small beaker placed in a fume hood, with the hood door open and the ventilation off. Within a few minutes, a strong but very odd, metallic taste occurred - mostly on the sides and back of the tongue which started to hurt, about at this time one's eyes also began to ache/hurt. A that point the beaker was covered, the fume hood cover closed and the hood started so as to remove the vapors. Windows were opened and fans started to ventilate the room. Recovery took about 5 minutes. OsO4 sublimates (evaporates into a vapor without going through a liquid form) easily and rapidly. While Osmium metal may be safe to handle, OsO4 is decidedly hazardous, as the material vaporizes out of a water solution easily, it is exceedingly poisonous and dangerous to work with. Its density is what makes it a good TEM stain, but every microscopist I have ever known to use the stuff treats it with the respect it deserves. The damn stuff is truly scary to work around...
I had the opportunity to work with osmium when I took a class in Electron Microscopy. It had its own refrigerator, which turned completely black inside - just from one container. All work with the osmium had to be done inside of a fume hood, which also turned black from repeated exposure.
@@02ennuu-zg5tb Ha! Perhaps not the best student when younger. So, probably more accurate to say I don't remember hearing about it before. And definitely not with such a dose of danger!
Osmium actually makes a pretty good coating for the edges of blades to maintain sharpness. Osmitanium (osmium alloyed with titanium) is basically adamantium...but good luck making it with our present tech level!
I was once acquainted with a person who owns 1 liter-sized cube of Osmium as a trinket - 10x10x10 cm, it weights 22.6 kg, as Osmium should. You do NOT expect the weight of it, when you try to lift it. He told me it's safe to handle, "but please don't drop it". I assumed that it would be costly to repair if it got dents or something from hit after drop, but I didn't consider toxicity of it. I asked him about the cost and it was in line of 30k USD - that was around 12-15 years ago, mind you.
A element with such a great heat resistance must have uses. Immediately I think on high voltage switch which often are in danger of smelting when they are not closing fast enough (to prevent a early transmission through the air).
If a little bit of it off-gasses it can blind the whole neighborhood. I used to want to add some to my elements collection, until I learned about its toxic qualities. No thanks on all that.
Yes , although i thought that Swann of Britain is the one who first used osmium in late 1800s 18 months or so prior to Edison carbon filament light bulb which wasn't really perfected for his patent and public release. The Edison carbon filament doped with rare earths like thorium and the other lanthanides used in gas mantles was a brilliant idea but fragile maybe. Edison did invent the carbon filament if he doesn't get credit for electric lamp .
Interesting. I read your closing disclaimer and I am wondering how element collectors actually go about collecting the elements? Since some are gases, some unstable, etc... I guess I'll do a search on that.
11:45 pm West Coast time, Tuesday, 14 November 2023. A Crazy Old Man who tries to learn something new every day, was absolutely intrigued. So much so that it sent me off find out more for 15 minutes before I go to bed. Thanks for the lesson!
Why does it not combine with oxygen except when finely divided? This wasn't explained. Also using it in alloys in electrical contacts seems like a bad idea because of the possibility of sparking and pitting slowly vaporizing the metal in the contact. Any contactor that has current will spark to some extent (which will pit the contact) unless you have a separate pre connection area with a resistor that pre charges the capacitors in the circuit you are connecting (known as an anti spark connector, basically it connects through the resistor first which causes a slow rather than an immediate rise in current before the contacts fully interface with each other)
Osmium dust does have more net surface area than the large chunk and is exposed to more oxygen. The volume to surface area ratio is great enough that osmium can release excess heat into its own interior, which does not contact the oxygen in the air.
Interesting. The only other time I've heard the word "tetroxide" is for hypergolic rocket fuel oxidizer, "nitrogen tetroxide" It is some foul and deadly stuff.
Yeah I heard about that. But the man who found the alien mummies is a known hoaxer. People like that dilute real research on the search for extraterrestrial life.
Unless you heat osmium metal to around 1,000°F, it's not going to produce any osmium tetroxide. Even the powder isn't an efficient producer of the tetroxide.
@@KickAssScience92Good morning! I have osimium ore. In ore it has 3 elements Os, Au, ir. And a few other elements but in very small proportions such as Pb, Cb. Do you have a formula to separate them? Thank you
First time viewer - and I'm going to subscribe. Some things I'd love to see you to have covered, since I didn't really know or think about Osmium until now. (1) You keep saying it's dangerous in powdered form and easily shattered... but don't specify why - I'm assuming the expanded surface area.. But what about -that- makes it bad? Is the oxidized form easily absorbed through the skin, or does it pick up a static charge making it worse than glitter to remove, or is is it just the gas it can give off? And if it's just the gas, how dangerous IS that gas? If a one gram bead costs $40, is smashing your bed going to yield enough gas if collected over time, to hurt you? Ok - that aside... why is it optimal for use in ball point pens? That's possibly the weirdest optimal use for a metal I've ever heard. I really wanted to know why it's used and how it was found to be the so good? And if it's safe in non-powdered form, then why were you able to find pictures of hands wrecked by "long term" exposure to it? People suck on the tips of ball point pens. People wear jewelry. And how did anyone manage long term exposure anyway - if it's found in parts per trillion in the crust and only 500kg is mined a year (I can't imagine any profitable mine getting this stuff out of the ground using people and their bare hands?) WHY is it even mined? Is it something found alongside something valuable? Would anyone ever make an "Osmium mine" if you can only get a few kilograms of the stuff and it's worth less than much easier to obtain materials? How do you obtain it - is it chemically precipitated, is whatever you're ACTUALLY mining melted down and this stuff with it's higher melting point is concentrated in the slag? .... I'm only stopping with my questions because I have to go to work so BIG TLDR: Good video, looking forward to more, but please if you find something odd about what you're talking about, go into some of the curous details about that oddity. I'm now looking at my large bag of ball point pens and wondering if I have a curiosity, hazardous waste, or an opportunity to freely collect some osmium. :P
Thanks for the comment and suggestions. Osmium is a byproduct of nickel and copper mining mainly from Russia and S Africa. When they electrorefine copper the minor metals like osmium, iridium and other PGMS settle out. The thing is the metal itself has very little industry use. Osmium was alloyed with iridium for pen tips many years ago. Other than that there is very little use for the metal itself. Now the main use of pure osmium metal is for element collectors and jewelry hence its low price per oz. There are a number of stores that sell osmium jewelry as it is a pretty blue metal (ex. oslery.com/en). Osmium metal chunks/beads by itself can be handled safely. It is the powder form (like the size of flour grains) that is very dangerous as there is more surface area to form poisonous osmium tetroxide. Although osmium tetroxide is dangerous it is used in the medical industry to treat arthritis with a light solution of OsO4 injected into the knees. Osmium tetroxide can cause blindness if it gets into the eyes. Osmium tetroxide must be stored in glass in a cold environment as it will penetrate plastic. By the way you can go to Luciteria.com to buy osmium 1 gram beads for $45 USD :)
Found a large clump of this in my backyard while gardening. It now sit’s on my coffee table in the lounge room. Very pretty to look at and makes a great talking piece
Cool beans. I found an alien space ship in my back yard. Little green men came out and said "Crazy Hair is right, we DID build the pyramids!! .... PSYCH!!" Then they got back in and took off. My therapist doesn't believe me. She thinks they definitely built the pyramids. She says piling stones on top of one another is some advanced alien sh*t, there's no other explanation.
@@madmattdigs9518 It’s looks identical to the thumbnail. I thought it was Galena until I watched this. The thumbnail is what got my attention. Anyway it’s very pretty and looks amazing. Friends have said the same.
ever thought about exposing osmium to compressed hydrogen . the chlorine smell is from electrolysis. caused by the friction in density . the transfer of electrons to insulate the mass from the difference. oxidation.
Human: I'm gonna smash and brake you into tiny little pieces and show you that just because you are the densest doesn't mean that you're unbreakable. Osmium: If you'll break me, I'll make a poisonous gas and mess up your skin. Humen: .... alright, no need to start a war. we cool right. Here's a cushioned case for you to comfortably rest with no risk of breaking, peace? Osmium: peace. And that's how peace was achieved with Osmium the world rarest precarious and deadly metal.
Osmic acid (osmium tetroxide) has been used (unlicensed) by rheumatologists to treat rheumatoid arthritis of the knee. It is injected into the synovial joint. The treatment room should have good ventilation with open windows. Any unused solution in the ampoules, syringes and needles are immersed in a jar of oil ( e.g. arachis oil) for disposal as even the vapour is toxic. The data sheet warns that there is a danger that the vapour can be absorbed into the cornea and the person will see rings in their vision for about two weeks. All ''nasty stuff'' I remember from my working days.
@@jerensteffen Osmium is a definitely a fascinating metal for sure. Did you get your cube from Luciteria? They have the 10 gm cubes for sale for just over $1000.
A common attempt at fraud was to put tungsten into gold because of how close it was to the weight of gold and try to pass it off. Imagine putting tungsten and osmium into gold to perfectly match the weight and volume to commit fraud. THAT would be hard to detect.
Osmium is too expensive and not cost effective to fake gold. You are right, tungsten is the only metal that weighs almost the same as gold. Only 0.04 gram difference in density. The thing is fraudsters use tungsten to fake gold bars larger than an ounce. It is not cost effective to fake a 1 gram gold bar. A one gram gold bar will bend easily(gold can be scratched with a fingernail) but a tungsten gold plated bar would be difficult to bend. Fraudsters are less likely to use tungsten in bars and coins that weigh less than an ounce, which is why I prefer small gold bars not large. The fraudster's real money is putting tungsten in large 100 oz or larger bars. One thing about tungsten is that it has the highest melting point of the metallic elements. The metal would need to be sintered so the the density may be less. Any fake one ounce tungsten gold plated coins/bars would have a lower density due to sintering and would stand out.
This is so cool to know. I’ve been handling osmium for years without knowing these facts. By handling, I do mean it’s the main ore used in the Mekanism mod for Minecraft!! 😉
Our company used to make a osmium solution that was then used to produce eye drops, because it widens the pupills so the doctor can properly look inside ...
The cheapest PGM metal is debatable. Either ruthenium or osmium. Osmium:400-800 USD per oz, Iridium over 4660 US per oz, Rhodium: 4100 USD per oz, Palladium: 900 USD per oz, Ruthenium 500 USD per oz, Platinum 880 USD per oz.
I have heard of that band before. The lead singer sounds very similar to Max Cavalera of Sepultura. Osmium is a the heaviest metal and Osmium is a heavy metal band, nice combo and a cool name. My favorite metal bands are Slayer, Megadeth, Opeth, Amon Amarth, Clutch, Paradise Lost, Sepultura (80's and 90's were their best years with Arise and Beneath the Remains) Suicidal Tendencies and Pantera.
@@KickAssScience92 Exactly! Pre flake it and bind solid with epoxy, like they do with frangible bullets, only osmium instead of coper. I'm guessing osmium is pretty soft?
If it can take high temperatures. Maybe we can use it in turbine blades for jet engines. Just got to figure out how to get around a few problems I guess.
higher firing temperatures increase the efficiency of turbine engines, but also create more NOx so there is a practical limit to the firing temps based on air emission regulations.
There is more surface area in dust form osmium than a large chunk of osmium for OsO4 to form. Powdered osmium is pyrophoric and can heat up easier whereas a large chunk transfers any heat into the metal itself preventing any chain reaction for OsO4 to form.
