Description

Buy Iridium Metal

Iridium is very nearly the ideal stuff to make dream jewelry out of. On top of it being the rarest it is also the least corruptible of all metals, the densest, one of the most expensive and extremely hard to boot. With a list of ‘mosts’ like that why don’t we see A-listers flaunting their Ir bling? Well, because there’s one more quality added to that list of mosts: it’s fiendishly difficult to work with. It has a sky high melting point of over 2400 °C (jewelers have always whined about platinum’s melting point of 1750 °C, ha!) aaaaand iridium has the bad habit of shattering rather than gently allowing itself to be beaten into shape.

Still, that hasn’t stopped a few of adventurous spirit and high tolerance for failure to take a stab at it. Since the 90’s it has been possible to commission wedding bands of varying quality made in pure iridium.

Another popular use: spark plug tips. Little tiny rods of iridium go into the best spark plugs for their exceptional ability to hold up under the repeated torture of six gajillion sparks of plasma bridging across the little gap every second for years without corrosion or degradation. That’s impressive!

CAS 7439-88-5

Iridium  metal is not exactly a household word, and that’s not really surprising. After all, it was only discovered in 1803. Chemists who were studying platinum dissolved it in a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids to create soluble salts, and they often resulted in a small amount of an insoluble and dark residue. A British scientist then discovered that this residue was composed of two previously undiscovered elements, which were osmium and iridium. The latter got its name from Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow, because the salts obtained had many different colors.

It’s one of the rarest stable elements in the Earth’s crust, and gold is actually 40 times more abundant. When it is in its pure form, it’s very brittle and virtually impossible to machine. It is also one of the most corrosive metals in the world.

Iridium  metal

Below is the historical Iridium price per troy oz.