October 4, 2023 • 12 mins
Rhodium is one of the most valuable precious metals on Earth, though it has dropped in value by about 80% in the last year. Learn why by clicking play.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck. And let's take it back to Christmas Eve.
The year's eighteen hundred, and I'm an English scientist named
William Hyde Wallaston. Who are you, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I guess that would make me your colleague Smithson Tenant.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Neil Tennant's great great great great grandfather.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I don't believe you have not falling for anything anymore.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Okay, so what are we doing on this Christmas Eve
eighteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Well, we're coming. We're unwrapping a very special thing, a
precious metal platinum or that's right. We paid got to
stop that.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
We paid a pretty penny for it too. It came
from what we would call Columbia today, what Wallaston and
Tenant us called Nueva Granada, which is fancy. But they
paid something like seven hundred and ninety five pounds for it,
which in eighteen hundred that'd be one thousand dollars and
today it'd be like twenty three thousand dollars. I would
(01:02):
have thought inflation would have made that way more, but still,
that's a decent amount of money to pay for a
hunk of platinum. Even back then, the reason why they
paid so much for it and why they had to
smuggle it out is because it was essentially pure platinum,
which is very, very hard to find. And one of
the reasons that Wallaston wanted it was because he was
(01:23):
trying to figure out how to create a chemical reaction
that could make platinum malleable and therefore even more useful
than it already was.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's right. He's like, I think I can do it.
I'm pretty smart, and I think we can get a
lot of uses out of valuable platinum. And so he
worked on it for a few years, or rather you
worked on it for a few years.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And you helped.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I helped a little bit. I got your tea and
stuff like that, latch at your jokes, kind of like
this podcast, Oh here's your tea, by the ways. And
he eventually would or you eventually would get that chemical
process down pat and isolate that platinum, and it was
in fact malleable. But what he noticed was was like,
wait a minute, there's something left over here, these reddish salts,
(02:10):
and like, what in the world could this be? And
it turns out that Wallaston, Wallaston and Tenet had also
discovered not just one other precious metal. But two we're
going to focus on rhodium, but they also discovered palladium.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, pretty neat stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That's a big bang for your buck.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And the reason they called it rodium it was after
the Greek word for rose, which is rodin, right, which
sounds like kind of like a robot that assembles from
different parts and fights.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I was gonna say the same thing.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So, and the reason why is because those salts are
kind of like a reddish rose color. Oh that's pretty cool.
That's a great name right off of the bat. But
even more than that, they figured out that roodium and
palladium were related to platinum. They're part of what's called
the platinum group metals. I don't know if that's a
band or not.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I was waiting for it, maybe like.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
A prog rock like an all star prog rock band.
Yeah that's not metal, No, not at all. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah,
it's one of the noble metals.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It is. The roodium has a chemical it's a chemical
element with the symbol r H atomic number forty five,
and it is in the group with iridium and ruthenium
and platinum pladium.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
What else don't iridium and osmium. Yeah, so it's a.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Pretty big deal that they found this, and also obviously
gold and silver also precious metals, and it turns out
that rhodium is super valuable today and very useful today.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, one of them be rare. It is rare. It's
incredibly rare. Actually, it's I guess almost never found or
never found in pure form. It's found in alloys with
other stuff, and it's usually found in just minuscule So
it's rare. It's scarce, and it's it was until very
(04:06):
recently in really high demand, so much so that the
price of an ounce of rhodium in April of twenty
twenty one was approaching thirty thousand dollars in ounce.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, that was the peak, that rodium peak.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
That's one of the most expensive like commodities on the planet,
if not the most expensive. I'm not sure. What's interesting, Chuck, though,
is that it's now down to about four thousand dollars
an ounce. And I say, we don't tell anybody why
until we come back from a message break.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Sounds good, all right, So we left quite a cliffhanger.
(05:03):
Rodium peaked at about close to thirty thousand dollars not
too long ago, and just march in April of twenty
twenty one. Now it's abound down to about four grand
I saw like thirty nine today forty two hundred yesterday
in that area, and the forecast is for it to
be about the same, which is still one of the
(05:23):
most valuable medals.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
In the world, more than gold for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah, I mean it's like still twice as much as gold,
so it's still very, very valuable. But like anything, it's
all about supply and demand. And while the supply is
still low because it's still rare, it's not like they
found some huge supply of it somewhere. The demand has
gone way down for a lot of reasons that are
(05:47):
pretty boring. If you're someone who talks about things like
financial instruments, then you might really enjoy hearing about like
the twelve reasons that I found that it's not a demand.
But one of the big reasons that everyone can understand
is that rodium is one of the biggest uses is
that it's used in catalytic converters, which is one reason
(06:09):
why catalytic converters are stolen because they contain palladium, platinum,
and rodium, and people can cut them off very easily
and sell them for a lot of money. But catalytic
converters are on the decline because of the rise of
electric vehicles, so thus rodium the demand is down.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Isn't that interesting? Like just the price of rodium indicates
that the world turned a corner and it's like, yeap,
electric vehicles are here to stay and we don't really
need catalytic converters like we used to.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, it'll go back up though, because the other eleven
reasons are much more volatile and not as locked in.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Okay, but still it's just not in demand. I think
something like eighty percent of the use or the demand
for rodium was with the automotive industry, largely for catalytic converters.
The reason why they use it for catalytic converts because
it is just aces at converting nitrous oxide emissions. Yeah,
(07:06):
which it's crazy there, well, some that comes out of
your tailpipe, but nothing like it would without a catalytic converter.
Like we would not be breathing basically right now with
all the cars on the road if there weren't catalytic
converters featuring rodium. And the solution to that is not
more rodium, it's fewer catalytic converters.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Turns out. Yeah, I wrote the catalytic converter article years
ago at how stuff works.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
How was it?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It was a slog my friend, Yeah, as someone you know,
I think for both of us were not super car
guys so or at least how cars work, so it
was tough.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Well, can you take ten minutes and explain how they
work real quick?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I have no memory of it, but what I do
remember is you said eighty percent as far as their
use in catalytic converters, also, eighty percent. That's how much
rodium South Africa is putting out, about eighty percent of
the world supplies coming from South Africa. Russia is number
two on that list, Zimbabwe is number three, and there's
(08:05):
also a and again, these aren't rhodium mines. I think
they're generally platinum mines for the most part, right, but
there's a platinum mine in Montana that is producing some
rodium as well.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Pretty neat, not bad. One of the cool things about
rodium is that it's super shiny. It's got a beautiful,
silvery white sheen to it, so it makes it very alluring,
like momo. Yeah, exactly. It has like a lot of attractiveness.
It also is very hard, which is a double edged
(08:37):
sword for jewelers. It makes it really hard to make
jewelry out of. But if you can figure out how
to plate rodium onto other kinds of jewelry, it will
make it super shiny and super hard and durable. And
that's one way that they have figured out how to
use rhodium is they plate it. And to plate it
you actually have to dissolve it in certain kinds of acids,
(08:59):
and that causes fumes, and you do not want to
breathe those fumes. But if you can successfully avoid breathing
the fumes, you can plate jewelry with roodium and you'll
be pretty happy with the result afterwards. I hear.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, it is actually one of the least toxic of
those precious metals, but it is that the fumes that
are harmful for sure, So they have found ways to
work on it as jewelers to avoid those fumes. Another
great part about rhodium on jewelry is that it's hyper hypoallergenic,
(09:34):
so you're not you know, sometimes if you wear bracelets
and rings and things that will turn your skin a
different color. This avoids that that plating of rodium will
not turn your skin different colors, so that's another big plus.
And it's also because it's hard. It's very scratch resistant,
it's corrosion resistant. It's pretty hardy. But they have to
(09:59):
do it in such a then layers it will wear down.
So they say if you do have a rodium plated
piece of jewelry or something, they say that you should
probably not do it on like a ring. You should
probably do it for like ear rings or a necklace
or something that doesn't get rubbed around a lot in
your skin. And you might want to think about getting
it replated every few years. And it sounds like, oh
(10:20):
my gosh, it's the most expensive thing in the world.
Why would I do that. They need so little of
it to plate your jewelry that apparently isn't that much money. No,
I'm sure that's relative, but it's not like you would
think like, oh, it costs like ten grand to get
this thing replated.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Right, because you don't need an ounce of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
No, you don't need a little tiny bit.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And that's all it takes. All it takes one other
use for it that I think we should end on.
Not only does it catalyze nitrous oxide into less harmful stuff,
it is the catalyst for the reaction that produces menthol. Yeah,
so if you like chewing gum or you can thank
(11:02):
roodium for that.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Aren't they getting rid of mental cigarettes?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
They should?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I thought I just saw something about that recently.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
I don't know, but I could. I could definitely see
us reaching that point.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Finally, I'm not sure why I would have dreamed that up,
even though I had the weirdest dream ever last night,
so you never know, but I thought I saw something.
So anyway, I'm sure we'll figure that out.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
You're not going to share last night's stream.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Oh no, no, no no, but it involved Michael Douglas
and Catherine Zada Jones.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Awesome. So if you want to know more about this
wonderful topic, Rodium, you can go on to how Stuff Works,
because that's where we got this article, and that means
short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck. And let's take it back to Christmas Eve.
The year's eighteen hundred, and I'm an English scientist named
William Hyde Wallaston. Who are you, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I guess that would make me your colleague Smithson Tenant.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Neil Tennant's great great great great grandfather.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I don't believe you have not falling for anything anymore.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Okay, so what are we doing on this Christmas Eve
eighteen hundred.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Well, we're coming. We're unwrapping a very special thing, a
precious metal platinum or that's right. We paid got to
stop that.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
We paid a pretty penny for it too. It came
from what we would call Columbia today, what Wallaston and
Tenant us called Nueva Granada, which is fancy. But they
paid something like seven hundred and ninety five pounds for it,
which in eighteen hundred that'd be one thousand dollars and
today it'd be like twenty three thousand dollars. I would
(01:02):
have thought inflation would have made that way more, but still,
that's a decent amount of money to pay for a
hunk of platinum. Even back then, the reason why they
paid so much for it and why they had to
smuggle it out is because it was essentially pure platinum,
which is very, very hard to find. And one of
the reasons that Wallaston wanted it was because he was
(01:23):
trying to figure out how to create a chemical reaction
that could make platinum malleable and therefore even more useful
than it already was.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's right. He's like, I think I can do it.
I'm pretty smart, and I think we can get a
lot of uses out of valuable platinum. And so he
worked on it for a few years, or rather you
worked on it for a few years.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And you helped.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I helped a little bit. I got your tea and
stuff like that, latch at your jokes, kind of like
this podcast, Oh here's your tea, by the ways. And
he eventually would or you eventually would get that chemical
process down pat and isolate that platinum, and it was
in fact malleable. But what he noticed was was like,
wait a minute, there's something left over here, these reddish salts,
(02:10):
and like, what in the world could this be? And
it turns out that Wallaston, Wallaston and Tenet had also
discovered not just one other precious metal. But two we're
going to focus on rhodium, but they also discovered palladium.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, pretty neat stuff.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That's a big bang for your buck.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
And the reason they called it rodium it was after
the Greek word for rose, which is rodin, right, which
sounds like kind of like a robot that assembles from
different parts and fights.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
I was gonna say the same thing.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So, and the reason why is because those salts are
kind of like a reddish rose color. Oh that's pretty cool.
That's a great name right off of the bat. But
even more than that, they figured out that roodium and
palladium were related to platinum. They're part of what's called
the platinum group metals. I don't know if that's a
band or not.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I was waiting for it, maybe like.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
A prog rock like an all star prog rock band.
Yeah that's not metal, No, not at all. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah,
it's one of the noble metals.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
It is. The roodium has a chemical it's a chemical
element with the symbol r H atomic number forty five,
and it is in the group with iridium and ruthenium
and platinum pladium.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
What else don't iridium and osmium. Yeah, so it's a.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Pretty big deal that they found this, and also obviously
gold and silver also precious metals, and it turns out
that rhodium is super valuable today and very useful today.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, one of them be rare. It is rare. It's
incredibly rare. Actually, it's I guess almost never found or
never found in pure form. It's found in alloys with
other stuff, and it's usually found in just minuscule So
it's rare. It's scarce, and it's it was until very
(04:06):
recently in really high demand, so much so that the
price of an ounce of rhodium in April of twenty
twenty one was approaching thirty thousand dollars in ounce.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, that was the peak, that rodium peak.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
That's one of the most expensive like commodities on the planet,
if not the most expensive. I'm not sure. What's interesting, Chuck, though,
is that it's now down to about four thousand dollars
an ounce. And I say, we don't tell anybody why
until we come back from a message break.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Sounds good, all right, So we left quite a cliffhanger.
(05:03):
Rodium peaked at about close to thirty thousand dollars not
too long ago, and just march in April of twenty
twenty one. Now it's abound down to about four grand
I saw like thirty nine today forty two hundred yesterday
in that area, and the forecast is for it to
be about the same, which is still one of the
(05:23):
most valuable medals.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
In the world, more than gold for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah, I mean it's like still twice as much as gold,
so it's still very, very valuable. But like anything, it's
all about supply and demand. And while the supply is
still low because it's still rare, it's not like they
found some huge supply of it somewhere. The demand has
gone way down for a lot of reasons that are
(05:47):
pretty boring. If you're someone who talks about things like
financial instruments, then you might really enjoy hearing about like
the twelve reasons that I found that it's not a demand.
But one of the big reasons that everyone can understand
is that rodium is one of the biggest uses is
that it's used in catalytic converters, which is one reason
(06:09):
why catalytic converters are stolen because they contain palladium, platinum,
and rodium, and people can cut them off very easily
and sell them for a lot of money. But catalytic
converters are on the decline because of the rise of
electric vehicles, so thus rodium the demand is down.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Isn't that interesting? Like just the price of rodium indicates
that the world turned a corner and it's like, yeap,
electric vehicles are here to stay and we don't really
need catalytic converters like we used to.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, it'll go back up though, because the other eleven
reasons are much more volatile and not as locked in.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Okay, but still it's just not in demand. I think
something like eighty percent of the use or the demand
for rodium was with the automotive industry, largely for catalytic converters.
The reason why they use it for catalytic converts because
it is just aces at converting nitrous oxide emissions. Yeah,
(07:06):
which it's crazy there, well, some that comes out of
your tailpipe, but nothing like it would without a catalytic converter.
Like we would not be breathing basically right now with
all the cars on the road if there weren't catalytic
converters featuring rodium. And the solution to that is not
more rodium, it's fewer catalytic converters.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Turns out. Yeah, I wrote the catalytic converter article years
ago at how stuff works.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
How was it?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It was a slog my friend, Yeah, as someone you know,
I think for both of us were not super car
guys so or at least how cars work, so it
was tough.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Well, can you take ten minutes and explain how they
work real quick?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I have no memory of it, but what I do
remember is you said eighty percent as far as their
use in catalytic converters, also, eighty percent. That's how much
rodium South Africa is putting out, about eighty percent of
the world supplies coming from South Africa. Russia is number
two on that list, Zimbabwe is number three, and there's
(08:05):
also a and again, these aren't rhodium mines. I think
they're generally platinum mines for the most part, right, but
there's a platinum mine in Montana that is producing some
rodium as well.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Pretty neat, not bad. One of the cool things about
rodium is that it's super shiny. It's got a beautiful,
silvery white sheen to it, so it makes it very alluring,
like momo. Yeah, exactly. It has like a lot of attractiveness.
It also is very hard, which is a double edged
(08:37):
sword for jewelers. It makes it really hard to make
jewelry out of. But if you can figure out how
to plate rodium onto other kinds of jewelry, it will
make it super shiny and super hard and durable. And
that's one way that they have figured out how to
use rhodium is they plate it. And to plate it
you actually have to dissolve it in certain kinds of acids,
(08:59):
and that causes fumes, and you do not want to
breathe those fumes. But if you can successfully avoid breathing
the fumes, you can plate jewelry with roodium and you'll
be pretty happy with the result afterwards. I hear.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, it is actually one of the least toxic of
those precious metals, but it is that the fumes that
are harmful for sure, So they have found ways to
work on it as jewelers to avoid those fumes. Another
great part about rhodium on jewelry is that it's hyper hypoallergenic,
(09:34):
so you're not you know, sometimes if you wear bracelets
and rings and things that will turn your skin a
different color. This avoids that that plating of rodium will
not turn your skin different colors, so that's another big plus.
And it's also because it's hard. It's very scratch resistant,
it's corrosion resistant. It's pretty hardy. But they have to
(09:59):
do it in such a then layers it will wear down.
So they say if you do have a rodium plated
piece of jewelry or something, they say that you should
probably not do it on like a ring. You should
probably do it for like ear rings or a necklace
or something that doesn't get rubbed around a lot in
your skin. And you might want to think about getting
it replated every few years. And it sounds like, oh
(10:20):
my gosh, it's the most expensive thing in the world.
Why would I do that. They need so little of
it to plate your jewelry that apparently isn't that much money. No,
I'm sure that's relative, but it's not like you would
think like, oh, it costs like ten grand to get
this thing replated.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Right, because you don't need an ounce of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
No, you don't need a little tiny bit.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
And that's all it takes. All it takes one other
use for it that I think we should end on.
Not only does it catalyze nitrous oxide into less harmful stuff,
it is the catalyst for the reaction that produces menthol. Yeah,
so if you like chewing gum or you can thank
(11:02):
roodium for that.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Aren't they getting rid of mental cigarettes?
Speaker 1 (11:06):
They should?
Speaker 2 (11:07):
I thought I just saw something about that recently.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
I don't know, but I could. I could definitely see
us reaching that point.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Finally, I'm not sure why I would have dreamed that up,
even though I had the weirdest dream ever last night,
so you never know, but I thought I saw something.
So anyway, I'm sure we'll figure that out.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
You're not going to share last night's stream.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Oh no, no, no no, but it involved Michael Douglas
and Catherine Zada Jones.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Awesome. So if you want to know more about this
wonderful topic, Rodium, you can go on to how Stuff Works,
because that's where we got this article, and that means
short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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