A temperature that will make steel run like water and
melt down fireclay has absolutely no effect upon it. You may put a piece
of platinum wire no thicker than human hair into a blast furnace where
ingots of steel are melting down all around it, and the bit of wire will
come out as absolutely unchanged as if it had been in an ice box all the
time.
"No means has been discovered for accurately determining the melting
temperature of platinum, but it must be enormous. And yet, if you put a
bit of lead into the crucible with the platinum, both metals will melt
down together at the low temperature that fuses the lead, and if you try
to melt lead in a platinum crucible, you will find that as soon as the
lead melts the platinum with which it comes into contact also melts and
your crucible is destroyed.
"A distinguishing characteristic of platinum is its extreme ductility. A
wire can be made from it finer than from any other metal. I have a sample
in my pocket, the gauge of which is only one two-thousandth of an inch,
and it is practicable to make it thinner. It has even been affirmed that
platinum wire has been made so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye,
but that I do not state as of my own knowledge.
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