Element of the Month: Molybdenum!

January's Element of the Month:
Molybdenum!

Mo
42

Atomic Mass: 95.94 amu
Melting Point: 2623 °C
Boiling Point: 4639 °C

Let's start with the obvious: "Molybdenum" is lots of fun to say.  Try it!  Also, I encourage you to start a conversation with a sentence containing the word "Molybdenum" with the next person you encounter.  Nothing but good could could come of this.

I, for instance, might start a conversation by asking "Did you know my mother-in-law once lived near one of the largest Molybdenum mines in the world?"  True story!  Before she was married, she lived in Climax, Colorado, at that time the highest altitude human settlement in the United States.  The pride of Climax was of course the "Glory Hole" of the Climax Mine, a vast Molybdenum extraction enterprise that, back in the day, produced three quarters of the world's output.  Climax was however abandoned in the 1960s, having been undermined (if I recall the stories correctly) by its own Glory Hole.  When Mrs.5000 and I drove through the area recently, we were impressed by its resemblance to the kinds of ghastly ruined landscapes imagined by directors of dystopian science fiction films with ecological messages.  You can get a feel for the place by checking out the satellite image on Google Maps.  Though no doubt the Phelps Dodge Corporation, owners of the currently mothballed operation, has the environmental situation firmly in hand.

The Centerfold!

If you were paying attention to the introductory information above -- I don't mean to doubt you -- you realize that the Australian Molybdenum shown here must be pretty freaking hot.  It has the sixth highest melting point among the elements, so you have to warm it up pretty thoroughly to get it all bubbly like that.  This leads to its major industrial application, which is as an alloy to steel.  Makes it harder and, of course, more temperature resistant, and this is considered very handy.  Molybdenum is also fairly plentiful and cheap, although its price has zipped up from eight bucks a pound in 2008 to around eighteen bucks now, what with the booming Chinese steel industry.  Still, it remains one of the go-to alloying metals for high-performance steel.

Molybdenum was probably "discovered" in the late 1770s by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, an early chemist who also probably discovered barium, manganese, and tungsten before the people who generally get the credit for those discoveries today.  Apparently the guy didn't fully grasp the significance of what he was doing, and/or didn't have much of a PR machine set up.  Indeed, Scheele apparently discovered Oxygen several years before Joseph Priestly, who, as everyone knows, discovered Oxygen.  Well, that's the historical record for you.  In the case of Molybdenum, formal credit goes to the plucky Swede Peter Jacob Hjelm, who isolated the stuff in 1781.

Toxic (like everything else) in high doses, Molybdenum is however a fairly important nutrient.  If you aren't getting enough, you might be subject to tooth decay, enzymatic imbalances, and a dramatically increased risk of esophageal cancer.  But unless you live in the Central Asian belt which, for some reason, doesn't have much Mo in the soil, you're probably doing fine.