Materials for Design

Silver (Ag)

As a very soft metal, silver is only used in its pure form for plating. To make it more durable for making jewellery and cutlery it is alloyed with copper to produce sterling silver (92.5 per cent silver and 7.5 per cent copper), which adds hardness. It is easy to think of silver as a material used mainly for jewellery, but it does in fact have some surprisingly unique and outstanding properties, which are exploited in a range of less familiar industries. For example, historically, silver was used to detect poison in food, with silver cutlery used to indicate if poison was present because the silver would turn black if it reacted with arsenic.

But it’s not just the fact that it tarnishes and its reactions to chemicals that make silver ...