Hudson 1990 - David Hudson Lectures

Now for those of you who have never done spectroscopy it involves takinga carbon electrode that is cupped at the top. You put the powder on thatelectrode and you bring the other electrode down above it and you strikean arc. In about fifteen seconds the carbon at this high temperatureburns away and the electrode's gone and your sample's gone. So all thelaboratories in this country are doing fifteen second burns and givingyou the results. According to the Soviet Academy of Sciences the boilingtemperature of water is to the boiling temperature of iron just like theboiling temperature of iron is to the boiling temperature of theseelements.As you know from driving a car as long as there is water in the motor ofyour car the temperature of that car engine will never hotter than theboiling temperature of water until all the water is gone. If you justheated the water on the stove in a pan you know that pan never getshotter than the boiling temperature of the water till all the water isgone. Once all the water is gone the temperature skyrockets really fast.As long as there is iron there the temperature of the sample can neverget hotter than the boiling temperature of the iron until all of theiron is gone so you can then heat this stuff. Now this is hard to fathomhow something with as high a boiling temperature as iron could be justlike water to these elements but it is. So literally we had to designand build an excitation chamber where argon gas could be put around thiselectrode so than no oxygen or air could get in to the carbon electrodeand we could burn it not for fifteen seconds but for three hundredseconds. According to the Soviet Academy of Sciences this is the lengthof time we have to burn the sample.We set up, we got the [PK blenders?], we got the standards, we modifiedthe machine, we did all the analysis for results, we did all thespectral lines on this three and a half meter instrument. That's thespec for how big the prism is which opens up the line spectrum. Forthose of you who don't know, most universities have a one point five

meter instrument. This is a three and a half meter instrument. A hugemachine. It took up the whole garage area. It was about thirty feet longand about eight or nine feet high.Anyway when we ran this material during the first fifteen seconds we gotiron, silica, aluminum, little traces of calcium, sodium maybe a littletitanium now and then and then it goes quiet and nothing reads. So atthe end of fifteen seconds you are getting nothing. Twenty seconds,twenty five seconds, thirty seconds, thirty five seconds, forty secondsstill got nothing. Forty five seconds, fifty seconds, fifty fiveseconds, sixty seconds, sixty five seconds but if you look in throughthe colored glass sitting there on the carbon electrode is this littleball of white material. There's still something in there.At seventy seconds, exactly when the Soviet Academy of Science said itwould read, palladium begins to read. And after the palladium platinumbegins to read. And after the platinum I think it was rhodium begins toread. After rhodium ruthenium begins to read. After ruthenium theniridium begins to read and after the iridium osmium begins to read.Now if you're like me I didn't know what these elements were. I hadheard of platinum, platinum jewelry, but what are these other elements.Well there are six platinum group elements in the periodic table notjust platinum. They didn't find out about them at the same time so theyhave been added one at a time. They are all elements just like iron,cobalt and nickel are three different elements ruthenium, rhodium andpalladium are light platinums and osmium, iridium and platinum are theheavy platinums.Well we came to find out that rhodium was selling for about threethousand dollars per ounce. Gold sells for about four hundred dollars anounce. Iridium sells for about eight hundred dollars an ounce andruthenium sells for one hundred and fifty dollars an ounce.Then you say gee these are important materials aren't they. They areimportant materials because in the world the best known deposit is now

being mined in South Africa. In this deposit you have to go a half mileinto the ground and mine an 18 inch seam of this stuff. When you bringit out it contains one third of one ounce per ton of all the preciouselements.Our analysis, which we ran for two and a half years and we checked overand over; we checked every spectral line, we checked every potential oninterference, we checked every aspect of this. We created apples andapples, oranges and oranges, bananas and bananas. We wanted exactmatches.When we were finished the man was able to do quantitative analysis andhe said "Dave, you have six to eight ounces per ton of palladium, twelveto thirteen ounces per ton of platinum, one hundred fifty ounces per tonof osmium, two hundred fifty ounces per ton of ruthenium, six hundredounces per ton of iridium, and eight hundred ounces per ton of rhodium.Or a total of about 2400 ounces per ton when the best known deposit inthe world is one third of one ounce per ton.As you can see this work wasn't an indicator that these elements werethere; these elements were there and they were there in boucoupsamounts. They were saying hey stupid man pay attention we are trying toshow you something.If they had been there in little amounts I probably would have contendedwith this. But they were there in such huge amounts I said golly, howcan they be there in these quantities and no one knew it. Now you keepin mind, it wasn't one spectral analysis it was two and a half years ofspectral analysis running this material every day. And the man actuallysent me away when they read because he couldn't believe it either. Andhe worked on it another two months before he called me up and apologizedto me and he said "Dave you are right." That is how skeptical he wasabout it. He couldn't apologize to me. He is a German researcher withGerman pride so he had his wife call and apologize to me.He was so impressed that he went back to Germany to the Institute of

Spectroscopy. He was actually written up in the spectroscopic journalsas having proven the existence of these elements in the SouthwesternUnited States in natural materials. It's not journals that you wouldever read but I actually saw the journals, he was written up.They had no idea where this stuff was coming from, how we were producingit, what concentrations we had gone through or anything, they just hadanalyzed this small amount of powder. The crazy thing about it is, allwe had done is remove the silica and sent the other stuff in. It waspretty unbelievable numbers. After we had come at this in every way weknow how, to disprove it, I decided all we have to do is throw money atthis problem because money solves everything, right?So at 69 seconds I stopped the burn. I let the machine cool down and Itook a pocket knife and dug that little bead out of the top of theelectrode. When you shut off the arc it sort of absorbs down into thecarbon and you have to dig down into the carbon to get it out; thislittle bead of metal.So I sent this little bead of metal over to Harlow Laboratories inLondon. They made a precious metals analysis on this bead. I get thereport back "no precious element detected". Now this was one secondbefore the palladium was supposed to start leaving. Yet according toneutron activation, which analyzes the nucleus itself, there were noprecious elements detected.This made absolutely no sense at all. There had to be an explanationhere. Either this material was converted to another element or it's in aform that we don't understand yet. So I decided that I just had to getmore information on it. I went to a Ph.D. analytical chemist, a man whowas trained at separating and purifying individual elements out ofunknown material. He was trained at Iowa State University and he had aPh.D. in metal separation systems. He's the man that Motorola and Sperryused in the state of Arizona to handle their waste water problems.He has worked with every element on the periodic table with the

exception of four. He has worked with all the rare earths, he has workedwith all the man made elements. He has physically separated everythingon the periodic table with the exception of four elements.Coincidentally I came to him to have him separate six elements. Four ofthose were the elements he had never worked on. He said "you know DavidHudson, I have heard this story before. All my life, and I'm a nativeArizonan too, I have heard this story about these precious elements. Iam very impressed with the way you have gone about this: with thesystematic way you have approached it. I cannot accept any money becauseif I accept money from you I have to write you a written report.All I have to sell is my reputation. All I have to sell is mycredibility. I'm a certified expert witness in the state of Arizona inmetallurgical separation systems. He said "David I will work for you atno charge until I can show you where you are wrong." "When I can tellyou where you are wrong I'll give you a written report." "Then you willpay me sixty dollars an hour for the time I spent." This would have cometo about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. If this gets rid of thecurse; if this just gets the thing answered once and for all it's worthit. It was for me at the time. Do it, get on with it.Well, three years later he said "I can tell you it is not any of theother elements on the periodic table. We are educated; we are taught todo the chemical separation of the material and then send it forinstrumental confirmation."The example I use is rhodium because it has a very unique color to thechloride solution. It is a cranberry color almost like the color ofgrape juice. There is no other element that produces the same color inchloride solution. When my rhodium was separated from all the otherelements it produced that color of chloride. The last procedure you doto separate the material out is to neutralize the acid solution and itprecipitates out of solution as a red brown dioxide. That is heatedunder a controlled atmosphere to 800 degrees for an hour and that

creates the anhydrous dioxide. Then you hydro reduce that under acontrolled atmosphere to get the element and then you anneal away theexcess hydrogen.So when we did that, we neutralized the acid solution and precipitatedit out as a red-brown dioxide. Which is the color it is supposed toprecipitate. Then we filtered that out. We heated it under oxygen for anhour in a tube furnace then we hydro-reduced it to this gray-whitepowder: exactly the color rhodium should be as an element. Then weheated it up to 1400 degrees under argon to anneal away the material andit turned snow white.Now this wasn't expected. This just isn't what is supposed to happen. Sowhat John did was he said "Dave, I'm going to heat it to the anhydrousdioxide, I'm going to cool it down. I'm going to take one third of thesample and put it in a sealed vial. I'm going to put the rest of thesample back in the tube furnace and heat it up under oxygen, cool itback down, purge it with inert gas, heat it back up under hydrogen toreduce away the oxides and the hydrogen reacts with oxygen forming waterand cleans the metal. I'll cool that down to the gray-white powder. I'lltake half of that and put it in another sealed vial. I'll take the restof the powder and put it back in the furnace. I'm going to oxidize it,and hydro-reduce it and anneal it to the white powder. Then I will putit into a vial and send all three vials to Pacific Spectrochem over inLos Angeles, one of the best spectroscopic firms in the U.S.The first analysis comes back. The red-brown dioxide is iron oxide. Thenext material comes back; silica and aluminum. No iron present. Now justputting hydrogen on the iron oxide has made the iron quit being iron andnow it has become silica and aluminum. Now this was a big sample. Wejust made the iron turn into silica and aluminum. The snow whiteannealed sample was analyzed as calcium and silica. Where did thealuminum go? John said "Dave my life was so simple before I met you." Hesaid "this makes absolutely no sense at all." He said "what what you are

working with is going to cause them to re-write physics books tore-write chemistry books and come to a complete new understanding.John gave me his bill, it was a hundred and thirty thousand dollarswhich I paid. But he said "Dave, I have separated physically and I havechecked it chemically fifty different ways and you have four to sixounces per ton of palladium, twelve to fourteen ounces per ton ofplatinum, a hundred fifty ounces per ton of osmium, two hundred fiftyounces per ton of ruthenium, six hundred ounces per ton of iridium, andeight hundred ounces per ton of osmium. The exact same numbers that thespectroscopist had told me were there. It was such an incredible numberthat John said "Dave, I've got to go to the natural place where thisstuff comes from and I've got to take my own samples. So he went up andactually walked the property and took his own samples, put it in a bag,brought them back to the laboratory, pulverized the entire sample andthen started doing the analysis on what is called the master blendsample which represented the whole geology and he got the same numbers.David Hudson: Separating the M-state ElementsWe worked on this from 1983 until 1989. One Ph.D. chemist, three masterchemists, two technicians working full time. Using the Soviet Academy ofSciences, the U.S. Bureau of Standards-Weights and Measures informationas a starting point we literally learned how to do qualitative andquantitative separations of all of these elements. We learned how totake commercial standards and make them disappear. We learned how tobuyrhodium tri-chloride from Johnson, Mathew & Ingelhardt as the metal andwe learned how to break all the metal-metal bonding until it literallywas a red solution but no rhodium detectable. And it was nothing butpure rhodium from Johnson, Mathew & Ingelhardt.We learned how to do this with iridium, we learned how to do it withgold, we learned how to do it with osmium, we learned how to do it with

ruthenium. And what we found when we actually purchased a machine calledhigh pressure liquid chromatography.And for your information this person named John [Sycapose?] was the manwho actually wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Iowa State University on how tobuild this instrument. He conceptualized building this instrument backin 1963-64.After he graduated some of the graduate students there took thattechnology and developed it and eventually Dow Chemical came in andbought it. Dow went ahead and commercialized it and now it is the mostsophisticated chemical separation that the world has. It's computercontrolled, all high pressure and you can do very precise separationswith it. Because this is the man who conceptualized, designed it, toldthem what the limitations would be, eventually, on it he was the idealman to take the technology and perfect it.So we were able to use their basic technology and develop a separationsystem for taking the rhodium tri-chloride (we actually separated fivedifferent species in the commercial rhodium tri-chloride). What this isall about is the word "metal" is like the word "army". You can't have aone man army. The word metal refers to a conglomerate material. It hascertain properties, electrical conductivity, heat conduction and allthese other aspects of it.When you dissolve the metals in acid you get a solution that is clearwithout solids. You assume it's a free ion but when you are dealing withNobel elements it's still not a free ion, it's still what is calledcluster chemistry.Back since the 1950's there has been a whole area of research incolleges called cluster chemistry; catalytic materials. But what happensis the metal- metal bonds are still retained by the material. So if youbuy rhodium tri- chloride from Johnson, Matthew and Engelhardt you areactually getting Rh 12 Cl 36 or Rh 15 Cl 45. You really aren't gettingRhCl 3. There is a difference between the metal-metal bonding material

and the free ion. And so what you are buying when you buy it is clusterchemistry; you are not getting free ions.When you put it in for analytical instrumentation to analyze it, it isactually analyzing the metal-metal bonds of the cluster. It is notreally analyzing the free ions.I heard that General Electric was building fuel cells using rhodium andiridium. So I made contacts with their fuel cell people back inMassachusetts and traveled back there to meet with them. They had threeattorneys meet with us and the GE people were there. The attorneys werethere to protect the GE people because a lot of people say they havetechnologies and they meet with them then after the meeting they suethem claiming that GE stole their technology. Then to defend themselvesGE has to divulge what their technology really is. So GE is veryskeptical when you say that you have something new. They bring in theirhigh faluting attorneys to really screen you.After about an hour they said "these guys are for real. You attorneyscan leave". Because they had had the explosions also. They knew thatwhen they buy the commercial rhodium tri-chloride that it analyzes verywell. But to make it ready to go into their fuel cells they have to doeffusions on it using salt effusions where they melt the salt and putthe metal in with it to disperse it further. They know when they do thatthat the metal doesn't analyze as well any more.So when we told them that we had material that didn't analyze at allthey could conceive how this was possible. They had never seen it butthey said we are interested. Now these are the people who buildanalytical instrumentation, GE. They said "Dave, why don't you just makea bunch of rhodium for us and send it to us and we'll mount it in ourfuel cell technology. [What is the mechanism of conversion of monatomicrhodium to metallic rhodium in these fuel cells?] We'll see if it worksin a place where only rhodium works. No other metal has ever been foundwhich will perform the catalysis in the hydrogen evolving technology of

the fuel cell other than rhodium and platinum. And rhodium is uniquecompared to platinum because rhodium does not poison with carbonmonoxide and platinum does.They said "Dave we will just run it to see if it's a hydrogen evolvingcatalyst and if it is then we will see if it is carbon monoxide stableand if it is then it's rhodium or it's a rhodium alternative.

Monoatomic Elements”, and holds the patent. David Hudson patent can be seen: Hudson Patent for White Powder Gold My name is David Hudson. I'm a third generation native Phoenician from an old family in the Phoenix area. We are an old family. We are very conservative. I come from an ultra-conservative right wing background.