Silver Facts

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Demand for silver is built on three main pillars; industrial uses, photography and jewelry & silverware. Together, these three categories represent more than 95 percent of annual silver consumption.

Sparkling tableware, shining jewelry, and living spaces brightened by silvered mirrors are the obvious contributions of silver to our daily lives. It is, however, the silver behind the scenes that makes our modern world function efficiently. Inside switches, silver contacts efficiently and safely turn on and off the powerful electric current that flows into our homes, our lamps and our appliances. It is silver under the keys of computer keyboards, behind automobile dashboards, and behind the control panels of washing machines or microwave ovens that switch on or off at the touch of the finger. And inside the 220-volt line circuit breaker boxes in our homes or inside the 75,000-volt circuit breakers in power stations, silver performs a safe and steady task of switching on or off our most dependable servant, electric power, throughout our lives.

Silver has been a multifaceted asset throughout history. It was found as a free metal and easily worked into useful shapes and was widely used by early man. The beauty, weight and lack of corrosion made silver a store of value, and hence one of the earliest of metals to be used as a medium of exchange.

The early discovery that water, wine, milk and vinegar stayed pure longer in silver vessels, led to its desirability as a container for long voyages. Herodotus (79 A.D.) wrote that Cyrus the Great, King of Persia (550-529 B.C.), a man of vision who established a board of health and a medical dispensary for his citizens, had water drawn from a special stream, "boiled, and very many four wheeled wagons drawn by mules carry it in silver vessels, following the king wheresoever he goes at any time."

In more contemporary times, when the first telegrapher tapped out his code in 1832, silver was the electrical contact that made the current flow. Earlier that century, when Joseph Nicephore Niepce created the first photographic image obtained through a camera-like device in 1813, it was silver nitrate that made it possible. Finally, when the German obstetrician, Dr. F. Crede made his medical breakthrough in 1884 to halt the disease that caused blindness in generations of children at birth, it was silver that killed the virus.

Today, the demands of modern technology have revealed the remarkable range of electrical, mechanical, optical, and medicinal properties that have placed silver as the key metal in many applications.

In The Home | In Technology | In The Hospital | On The Highway | In Industry | Store of Value