Tell the “biography” of a mixture. From small beginnings as a group of elements, to the mixture.?

Answer 1

Hi, I am the element Carbon (C) ; here are my friends Zinc (Zn) and Iron (Fe). Once upon a time we were elements living in a star; created by the process of fusion. When the star when supernova (a really big explosion) my brother and friends were spread across the universe. Our parent star was huge and it went up with a really big explosion big enough to create things like Zinc. If it had been a smaller explosion then my buddy Zinc may never have been formed. The three of us happened to end up in the same cloud of debris that eventually condensed and formed this planet called Earth, soil dirt or something like that.

Anyway I ended up in the atmosphere while my friends ended up in the ground; I thought I would never see them again. Then one day a plant breathed me in, the planet was still young back then. The earth was still forming back then and the shallow plane I lived in became flooded and turned into a swamp. That killed the plant, but saved me from exposure to that greedy element oxygen. When the plant died it decayed and I, as a part of the remains, was buried by silt and later tons of rocks and soil; over a period of thousands of years. Eventually the pressure got too much to me and my brothers and I were compressed. At first I formed this crumbly substance called peat, but the pressure only increased over time as more soil and rock was placed upon us. I transformed from peat into Lignite and later into Bituminous coal. Along the way I grabbed up some hydrogen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen) and met up with Sulfur (S) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur) we got together for company and quietly hardened over the years. Then a change in the earth’s crust thrust up into the sky near the surface in this formation called a mountain.

My friend Zinc was buried under rock hiding in a mountain nearby; he found himself in a pure pocket and became a bluish white metal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc).

My buddy Iron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron) feel into a bad crowd with that plant waste gas called oxygen. Oxygen corrupted him and made him rust. He lay in a small pocket underground for centuries until some ape like thing dug him up.

I was hiding deep in an underground vein of rock when more of those ape like things dug me out of the ground. They burned my brothers to liberate the hydrogen. The carbon was converted to soot, ash and released as free carbon only to fall in with those evil corruptors Oxygen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen). Oxygen is a greed gas that when it can form a molecule with something else it joins with itself.

I thought for sure I would end up as waste until I was sold to a ape creature called a blacksmith. He used me to create a fire strong enough to melt iron. That’s where I met my old friend Iron. The blacksmith was trying to make some weapon called a sword and he was banging my old friend iron. When the iron was melted he finally broke away from that corruptor oxygen.

The blacksmith was heating cooling this sword thingy and banging on it with his hammer. I decided that it would be a good idea to join my old friends so a few of us lay on top of the sword and were banged into it by the blacksmith’s hammer. It was there that I found Iron. Only a few of my friends were able to join us, most of us got banged off or rubbed off. Later we found that the total Carbon population was only 6% of the total Iron population.

I was able to form a strong bond with Iron because of our old friendship and we became a new stronger material called steel. The blacksmith shaped us into a sword to use as a weapon for some famous guy called knight. We severed this knight guy pretty well for years, but ended up getting broken in a battle.
We lay on a junk pile rusting for years until some other blacksmith came along and reheated us. He shaped us into small sticks that he called nails. These ape like creatures would use nails to hold wood pieces together.

But, the blacksmith had a special trick to make us stronger. He heated and melted another metal and created a bath of it which we were dipped into. The metal turned out to be Zinc and I found one of my old friends who had been in the original star with me.

Zinc helped us a lot by sticking to the outside of the sword and shielding us from that greedy element Oxygen. Oxygen would take Iron away from me and together they would have rusted into garbage.

Our new colony; the nail was used to help build this big think called a castle; we were fashioned into one of the support beams where we still are today. We help to keep the walls from falling in and keep the castle strong. Today I heard it has been turned into a museum and full of artifacts, many of them made out of iron, where millions of the ape like creatures come to gawk at us each year.

Most of us are simple iron, but I was able to get to together with carbon and we formed a link, a bond that made the rest of the nail stronger. Only a few of us were able to do this since there was so little carbon in the iron, but there were enough of us to make one of the strongest metal combinations every made.

My friend zinc never really bonded with us, but he coated us and kept us safe from Oxygen so we were always grateful to have him and his buddies around. When we got hammered into the wood I heard that there was some carbon around, but it was locked in dead tree cells so they weren’t easy to talk to. Besides I had zinc between us and them. From what I heard they were pretty stable and seemed happy as these dead cells.