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Manganese is a silvery-grey metal which resembles iron...
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Manganese
Manganese is a silvery-grey metal which resembles iron. Manganese is hard and very brittle, difficult to fuse but easy to oxidize. Manganese metal and its common iron are paramagnetic. Manganese is essential to plants for growth and to higher animals to promote the action of many enzymes.
Manganese is found as a free element in nature in many minerals and often in combination with iron. Manganese is a chemical element designated by the symbol Mn with an atomic number 25. Being a free element, Manganese is an important metal for the use of industrial metal alloys, particularly stainless steel.
The main oxides of Manganese, like Manganese dioxide, are abundant in nature and because of their colour have been used since the Stone Age. The cave paintings in Gargas contain Manganese as pigments. These cave paintings are 30,000 to 24,000 years old. Manganese compounds were used by Egyptian and Roman glassmakers as a way of either removing or adding colour to the glass. This form of glassmakers soap carried through the middle ages and is evident in the 14th Century glass from Venice.
Manganese phosphating is used as a rust and corrosion treatment for steel. Manganese ions have various colours which depend on their oxidation state and are used industrially as pigments. Manganese dioxide is used as the electron acceptor material in standard and alkaline disposable dry cells and batteries.
The Manganese content of some iron ores used in Greece led to the assumption that the steel produced from that ore contained inadvertent amounts of manganese which made the Spartan steel extremely hard. In 1816, it was noted that adding Manganese to iron made it harder without making it any more brittle. At the beginning of the 19th Century, Manganese was used in steelmaking with several patents being granted. In 1912, Manganese phosphating electrochemical conversion coatings for protecting firearms against rust and corrosion were patented in the United States and has widespread use ever since.
In 1866, the invention of the Leclanche cell and the subsequent improvement of batteries containing Manganese dioxide as a cathodic depolariser led to the increase in the demand of Manganese dioxide. Before the introduction of the nickel-cadmium and lithium batteries, most batteries contained Manganese. In the 20th Century, Manganese dioxide has been highly used commercially as the chief cathodic material for disposable dry cell and dry batteries in both zinc-carbon and alkaline types.
Manganese is mined in South Africa, Australia, China, Brazil, Gabon, Ukraine, India, Ghana and Kazakhstan.
