Amalgam (chemistry) copper trough, which formed a thin coating of mercury on the exterior. The waste ore was then transferred down the trough, and gold in the waste amalgamated with the mercury. This coating would then be scraped off and refined by evaporation to get rid of the mercury, leaving behind somewhat high-purity gold. Mercury amalgamation was first used on silver ores with the development of the patio process in Mexico in 1557. There were also additional amalgamation processes that were created for processing silver ores, including pan amalgamation and the Washoe process. Gold amalgam has proved effective where gold fines ("flour
Inorganic chemistry based on their properties. Partly the classification focuses on the position in the periodic table of the heaviest element (the element with the highest atomic weight) in the compound, partly by grouping compounds by their structural similarities. When studying inorganic compounds, one often encounters parts of the different classes of inorganic chemistry (an organometallic compound is characterized by its coordination chemistry, and may show interesting solid state properties). Different classifications are: Classical coordination compounds feature metals bound to "lone pairs" of electrons residing on the main group atoms of ligands such as HO, NH, Cl, and CN. In modern coordination