Fossil is a design, development, marketing and distribution company that specializes in consumer products predicated on fashion and value.

The company's principal offerings include an extensive line of fashion watches sold under the FOSSIL and RELIC brands, as well as complementary lines of small leather goods, belts, handbags, jewelry and sunglasses and FOSSIL brand apparel.

Platinum wrist watches are one of the most fascinating artesanal products in the world; they are also, horribly expensive. The reason is the nature of platinum, a precious metal similar to gold in many of its properties, but better yet, and far more rare.

In the past, however, platinum was derided, and considered as some sort of defective silver; the first people who ran across it really did not think much about this metal. It was discovered in Rio Pinto, Colombia, during the sixteenth century and as the European explorers and conquerors were taking hold of America.

But until the Spanish explorer Ulloa, during the middle of the eighteenth century, tried to melt platinum, nobody realised that they had something new at hand. The Spaniard believed that what he had was silver, but found out that he could not melt his sample as the expected temperatures; the melting point of platinum is far higher that that of silver.

This led to further experimenting and the truth was then known. The problem was that there was little knowledge about physical and chemical properties such as specific mass, which would have shown immediately that it was not silver.

Now, we know about big platinum deposits in Sudbury, Canada and the Urals, in Russia, albeit other smaller sources have been found elsewhere. Platinum is used in jewellery, but is highly appreciated in a variety of industries like medicine, chemistry and electronic engineering because it can be used under extreme conditions.

Platinum properties are impressible: it resist the attack of all corrosives known, it is malleable, highly conductive and easy to work with; so, it is the ideal metal to perform precision, high-quality soldering work.

However, its enormous cost allows only for use in the most demanding situations and designs. Spacecraft, ballistic missiles and supercomputers are usually wired using this metal or some of those of the same family, as defined by Mendeleiev's periodic table: palladium, osmium and iridium.

These are even more expensive than platinum: a small ingot, not much bigger than a coin, usually goes in the market for about one million euros. Platinum is widely used in medicine; prosthetics and implants usually carry some of it because it does not immune rejection by the body; this is the reason why it is used, for example, in the screws used to reconstruct big bones which have undergone extensive damage.

Exploration in search for platinum never stops, but due to its magmatic origin, it is unlikely that it will be ever found in big quantities, like what happened when the Europeans conquered America.

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