Meet the meekest of all elements. Tin is so the opposite of a poison that it used to be used for lining cans of food (hence ‘tin cans’). Who knows how many pounds of tin people inadvertently ate while scraping the sides of their cans of chili way back when. And nothing happened to them. Well, nothing that we know of anyway. This was back in the day when doctors were recommending smoking as a healthy activity to stretch out your lungs after all.

Today tin no longer figures in the food industry. The tin cans have been replaced with steel, tin foil with aluminum. Its main use continues to be for soldering. Hundreds of thousands of tons of tin are used every year to mate circuit boards to chips and those little candy-like doodads that do electrical stuff. Without a low tempertaure metal that can serve this humble function the world would be in big trouble!