Necklace with beautiful pendant of Bismuth from Bolivia.

Bismuth is a chemical element with the symbol Bi and atomic number 83. It is a red-white main group metal. In the past, bismuth was often confused with tin or lead because it shares many properties with them. In 1753, the French scientist Claude François Geoffroy succeeded in separating bismuth from lead. The name comes from the German Wismut, which is probably a corruption of white matter. Bismuth is widely used in the production of cosmetics and medicines. In addition, there are other industrial applications: Bismanol (an alloy of manganese and bismuth) can be used to make strong permanent magnets. The low melting point of many bismuth alloys makes them suitable for use in fire detectors. It is therefore used in the Woods metal alloy. Bismuth is used as a catalyst in the plastics industry. Bismuth can be used as a carrier of 233U and 235U in nuclear installations. Bismuth is used with a tin alloy for a coating on dovetail blades of jet engines. Bismuth is used in brazing. The property that it expands when cooled makes bismuth very suitable for this in some cases. Fireworks are sometimes enriched with bismuth to create beautiful color effects. In a eutectic mixture with lead as coolant in a lead-cooled reactor. Since the early 1990s, research has been conducted into the extent to which bismuth can be used as a non-toxic substitute for lead in various industrial processes, such as the shot in a shotgun cartridge from a shotgun, which is already in use today. Bismuth is a fragile heavy metal that is the only one of that group not poisonous. In addition, bismuth is the heaviest heavy metal and also the most diamagnetic. It has a very low electrical conductivity and exhibits the highest Hall effect of all metals. Bismuth burns to form a bright blue/green flame. Bismuth is one of the few substances that expands when frozen; a property the metal shares with water and gallium.