Your silver turns black because of the presence of sulfur in food. Here’s how the cleaning works: The tarnished spoon has silver sulfide on it, and when you put it in the solution, the silver sulfide combines with the baking soda and salt in the water solution to break apart into sulfur (which gets deposited on the foil) and silver (which goes back onto the spoon). Using the heat from your stove, you’ve just relocated the tarnish from the spoon to the foil. Just rinse clean and wipe dry!


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7 Responses to “Grandma’s Silver”

  1. Yes there is a video. Try logging out and then back in again. If you still have trouble, please email me directly: [email protected]

  2. Is there a video for Grandma’s Silver? We cannot see it or see directions to do the experiment.

  3. Ok so I found out what was going on with this video. The experiment itself involves making silver chloride from HCl, and it’s more of a college-level experiment, but I wanted to use it as a reference to demonstrate how you would use chemistry to solve a real world problem by combining specific chemicals together to get the precipitate and then how to measure out the right bits to calculate the amount of silver in the silverware. This is one of the very few that we don’t actually recommend you do yourself due to the nature of the chemicals involved, but I wanted you to see exactly how real chemists solve real problems, so I included the overall instructions and walked you through the lab.

    The experiment that is associated with it is a different kind of experiment that uses more common every day substances to remove the tarnish off the silver by turning the fork into a battery to reverse the chemical reaction and re-deposit the silver back on the fork (or spoon!)

  4. Oh no! That’s not right – let me see if I can figure out what happened with that particular video… more soon.

  5. Marisa Corless says:

    In this video, it says “let me show you how to do this experiment.” and then the video ends and the experiment is not shown. If I click the link for Redox Reaction Experiment, it takes me to a different experiment that is not about polishing silver. Where is the experiment for Grandma’s silver?

  6. Yes, it’s a similar process. Silver tarnishes from sitting by being exposed to sulfur-containing substances in the air.

  7. Lisa Pearson says:

    My silver tarnishes from sitting, just exposed to air. Is this a similar reaction as to the sulfur in food? Will the chemistry be the same?