>>21606233this chunk you just light on fire and 3/4 of the silver melts out as a puddle
The spanish accidentally discovered a way to deal with the remaining 1/4 by cooking it in a reducing furnace with no oxygen like firing pottery. And in cases where there was chlorine mixed with the ore they used salt and sunlight to free the chlorine from the ore and then mixed it with mercury to get every trace of silver out of the rock
lots of accidents in discovering how to get silver,
but the fact that it usually comes mixed with lead making the melting point lower (like solder) makes getting the silver out pretty easy. Also the melted liquid silver and lead absorbs other metals like gold and copper, so it was pretty easy to get most of the metal with nothing more than a small oven made of clay and rocks or bricks.
I could melt this chunk and get a couple hundred dollars worth of silver, but it's worth close to a thousand dollars if I don't melt it.
