25 curiosities about gold

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Gold is one of the most appreciated substances in our society, meaning of wealth and status. Why is it so coveted? Of all metals of the universe, why has the gold become so valuable? It has been a row of events that has taken gold to be highly valuable; on one side, it is not the weirdest metal but it is difficult to get it. But there are metals that are quite weirder and, particularly, gold is not too interesting: it does not react with other metals, then which is its virtue? Precisely, its plainness is what makes gold be so valid as currency.

Gold is not too weird neither is too abundant. It is not toxic, neither radioactive. And gold is one of the few metals that exist that have these characteristics.

1. A tonne of old mobile phones will give you more gold than a tonne of gold ore.

2. If you take all the gold from the ocean, there would be enough gold so that each person around the world would have 4 kg of this metal.

3. To avoid Nazi confiscation, the Hungarian chemist George Hevesy melted the German physicist Max von Laue and James Frank’s Nobel Prizes gold and he rebuilt them after the war.

4. Early sailors used to have gold rings so that if they got drowned and if they finally got ended up in the shore, these gold rings used to be a way of payment for Christian burials.

5. The Olympic gold medal only contains 1% of gold.

6. In Dubai there are cash machines that dispense gold.

7. Most of the gold which is in the earth’s crust was placed there because of the asteroid impact.

8. Most of gold of the Earth is in the core, because it sank in the core while the planet was forming.

9. This is not a curiosity about gold, but it is something related with it. In 1859 the gold miners from the Rocky Mountains woke up at 1 a.m. to have breakfast because the light was so bright that they thought it had already dawned.   

10. The ice-cream testers use gold spoons to avoid the taste of traditional spoons that they have.

11. The Roman politician Cayo Graco had a reward for his head, that person who would give it, would have that head weight in gold. The head was given but the reward wasn’t paid because the killer had filled the head with lead.

12. Aluminium used to be the most valuable metal in the Earth. The rich people could eat with aluminium cutlery, while the people who were not so rich used gold ones.

13. Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, wasted so much gold in Egypt that it was devalued and he almost destroyed the economy.

14. Chinese prisoners are obliged to extract gold on the online videogame World of Warcraft. Some sources report that there are near 100000 online gold farmers in all the Asian country.

15. LEGO gives a gold ingot of 25 grams to the workers who have been in the company for a quarter century.

16. Gold is edible.

17. Gold has been found in every continent.

18. Gold is usually extracted by force of water during earthquakes because of his pressure in the of the earth’s crust.

19. Eucalyptus leaves might contain traces of gold.

20. All gold extracted in the human history would fit in three Olympic swimming pools.

21. Almost the half of the gold that has been extracted were situated in Witwatersrand, in South Africa.

22. Aurophobia is the fear of gold.

23. Indian housewives have almost 11% of the gold in the world, more than the gold there is in USA, Switzerland, Germany and IMF together.

24. The biggest gold bar in the world weighs 250 kg.

25. Your body contains approximately 0.2 mg of gold, situated mainly in the blood stream.

Gold is one of the most appreciated substances in our society, meaning of wealth and status. Why is it so coveted? Of all metals of the...