60 Amazing Facts about Gold You Probably Didn’t Know | Amazing Facts 4U
- Gold is one investment that doesn’t lose its value unlike fiat currencies printed out of thin air backed just by an assurance from the federal government in our world with looming currency and debt crisis.
- Traditionally, investors try to preserve their assets during hard economic times by investing in precious metals, such as gold and silver.
- The word Gold is derived from the Old English word Gelo meaning yellow. The element symbol for gold is Au which comes from the old Latin name for gold, aurum, which means “shining dawn” or “glow of sunrise”.
- The amazing fact is that nearly all of the gold on Earth that is mined came from meteorites that bombarded the planet over 200 million years after the earth was formed.
- The vast majority of Earth’s gold and platinum is found in its core. The reason these elements are so rare on the surface is that they mostly sunk to the core when the planet was molten.
- It is believed that there’s enough gold in Earth’s core to coat its surface in 1.5 feet of Gold.
- Amazingly the oldest worked gold objects were made as early as 6000 BC. You will find more than 400 references of gold in the bible.
- A gold pendant was found in Thessaly dating from around 6000-5300 BC.
- In 560 B.C., the Lydians introduced the first gold coin, which was actually a naturally occurring amalgam of gold and silver called electrum.
- When the Lydians were captured by the Persians in 546 B.C., the use of gold coins began to spread.
- Gold is the only metal that is yellow or “golden”. Other metals may develop a yellowish color, but only after some chemical reaction.
- In fact, Gold and Copper are the only two non-white metals.
- The amazing fact is absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands.
- High purity metallic gold is odorless and tasteless since the metal is unreactive.
- The amazing fact is Gold never erodes. Very few chemicals can attack gold, so that’s why it keeps it shine even when buried for thousands of years.
- While acids dissolve most metals, a special mixture of acids called aqua regia is required to dissolve gold.
- Amazingly at one time in fact aluminum used to be more valuable than gold! Aluminum used to be one of the most expensive metals in the world. Only the wealthiest ate with aluminum utensils, while lesser nobility ate with gold.
- Malleability is a measure of how easily a material can be hammered into thin sheets. Gold is the most malleable element. A single ounce of gold can be beaten out into a sheet that is 300 square feet.
- A sheet of gold can be made thin enough to be transparent. Very thin sheets of gold may appear greenish blue because gold strongly reflects red and yellow.
- 24 karat gold is pure elemental gold. 18 karat gold is 75% pure gold. 14 karat gold is 58.5% pure gold. The remaining portion of the metal usually is silver, but may consist of other metals or a combination of metals, such as platinum, copper, palladium, zinc, nickel, iron, and cadmium, etc.
- Worldwide about 60 % of gold mined is used for making jewelry. Being inert Gold does not cause skin irritation. If gold jewelry irritates the skin, it is likely that the gold was mixed with some other metal.
- Gold is relatively heavy. In fact one cubic foot of gold weighs half a ton.
- 75 % of all gold in circulation has in fact been extracted since 1910.
- At least 15% of annual gold consumption is recycled each year. That means you could have ancient Egyptian gold in your dental filling!
- Gold is edible without any harm. Our bodies contain about 0.2 milligrams of gold, most of it in our blood.
- The visors of astronauts’ space helmets receive an amazing coating of gold so thin (0.00005 millimeters, or 0.000002 inches) that it is transparent. Even this thin layer reduces glare and heat from sunlight.
- An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long. Amazingly the resulting wire would be only 5 microns wide.
- The amazing fact is that if all of the existing gold in the world was to be turned into 5-micron wire, it could wrap around the planet about million times.
- Amazingly it is rarer to find a one-ounce nugget of gold than a five-carat diamond.
- The temperature of the human body is 37 degrees centigrade. Because of gold’s unique conductivity, gold jewelry rapidly matches your body’s heat, becoming part of you.
- Gold melts at 1064 degrees centigrade and only boils at 2808 degrees centigrade.
- It can conduct both heat and electricity and it never rusts.
- The world’s largest gold bar weighs 250 kg (551 lb).
- Gold thread can be used as embroidery thread.
- The pharaohs of ancient Egypt wore garments made from threads of beaten gold up to 500 threads per inch of cloth.
- One cubic mile of seawater amazingly contains about 50 pounds of gold. The fact is if all the Gold sitting in the oceans were mined, each of us would get 20 kg each.
- More gold is recoverable from a ton of personal computers than from 17 tons of gold ore.
- In Olympics, so-called Gold Medal in fact only contain 6 grams of gold. The last time Olympic gold medals were entire of gold was in 1912.
- Do you know that over 6 milligrams of gold are lost every year from a Wedding Ring just by wearing it?
- The amazing fact is that only approximately 142,000 tons of gold have mined throughout history which if melted, makes a cube measuring approximately 25 x 25 x 25 meters. Gold is so rare that the world pours more steel in an hour than it has poured gold since the beginning of recorded history.
- The value of all the gold in the world is about $1000 for each person on the planet.
- Gold leaf may be only 0.18 microns (seven-millionths of an inch) thick; a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.
- The “Welcome Stranger,” the largest gold nugget ever recorded, was found in Victoria, Australia, in 1869. It weighed 78 kilograms and dimensions were 25 by 10 inches. When it was melted down, it produced 71 kilograms of pure gold. The amazing fact is that it was found just 2 inches below the ground.
- Gold mines of South Africa can descend up to 12000 Ft and a temperature of 54 Degree Centigrade.
- In South Africa, 70 million tons of earth are raised and milled to extract 500 tons of Gold.
- In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt outlawed US citizens from hoarding Gold. Owning Gold attracted penalty of $ 10000 and/or ten years in prison. Before that, the U.S. mint made $2.50, $10, and $15 coins of solid gold.
- The value of gold has been used as the standard for many currencies. After WWII, the United States created the Bretton Woods System, which set the value of the U.S. dollar to 1/35th of a troy ounce (888.671 mg) of gold.
- The U.S. assured the world that enough gold would be kept to cover printed money if the dollar is made world reserve currency. The U.S. abandoned this in 1971 after the Vietnam war breaking the promise and paving the way for unlimited money printing out of thin air taking huge advantage of the dollar being a world currency.
- Ice cream taste-testers in fact eat with golden spoons! Eating on gold allows the tester to taste the product 100% without being influenced by a metal aftertaste, common with most spoon metals.
- Gold has many uses, aside from its monetary and symbolic value. It is used in electronics, electrical wiring, dentistry, electronics, medicine, radiation shielding, and in the color glass.
- In 1955, someone accidentally dropped more than a 600-year-old plaster Buddha statue in Bangkok, Thailand to discover the plaster was actually covering a solid gold statue.
- Wladimir Klitschko auctioned off his 1996 Olympic gold medal in March 2012 for charity. The buyer paid $1 million, but immediately returned it because he wanted it to stay in the family.
- Canada has minted a $300 Gold Coin.
- Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. After the war, the gold was recast into medals and again presented to Laue and Franck.
- Gaius Gracchus, the ancient Roman politician, had a bounty put on his head to the price of the head’s weight in gold. Although the head was delivered, the prize was never paid, as it was discovered that Gaius’ captor had emptied out his brain and replaced it with molten lead.
- It was common for sailors to wear gold earrings so that in the event of their death and the body washing up on shore, the earring would serve as payment for a “proper Christian burial”.
- In 1992, a man looking for his hammer with a metal detector found one of the largest hoards of Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain.
- There are ATMs in Dubai that dispense gold bars.
- Indian citizens buy so much gold that the Indian government owns officially only 360 metric tons, while private gold holdings since generations are estimated to be more than 30,000 metric tons.
- Tiny spheres of gold are used by the Amersham Corporation of Illinois as a way to tag specific proteins to identify their function in the human body for the treatment of disease.
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