Gold! Gold! Gold!

Gold Bars

Last time I checked, the price of gold was somewhere around $1,350 an ounce and headed up.  Back around when gold was $400 an ounce, I bought a bunch of it.  A few years later I sold it for about $280 an ounce; so, you see, I didn't fare too well profit-wise, and I vowed that my gold trading days were over.  Ha.

Gold Coins

But the topic of gold is a fascinating one, for a lot of reasons.  It is a remarkable and rare metal.  It has been used as the ornament of kings, served as currency and a standard for currencies.

It is the only metal that will not rust or tarnish.

In its pure form, gold has a sun-yellow metallic luster. But when it is in the presence of other metals, it has various colors ranging from silver-white to green and orange-red.


Gold Dust

Gold is present in quartz veins and as a free metal.  It is widely distributed throughout the earth, although it is rare.  It is 75th in order of abundance of the elements in the earth's crust.

It is also present in sea water, at the ratio of 5-25 parts to 100 million parts of water.

Gold has high electrical conductivity---excellent when used as electronic components.

Gold is Excellent as an Electronic Component

It is highly malleable.   One ounce can be drawn into a wire 50 miles long.  It can be hammered so thinly that sunlight will pass through it.

Gold Jewelry

Its most common use is jewelry.

Only approximately 175,000 tons have been mined in all of history, 75% of which has been mined since 1910.  This amount of gold is so small that if it were formed into a cube, it would be slightly smaller than a tennis court cubed.

Gold is so rare that the world pours more steel in one hour than it has poured gold in all of recorded history.

Edible Gold

Gold is edible.  It has been placed in fruits, jellies, coffee, tea and other foods.

Gold Nuggets

The largest gold nugget ever found was the "Welcome Stranger" nugget discovered in Australia in 1869.  It was 10"X25" and yielded 2,248 ounces of pure gold.  It was found just 2" below the earth's surface.

One cubic foot of gold weighs half a ton.

Olympic Gold Medal

The last time olympic gold metals were made entirely of pure gold was 1912.

There are more than 400 references to gold in the bible.

The first known gold coin was made by the Lydians in 560 BC.

Gold and copper are the only two non-white-colored metals.  Both were discovered around 5,000 BC.

Part of the Vault at Fort Knox, Kentucky

The world's largest stockpile of gold is 5 stories underground inside the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Klondike Gold Rush, 1896

The first recorded discovery of gold in the United States was a 17 pound nugget found in Cabarrus, North Carolina in 1803.  This caused the first U. S. gold rush.