Gold has got an incredible history. From the ancient civilizations to first space walk, It's played a fascinating part in world history and culture for millennia.
Ancient people considered gold as a unique combination of water and sunlight and believed skin of their gods was of gold. People mastered technology of gold prospecting, extraction and processing and used it as a symbol of wealth and exchange equivalent. A small golden coin allowed purchasing big stock of food or cloth.
New findings of the metal in different regions of the world were inevitably accompanied by torrents of people who wondered to become truly reach. This unique phenomenon was named "gold rush" and even entered the world literature.
Nowadays gold stays one of the most revered metals on the planet. It is used in medicine, industry and of course, never likely to lose its aesthetic appeal.
Ancient Gold: Egypt, Rome and Greece
Long before gold was used the same as money early cultures made use precious metals unique characteristics to create jewelry, practical items and religious objects. Gold deposits were first discovered in Mesopotamia-the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers-and Egypt, and these regions became centers for its early uses. In these areas gold was primarily won by washing the river sand. As anyone who has seen or heard about the incredible treasures of Tutankhamen probably knows, Ancient Egypt left a rich legacy of gold. Gold was considered by the ancient Egyptians to be a divine and indestructible metal, and was associated with the brilliance of the sun. Ancient Egyptians even believed the skin of their gods was golden.
The Egyptians were the first to develop a gold mining system and contributed a raw of fundamental points into the technology of gold processing. Thus, they were forerunners in developing processes for melting metal. Using blowpipes, they managed to generate temperatures high enough to melt the metal. This enabled them to not only directly process larger gold nuggets, they could also work with smaller grains and thin flakes by melting them together in crucibles before processing.
Archaeological findings prove this civilization also mastered the art of beating gold into leaf to extend its use, as well as joining it with other metals to create alloys, which allowed for improved hardness and colour variations. It was also around this time that Egyptians started to cast gold using the lost-wax technique, which is still at the heart of jewellery making today.
Knowledge about producing and working precious metals spread from Egypt to all the other advanced civilizations in the region of that far age. The Egyptians' legacy later descended to the Romans, who also mined gold extensively throughout the empire, developing the technology of mining to new levels of sophistication. For example, they would divert streams of water in order to mine hydraulically, and even pioneered 'roasting', the technique of separating gold from rock.
In 202 BC, during the second Punic War with Carthage, the Romans won access to the gold mining region of Spain, allowing them to recover gold through stream gravels and hard-rock mining. But it wasn't until 50 BC that the widely used Aureus gold coin was issued - eight years after Julius Caesar brought back enough gold from a victory in Gaul to give 200 coins to each of his soldiers, and repay all of Rome's debts.
The next great civilization to prize and value gold were the Greeks. The Greeks considered gold in a way that seems more familiar to us today - as a primarily financial commodity. By 550 BC, the Greeks had started mining for gold throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East regions, and for a long time thought it was made from a particularly dense combination of water and sunlight. In 344 BC, Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont with 40,000 men, beginning one of the most extraordinary campaigns in military history. Included in the spoils of war were vast quantities of gold from the Persian Empire. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last time that gold would be at the centre of bloody international conflicts.
The 'Golden' Expansion: Findings Provoke Rushes
In 1700 gold was founded in Brazil and by 1720 this state had become the world's largest gold producer, delivering over 15 tons-and providing almost two-thirds of global production. Gold deposits of Brazil unleashed torrents of adventurers from the entire colony, and even some from the Portuguese homeland, into the country's interior. The gold rush in South America's largest country already bore all the characteristics of later movements the world over, but it took almost another 130 years before the next real gold rush happened.
Vast gold reserves were discovered in California in 1848. The wave of prospectors that flooded westward never slackened, and within a short time the United States had catapulted to the top of the gold-producing nations. But it wasn't Brazil, which had long ago led the league, that was nudged out of the top spot: it was the Czar's Russia. Huge reserves had been discovered in the Urals during the mid-18th century, making Yekaterinburg the center of Russian gold production.
However, California did not pose the only serious competition for first place to czarist Russia. An Australian gold prospector was returning home from California in late 1850. While onboard ship, he bet that he would only need a week to find geological formations in Australia similar to those he knew from California-and discover gold deposits. And indeed, Edward Hargraves was right! Upon his return to the fifth continent, it took him only one week to discover gold in the Macquarie River in New South Wales. Thus, the Australian gold rush began a mere two years after California's. Hargraves was later richly rewarded for his service: Queen Victoria appointed him Commissioner of the lands where he had discovered gold, making him financially secure for life.
The last gold rush in the traditional sense of the word came in 1896 in North America, when two Canadian prospectors discovered deposits near the Yukon River. Not only did the Klondike reserves enter the world of literature, these fields were the gold seekers' most coveted of all! Of the 100,000 people who set out for Dawson City, the mining town at the center of the reserves, only 30,000 to 40,000 actually arrived. Of those, only about 5,000 actually prospected for gold, and only a few hundred truly got rich. The Klondike Gold Rush lasted a total of three years. Seventy-five tons of gold were extracted during this time, and then the population of Dawson City-Canada's largest city north of Winnipeg for two years-collapsed. Although gold was mined in this region until 1966, its glory days had long been over.
Ten years after the gold rush in northern Canada, gold was discovered in an entirely different location on the globe: South Africa. Here, however, traditional "diggers" and seekers of fortune did not dominate the scene from the start. Instead, well-capitalized companies with a high level of technical expertise tackled the task professionally.
In the beginning the gold mining companies which supposed to operate in the region faced problems that seemed unsolvable: the deposits in South Africa were different from those found in other parts of the world. There were no gold nuggets to dig for; not even visible traces of gold. The deposits were not found in mineral veins or lodes. They were gold placer deposits, with the gold hosted by conglomerates and grits! And this made it very difficult to recover. English scientists finally saved the day by developing a technical process for dissolving gold from ore, helping the gold mining industry on the Cape of Good Hope rise from near failure in 1890 to successfully defending its position at the top in 2007.
The Gold Standard and Modern Look at the "Yellow Metal"
After the Napoleonic Wars, England became the first country to adopt the gold standard in 1816. Portugal followed suit some years later, then Switzerland with a gold/silver currency, and finally the German Empire in 1871 after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian states also made the switch relatively quickly, with Russia, Japan and the USA as the only meaningful stragglers, which eventually transitioned their currencies at the close of the 19th century (the Gold Standard Act placed the United States officially on the gold standard only in 1900).
The result: a gold standard currency, meaning that circulating paper money was made legal tender and fully backed by gold in the individual countries. The gold itself was used in the form of gold coins-called full-bodied coins-that were either in circulation or could be exchanged for paper banknotes at the issuing banks. Not only did the gold standard establish an essential foundation for national economic policy in participating countries, the international currency system was also based on this foundation, characterized by stable exchange rates fixed at a specific proportion to gold. The free flow of money and capital goods between nations that reigned during this time made this system possible.
But in 1914, World War I put an end to the short-lived era of the gold standard that had been adopted in 59 countries by that time. A few nations attempted to return to the old-style gold standard after the first Great War ended, but widespread inflation and the ruined economies in so many states made this virtually impossible.
The early 20th century demonstrated new discoveries and developments concerning gold. The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, even speculated about our obsession with gold, which he of course put down to 'the erotic fantasies of early childhood'.
In 1927, an extensive medical study conducted in France proved gold could be valuable in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Also, AT&T used gold contacts pressed into a germanium surface, as they developed the first transistor in the 1940s. In 1965, Colonel Edward White used a gold-coated visor to protect his eyes from the sun during the first space walk on the Gemini IV mission, and gold-coated visors are still a standard safety feature for any modern astronaut. In fact, gold would continue to play an important role in space exploration. For example, the first space shuttle (launched in 1982) used gold in its liquid hydrogen fuel pump.
Today gold is still one of the world's most prized materials. It is now widely associated with notions of achievement: Olympic medals, Nobel prizes, Academy awards - all rely on the positive connotations of gold.
In practice, gold remains an economic anchor (the Euro is partly backed by gold reserves), a technological tool (giant gold-coated mirrors were used to capture the most detailed images of Neptune and Uranus ever produced) and is of course never likely to lose its aesthetic appeal.
Gold: essential facts & useful figures
Gold
- The chemical symbol for gold is Au
- Gold's atomic number is 79 and its atomic weight is 196.967
- Gold melts at 1064.43° Centigrade
- The specific gravity of gold is 19.3, meaning gold weighs 19.3 times more than an equal volume of water.
Weight equivalents
| 1 troy ounce | = | 1.097 ordinary ounces |
| 1 troy ounce | = | 480 grains |
| 1 troy ounce | = | 31.1 grams |
| 1000 troy ounces | = | 31.3 kilograms |
| 1 gram | = | 0.03215 troy ounce |
| 1 kilogram | = | 32.15 troy ounces |
| 1 tonne | = | 32 150 troy ounces |
| 1 ordinary ounce | = | 0.9115 troy ounce |
| 1 ordinary pound | = | 14.58 troy ounces |
| Percent Gold | European system | Karat system |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | 1000 fine | 24 |
| 91.7% | 917 fine | 22 |
| 75.0% | 750 fine | 18 |
| 58.5% | 585 fine | 14 |
| 41.6% | 416 fine | 10 |
Links:
http://www.heraeus-edelmetallhandel.de
http://www.goldipedia.gold.org
