Gold
Gold is one of the substances that are equated with extreme value. Have you ever wondered why? Why is gold considered one of the most valuable metals in the universe?
One of the reasons could be because it’s one of the rarest metals on earth, but there are other metals that are even rarer.
So what’s the deal? Well, out of all the rare elements like silver and platinum, gold has one distinction that makes it stand out—it’s yellowish. Also it doesn’t react with other elements so it doesn’t tarnish. All the others are grayish.
Gold was used as a currency of choice in the past, but even though it isn’t used as currency anymore, it still retains its value.
Here are 25 awesome things you didn’t know about gold.
#25 A ton of old cell phones will give you more gold than 1 ton of gold ore
#24 If all the gold in the ocean was taken out, there would be enough for every person on Earth to have 9 pounds.
#23 Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy melted down the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue and James Frank so that Nazis wouldn’t confiscated them. They were recast after the war.
#22 Have you ever wondered why sailors often wore gold earrings? It’s so that if they drowned and washed up on the beach, the earrings would serve as payment for a proper Christian burial.
#21 The Olympic gold medal is only 1% gold.
#20 In Dubai, there are ATM’s that dispense gold bars!
#19 Most of the gold that is found in the Earth’s crust was placed there by asteroid strikes.
#18 Most of the gold on Earth is in the core because it sank to the center while the Earth was being formed.
#17 In 1859, gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up at 1am to eat breakfast because the aurora was so bright that they thought it was morning.
#16 Did you know that ice cream testers use gold spoons so that they would avoid the after taste of using regular spoons?
#15 Roman politician Gaius Gracchus has a bounty put on his head of its weight in gold. The head was delivered but the bounty wasn’t paid because the person who captured the head filled it with lead.
#14 Did you know that aluminium used to be the most valuable metal on Earth? Rich people would eat using aluminium cutlery will poorer people would use gold!
#13 Mansa Musa, the ruler of the Mali Empire, spent so much gold in Egypt that he devalued it and almost destroyed the economy.
#12 According to list25, Chinese prisoners are forced to mine gold in the game World of Warcraft. There are sources that report nearly 100,000 virtual gold farmers throughout the country.
#11 LEGO used to give a 25.65 gram brick of gold to its employees who completed 25 years of service.
#10 Did you know that gold is actually edible?
#9 Gold can be found on every continent.
#8 Gold is usually forcibly extracted from water during earthquakes because of the pressure deep within the Earth’s crust.
#7 The leaves of the eucalyptus tree have been found to contain some traces of gold.
#6 All the gold ever mined in human history can fill up three Olympic-sized swimming pools.
#5 Almost half of the gold came from Witwatersrand, South Africa.
#4 The fear of gold is called Aurophobia.
#3 Indian housewives hold almost 11% of the world’s gold. That’s more than the US, Germany, Switzerland and the International Monetary Fund combined.
#2 The largest gold bar in the world weighs 250 kg or 551 pounds.
#1 Your body contains around .2mg of gold which is mostly found in your bloodstream.
