With its yellowish hue, gold has fascinated humans since its discovery. You may know that gold is a popular mainstay for jewelry, but did you know that gold can be safely eaten? Or that our bodies contain nearly .2 mg of gold (mostly found in our blood)? Here are a few other things you may not know about one of the world’s most precious metals.
(Pixabay / reverent)
Where is gold found?
Gold has been discovered on every continent on Earth.
How flexible is gold?
It is one of the most flexible or “ductile” metals. In fact, one ounce of solid gold can be stretched out into a golden thread almost five miles long. Not only that, but gold is extremely “malleable” meaning it can be pounded and pressed into sheets of gold that are so thin they seem to be transparent. One ounce of gold can extend to a thin sheet with an area of 300 square feet.
Why is gold sometimes referred to as Au?
This is the element symbol for gold as labeled in the periodic table. The genesis of this symbol is “aurum,” which means “shining dawn” in Latin. What’s the biggest bar of gold on Earth? There is a gold bar that weighs 551 pounds. The bar was purchased by Mitsubishi and can be found on display in a museum in the Shizuoka prefecture of Japan. Its worth hovers around $9 million.
What’s the biggest naturally-occurring deposit of gold?
This honor goes to a nugget know as the “Welcome Stranger.” It was discovered in Australia in the mid-1800s and weighed in at nearly 175 pounds.
How deep do miners dig to extract gold?
In South Africa, there is a gold mine that is 2.5 miles deep. That’s the length of 10 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.
When was gold discovered?
Gold was one of the first metals discovered. Man first found it in 5000 BC.
Why does there appear to be gold in my computer?
If you open up a computer, you’ll see a lot of gold staring back at you. It coats circuit boards, memory chips, motherboards, and more. The gold is distributed so thinly over the computer parts, however, that retrieving it would hardly be worth your time. A large stack of circuit boards, for example, might yield about $10.
Are diamonds rarer than gold?
The opposite is true—gold is rarer than diamonds.
While solid gold makes a great investment, gold can also be plated onto substrates such as jewelry, electronics components and more. High quality yet affordable gold plating kits are available at GoldPlating.com.