Why Do Humans Like Gold

[Mark Gillespie]

Mankind's attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting - it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?

Why not osmium or chromium, or helium, say - or maybe seaborgium?

That's where I meet Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London, beside an exquisite breastplate of pure beaten gold.

He pulls out a copy of the periodic table.

"Some elements are pretty easy to dismiss," he tells me, gesturing to the right-hand side of the table.

"Here you've got the noble gases and the halogens. A gas is never going to be much good as a currency. It isn't really going to be practical to carry around little phials of gas is it?

"And then there's the fact that they are colorless. How on earth would you know what it is?"

The two liquid elements (at everyday temperature and pressure) - mercury and bromine - would be impractical too. Both are also poisonous - not a good quality in something you plan to use as money. Similarly, we can cross out arsenic and several others.

Sella now turns his attention to the left-hand side of the table.

"We can rule out most of the elements here as well," he says confidently.

"The alkaline metals and earths are just too reactive. Many people will remember from school dropping sodium or potassium into a dish of water. It fizzes around and goes pop - an explosive currency just isn't a good idea."

A similar argument applies to another whole class of elements, the radioactive ones: you don't want your cash to give you cancer.

Out go thorium, uranium and plutonium, along with a whole bestiary of synthetically-created elements - rutherfordium, seaborgium, ununpentium, and einsteinium - which only ever exist momentarily as part of a lab experiment, before radioactively decomposing.

Then there's the group called "rare earths", most of which are actually less rare than gold.

Unfortunately, they are chemically hard to distinguish from each other, so you would never know what you had in your pocket.

This leaves us with the middle area of the periodic table, the "transition" and "post-transition" metals.

This group of 49 elements includes some familiar names - iron, aluminum, copper, lead, silver.

But examine them in detail and you realize almost all have serious drawbacks.

We've got some very tough and durable elements on the left-hand side - titanium and zirconium, for example.

The problem is they are very hard to smelt. You need to get your furnace up into the region of 1,000C before you can begin to extract these metals from their ores. That kind of specialist equipment wasn't available to ancient man.

Aluminum is also hard to extract, and it's just too flimsy for coinage. Most of the others in the group aren't stable - they corrode if exposed to water or oxidize in the air.

Take iron. In theory it looks quite a good prospect for currency. It is attractive and polishes up to a lovely sheen. The problem is rust: unless you keep it completely dry it is liable to corrode away.

"A self-debasing currency is clearly not a good idea," says Sella.

We can rule out lead and copper on the same basis. Both are liable to corrosion. Societies have made both into money but the currencies did not last, literally.

So, what's left?

Of the 118 elements we are now down to just eight contenders: platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium, along with the old familiars, gold and silver.

These are known as the noble metals, "noble" because they stand apart, barely reacting with the other elements.

They are also all pretty rare, another important criterion for a currency.

Even if iron didn't rust, it wouldn't make a good basis for money because there's just too much of it around. You would end up having to carry some very big coins about.

With all the noble metals except silver and gold, you have the opposite problem. They are so rare that you would have to cast some very tiny coins, which you might easily lose.

They are also very hard to extract. The melting point of platinum is 1,768C.

That leaves just two elements - silver and gold.

Both are scarce but not impossibly rare. Both also have a relatively low melting point, and are therefore easy to turn into coins, ingots or jewelry.

Silver tarnishes - it reacts with minute amounts of Sulphur in the air. That's why we place particular value on gold.

It turns out then, that the reason gold is precious is precisely that it is so chemically uninteresting.

Gold's relative inertness means you can create an elaborate golden jaguar and be confident that 1,000 years later it can be found in a museum display case in central London, still in pristine condition.

So what does this process of elemental elimination tell us about what makes a good currency?

First off, it doesn't have to have any intrinsic value. A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does.

As we've seen, it also needs to be stable, portable and non-toxic. And it needs to be fairly rare - you might be surprised just how little gold there is in the world.

If you were to collect together every earring, every gold sovereign, the tiny traces gold in every computer chip, every pre-Columbian statuette, and every wedding ring and melt it down, it's guesstimated that you'd be left with just one 20-metre cube, or thereabouts.

But scarcity and stability aren't the whole story. Gold has one other quality that makes it the stand-out contender for currency in the periodic table. Gold is... golden.

All the other metals in the periodic table are silvery-colored except for copper - and as we've already seen, copper corrodes, turning green when exposed to moist air. That makes gold very distinctive.

"That's the other secret of gold's success as a currency," says Sella. "Gold is unbelievably beautiful."

 

[EL NINO77]

Perhaps the perception of shiny Gold is a lasting and high value - a wealth that also represents the seal of governance, status in society ... and power.

It is also interesting how many different civilizations appreciated gold as a standard of wealth .., or as a currency of the highest value...

[DDancer]

22 hours ago, Mark Gillespie said:

A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does.

This single line in the whole article pretty much says it all.  Many societies never appreciated gold as a currency.  That line with the supporting arguments on its scarcity, stability and workablity are what makes gold valuable.  Nowadays's gold also has an intrinsic value for society in its use's where'as back in time it had little or no value for day to day activities.  Only is social status to support its value at the farm or in the court.

[PositivityandProsperity]

I think DDancer said it best, gold has a social value which in turn creates monetary value. I feel like if society regarded copper as the main jewerly item in replacement of gold, then copper would be worth more.

[Rick K - First Member]

It's simple. Gold is rare. It is incorruptible -never corrodes or tarnishes - eternal.

[GB_Amateur]

On 4/2/2019 at 11:47 AM, Mark Gillespie said:

That leaves just two elements - silver and gold.

Both are scarce but not impossibly rare.

(Mark is quoting this article:  https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957) This is an exaggeration.  On the earth, gold is amongst the nine rarest naturally occurring elements (by mass).  Those 9 (Tellurium, Platinum, Gold, Ruthenium, Palladium, Rhenium, Iridium, Rhodium, and Osmium) combined add up to less than any other single element.  Silver is in the next rarest group (Cadmium, Silver, Mercury, Selenium, Indium, Bismuth).   See the following graph from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust

[Mark Gillespie]

How many of these metals were know 2000 years ago?

Gold and Silver

[Steve Herschbach]

It’s deeper than that in my opinion. Rick kind of touched on it. Gold captured the imagination of separate cultures around the world, many of which that had no contact with the others. When that person thousands of years ago found that gold nugget, it was obviously different. It was very heavy and it captured the glow of the Sun God... perhaps a piece of the sun fallen from heaven? It would have not taken long to discover it never rusted, never tarnished... it is immortal. Again, god like and there has been a connection between gold and religion since the earliest days. The early artisans discovered it is the most malleable of metals that can be drawn, hammered, and formed in ways no other metal can. The relatively low melting point meant it could be easily cast whereas no human created heat could melt something like platinum until the 1800s.

But mainly I think it’s that glow when held in sunlight and it’s incorruptability. Gold speaks to something in us like no other metal. Gold is magical.

[strick]

On July 31, 2019 at 8:06 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

 Gold captured the imagination of separate cultures around the world, many of which that had no contact with the others. When that person thousands of years ago found that gold nugget, it was obviously different. It was very heavy and it captured the glow of the Sun God... perhaps a piece of the sun fallen from heaven? It would have not taken long to discover it never rusted, never tarnished... it is immortal. Again, god like and there has been a connection between gold and religion since the earliest days. The early artisans discovered it is the most malleable of metals that can be drawn, hammered, and formed in ways no other metal can. The relatively low melting point meant it could be easily cast whereas no human created heat could melt something like platinum until the 1800s.

But mainly I think it’s that glow when held in sunlight and it’s incorruptability. Gold speaks to something in us like no other metal. Gold is magical.

 

I think you just wrote the opening paragraph for that book your supposed to write 

strick

[Randy Lunn]

Rhodium is bright, shiny, beautiful and very rare. It has jewelry and industrial uses. Only in the last few years has it taken off in price. It did not become a monetary metal as it was not known as a separate metal in antiquity being mixed with the other platnum group metals. As a store of wealth rhodium is not a bad choice but gold still wins for historic reasons. Central bank, especially China and Russia, are again stock piling gold. The US dollar will eventually lose its unique reserve currency status and slowly have to share the honor with other currencies or be part of a basket of currencies as the World Bank has discussed.