TEN FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT GOLD

Science of Gold
More than 90 percent of all gold ever used has been mined since 1848, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, Calif., sparking the greatest gold rush of all time.

Most gold — 78 percent of the yearly gold supply — is made into jewelry. Other industries including electronics, medical, and dental require about 12 percent. The remaining 10 percent of the yearly gold supply is used in financial transactions.

Gold leaf may be only 0.18 microns (7 millionths of an inch) thick; a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.

Only five out of 1 billion atoms of rock in Earth’s crust are gold.

Gold is so malleable that a single ounce (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field.

Culture of Gold
The oldest worked-gold objects, the products of the ancient Thracian civilization, were made as early as 4000 B.C., and were discovered at a burial site in Varna, Bulgaria.

In the Aztec language, the name for gold is teocuitlatl, which means “excrement of the gods.” For the Inka and other peoples of the Andean region of South America, gold was the “sweat of the sun,” the most sacred of all deities.

Virtually all the Inkas’ golden treasure was melted down, first in a vain attempt to ransom their captured king. Then, after his execution, more gold was commandeered to fill the coffers of the Spanish treasury.

The largest gold nugget believed to exist today is the “Hand of Faith,” a 60-pound specimen discovered in Victoria, Australia, in 1980. It is currently on display at the Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds the world’s largest accumulation of monetary gold. The vault is 25 meters (80 feet) beneath the street and holds $147 billion worth of gold bullion.