Gold--How did they know?

Gold has been a symbol of wealth since the ancient times. How did they know gold was a precious metal? What would have happened if, after the entire known world invested all this time and effort in making gold the standard, a continent was discovered and it was made out of solid gold?

 

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Gold was known to humans for tens of thousands of years before coinage. The fact that it was a "precious" metal was due to both the desirability due to its unique properties as well as its rarity versus other metals. They never "knew" total earth rarity, they just reacted to its scarcity at the time. Other metals have changed dramatically in value over time. Platinum was pretty cheap when the Russians used it for coinage. The only demand really besides coinage was as a based metal to gold plate to counterfeit gold coins. It was not until industrial uses were found for it that its true rarity greatly increased its value.

Your scenario actually happened in a way. The Washington Monument is topped with a "precious" metal more valuable than silver at the time, a new wonder metal called aluminum. A decade later they discovered a new way to refine it and it became cheap like today.

Chris

 

Gold was seen as special because it never tarnishes, rusts, corrodes, or any of the other nasty things that all the other metals known to man in the early days did. Plus it was a very heavy metal... second only to lead.

 

Because it was rare, rulers were able to declare its worth and easily control it. Otherwise it has limited uses. Other civilizations valued shells.

 

Maybe they were told by "visitors" that gold was only made in supernovas " in the heavens" ( well, also inside some leaky nuclear reactors)

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/aa050601a.htm

 

Well, sixth only to:

Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Rhenium, Plutonium (Lead is only just over half as dense as gold!)

 

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

You are correct that if a continent was discovered that had enormous amounts of gold, it would not be precious. But it it didn't work out that way and the other characteristics of gold combined with its rarity makes it highly valuable.

 

well said, ratio. I think what others are missing is that the value didn't come before the desirability of gold. It was the other way around. People liked gold and gold jewelry for all of the reasons mentioned and the fact that it was beautiful. The demand rose and the scarcity made it valuable, but it was the initial desirability that started the evolution, not the value.

 

I think that ratio411 was referring to the metals known to the ancients.

 

Kidding aside, it is true that gold had all of the reason Ratio411 mentioned, but one of the large reasons also is its malleability and ductility, along with a low melting point which allowed ti to be worked easily for jewelry, art, etc. And also it is one of the few colored metals.

 

Another reason it was probably considered precious was that it was probably one of the first metals discovered. Most metals are chemically active and are almost never found in their metallic form. They are always as ore of oxides, sulfides, carbides etc , and also usually mixed with ores of other metals. But gold is relatively unreactive and does tend to show up as a metal in veins, flakes, or even natural "wire". Silver, copper, lead and a couple of others can be found in the metal form, but much more rarely except for lead. I've often wondered how primitive man ever managed to discover most metals. I mean how do you figure out what you have to do to this rock to get copper out of it? I know that they roast the copper ore, but how would you be the first person to figure that out since the temperatures needed tend to be much higher than those produced in your typical campfire?

 

It may be that they discovered other metals first, such as Wood's metal or Field's metal, which had much lower melting points and would actually melt in a campfire.

http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/thermo/thermo4.html

But then again, campfires can get pretty hot-- sometimes more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead and tin

http://ukweli.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/temperature-campfire-foods/

And once someone figured out that coal would burn, the temperature that early man could produce from fire rose dramatically-- up to 2800 degrees Fahrenheit or even higher, hot enough to melt copper, silver and gold.

 

can you still say colored and be PC today ?

 

But I don't believe that either of these occur naturally so you would have to have the knowledge of ore processing to get the component metals first.

A campfire will definitely melt lead and could be used for processing lead based ores such as Galena, but tin ore requires temperatures of around 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit to smelt and that's pretty high for a campfire. (Smelting metal from it's ores typically requires much higher temperatures than just those required to melt the metal itself.)

And coal fires can get that hot when bellows are used to feed in extra air, but why would you do that unless you were using it for smelting or working metal? It's a "chicken or the the egg" type quandary. If you don't know about ore smelting there is no reason to invent a forced air furnace, but without the forced air furnace you are seemingly unlikely to discover ore smelting. (Yes the forced air furnace is useful in metal working as well, but you are back to needing the ore smelting to get the metal for metal working.)

 

"Since the discovery happened several millennia before the invention of writing, we have no evidence about how it was made. However, tin and lead can be smelted by placing the ores in a wood fire, so it is possible that the discovery may have occurred by accident."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smelting

 

Wait. What? Osmium, Iridium, Platinum & Rhenium are less dense (lower atomic weight) than Gold & Lead. Plutonium does not occur in nature and it's deadly radioactive & toxic.

So the party who posted that gold was only 2nd to lead in weight was correct.

 

just speculation but maybe they didn't need to smelt the ore itself to get the metal out...if you smash a rock up into bits and pieces then heat it up and drain off the metal...course you'd end up with less then .999 of that type of metal but in the beginning of time so to speak I'm sure they didn't have it perfected just yet

 

Most metals, even gold, are not improved much by getting them to .999 purity. Alloys tend to be much stronger than pure elements. .999 gold in modern times is more of an emotional concept than one of any practical use, even a monetary one. Much of the gold in Ft. Knox is 90% coin gold.

 

Actually, lead is much less dense than gold, and platinum is denser than gold.

http://www.farm.net/~mason/materials/specific-gravity.html