97 Fun Facts About Gold

What is the chemical symbol for gold on the periodic table?

Au is short for aurum, the Latin word for gold, which is why the symbol shares no letter with the English name; Ag is silver, Fe iron and Cu copper.

Gold's atomic number, 79, counts which particles in its nucleus?

Protons: every gold atom has exactly 79, and since no chemical reaction can change that count, the alchemists' furnaces and acids could never turn lead, with its 82, into gold.

Alchemists hunted for which legendary substance, said to turn lead and other base metals into gold?

The philosopher's stone was taken so seriously that in 1404 England made 'multiplying' gold a felony; the ban lasted almost three centuries, until chemist Robert Boyle got it repealed.

Which physical property makes gold easy to hammer into extremely thin sheets, like gold leaf?

Malleability lets goldbeaters hammer gold into leaf about a ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick, so a small amount of metal can gild a whole statue or dome.

Which pharaoh's funerary mask, uncovered in 1925, contains more than 10 kg of gold?

Tutankhamun's mask weighs 10.23 kg; in 2014 museum staff knocked off its plaited beard and hastily stuck it back with epoxy, and it took a German–Egyptian team to repair it properly.

Roughly how much would a one-litre carton of pure gold weigh?

About 19 kg: gold is 19.3 times as dense as water, so a carton that holds one kilogram of milk would weigh about as much as a packed suitcase.

Which physicist's team fired alpha particles at thin gold foil and discovered the atomic nucleus?

Ernest Rutherford's assistants saw a few particles bounce straight back off the gold; he said it was as if a 15-inch shell had rebounded from tissue paper, and deduced a tiny, dense nucleus.

In 2017 astronomers first watched gold being forged, in a collision between two of which objects?

Neutron stars: their 2017 collision, caught first by its gravitational waves, glowed with freshly made heavy elements, evidence that such smash-ups forge much of the universe's gold.

Which Black Hills gold-rush town of 1876 is where Wild Bill Hickok was shot at a poker table?

Deadwood sprang up in 1876 on land that still belonged to Native Americans, after gold was found in its gulch; Hickok is said to have been holding aces and eights, now the 'dead man's hand'.

Pure gold is about as hard as which of these?

Fingernail: it rates about 2.5 on the Mohs hardness scale and pure gold 2.5 to 3; that softness is why goldsmiths alloy it with other metals before making rings.

Close to half of all the gold ever mined exists today in which form?

Jewelry holds about 45% of all the gold ever mined; gold is virtually indestructible and almost never thrown away, so old pieces are melted down and reused rather than lost.

Amritsar's Golden Temple, its sanctum sheathed in gold leaf, is the holiest shrine of which religion?

Sikhism's holiest shrine stood for more than two centuries before it became 'golden': Maharaja Ranjit Singh had its sanctum overlaid with gold leaf in 1830.

What term describes gold's ability to be drawn into extremely fine wires?

Ductility is why gold can be spun into thread for embroidery. Its softness is also why jewelry gold is nearly always alloyed with harder metals.

Injections of gold salts were for decades a standard treatment for which disease?

Rheumatoid arthritis was treated with injected gold compounds from the 1930s because they calm inflammation; newer drugs with fewer side effects have largely replaced them since the 1980s.

In classical alchemy, gold was linked with which heavenly body?

The Sun ruled gold in a scheme that gave each of the seven known metals a heavenly body; Saturn's metal was lead, which is why lead poisoning is still called saturnism.

Which country was the world's largest gold producer in 2024?

China overtook South Africa in 2007 to become the world's largest gold producer and has stayed on top since; South Africa had led for more than a century.

Which gold rush, set off by a find in January 1848, drew some 300,000 people to the American West?

California was still Mexican territory on paper when the gold turned up, nine days before the treaty that handed it to the United States; about half of the 300,000 newcomers came by sea.

Which corrosive liquid is famous for dissolving gold?

Aqua regia, Latin for 'royal water', got its name because it dissolves gold, the royal metal, which neither of its two ingredients, nitric and hydrochloric acid, can do alone.

What is the name for a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver?

Electrum takes its name from elektron, the Greek word for amber as well as for the pale-gold alloy; the same word later gave English 'electricity', since rubbed amber attracts light objects.

Gold's world price is quoted per which unit of weight, equal to about 31.1 grams?

Troy ounce: it is about 10% heavier than the everyday ounce of 28.35 g, part of an old system of weights that survives today only for precious metals.

Which set of 1971 US measures ended the dollar's convertibility into gold?

The Nixon shock of August 1971 suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold, and with it the Bretton Woods system; by 1973 the major currencies were floating freely against one another.

Which process is the gold industry's most widely used way to dissolve gold out of low-grade ore?

Cyanidation, also called the MacArthur–Forrest process, treats crushed ore with a cyanide solution; the chemical is so toxic that some jurisdictions have banned the method.

Which metal outdoes gold, and every other metal, at conducting electricity?

Silver conducts so well that when copper ran short in World War II, the Manhattan Project borrowed over 13,000 tons of it from the US Treasury to wind its uranium-enriching magnets.

Where did Cornish miners dig up the 'Welcome Stranger', the largest gold nugget on record?

Australia: the nugget was found just below the surface at Moliagul, Victoria, in 1869; no local scales could take it, so a blacksmith broke it into three pieces on an anvil.

If all the gold ever mined were melted into a single cube, roughly how long would each side be?

About 22 metres: gold is so dense that the roughly 220,000 tonnes mined in all of history would fit inside a single cube, and about two-thirds of it has come out of the ground since 1950.

The doubloon of pirate lore was a gold coin of which empire?

Spanish mints on both sides of the Atlantic struck the doubloon; its name goes back to the Latin for 'double', fitting a coin worth two escudos.

Adding which metal to gold produces the distinctive 18-karat rose gold?

Copper gives rose gold its pink tint, and the more copper in the mix the redder the alloy; nickel or palladium bleach gold toward white instead.

In what type of natural geological formations is gold often found as nuggets or grains?

Alluvial deposits are the sands and gravels laid down by rivers; gold weathered out of rock upstream collects in them because it is far heavier than the sediment around it.

Which method separates gold from stream gravel by swirling it with water?

Panning works because gold's high density lets it settle to the bottom while lighter material washes away; it is the simplest way to work a gold-bearing stream.

Which 14th-century ruler is said to have handed out so much gold in Cairo that its value there fell for years?

Mansa Musa of Mali stopped in Cairo on his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca; chroniclers add that he ran short on the way home and had to borrow from the city's merchants at steep interest.

Which state hosted the first documented commercial US gold find, at the Reed Gold Mine in 1799?

North Carolina: in 1799 farmer's son Conrad Reed pulled a 17-pound nugget from Little Meadow Creek, and the family used it as a doorstop for three years until a jeweler identified it.

White gold rings are usually given their bright finish by a thin plating of which metal?

Rhodium: the gold alloy underneath is naturally duller, and the plating is so thin that it wears away with use.

Bars of which metal, almost as dense as gold, have been gold-plated and passed off as bullion?

Tungsten's density is within half a percent of gold's, so a gold-plated tungsten bar passes a simple weight check; lead, far lighter for its size, would be caught at once.

What colour does light look after passing through semi-transparent gold leaf?

Greenish-blue: gold blocks the yellow and red end of the spectrum so strongly that only blue-green light gets through a leaf about 100 nanometres thick.

In investing, what is gold often considered during economic uncertainty?

A safe-haven asset: gold is nobody else's liability and carries no credit risk, so investors move into it when they doubt banks, bonds or currencies.

Mercury dissolves gold into which kind of alloy, once used by miners to capture fine gold?

Amalgam: gold dissolves in liquid mercury at room temperature, and miners then boiled the mercury off to leave the gold behind, which is why old goldfields are mercury-contaminated.

Gold's benchmark world price is set in which currency?

US dollars: the benchmark is set twice a day in London, yet in dollars, with prices in sterling, euros and other currencies published alongside.

Which space telescope, launched in 2021, has 18 hexagonal beryllium mirror segments plated with gold?

James Webb's mirror is too wide for any rocket fairing, so its 18 gold-coated segments were built to fold for launch and open out in space into a dish 6.5 metres across.

What is the term for gold embedded in solid rock, typically quartz veins, rather than loose in gravel?

Lode gold sits in quartz veins and has to be blasted, crushed and chemically extracted, unlike the loose grains that erode out of it and wash downstream.

In which Shakespeare play does a scroll warn that 'All that glisters is not gold'?

The Merchant of Venice: the Prince of Morocco finds the warning on a scroll inside the gold casket he wrongly picked, and with that choice loses his chance to marry Portia.

The 1896–98 Klondike stampede was centred in what is now which Canadian territory?

Yukon's Klondike goldfields were reached by only 30,000 to 40,000 of the roughly 100,000 who set out; Jack London's The Call of the Wild came out of the rush.

Which Roman emperor built the three-tier coinage with the gold 'aureus' at its top?

Augustus, Rome's first emperor, fixed the gold aureus at 25 silver denarii in his coinage reform of about 23 BC; the coin lasted three centuries, until Constantine replaced it with the lighter solidus.

Garimpeiros, wildcat gold miners blamed for polluting rivers, work chiefly in which rainforest?

The Amazon's Serra Pelada drew tens of thousands of diggers within months of a gold find on a farm, and they dug its giant open pit by hand.

What is a block of refined gold cast from the melt called?

Ingot: London's 'Good Delivery' bars weigh about 12.4 kg each and are stamped with a refiner's mark, purity and a serial number to guard against counterfeits and theft.

The term 'fool's gold' refers to which mineral that is often mistaken for real gold?

Pyrite, an iron sulfide, fools the eye with its brassy yellow, but a knife tells them apart: pyrite is hard and brittle, while real gold is soft enough to dent.

Which country held the world's largest official gold reserves in 2024?

United States: it held about 8,133 tonnes in 2024, more than double second-placed Germany's roughly 3,350, even though the dollar has not been redeemable in gold since 1971.

Which of these metals, like gold, counts as a noble metal?

Platinum resists oxygen and most acids just as gold does, which is why laboratories rely on platinum equipment; iron, zinc and aluminium all react with oxygen in air.

What property of gold makes it useful for infrared heat shielding on spacesuit visors?

Reflectivity: a film of gold thin enough to see through still bounces back most infrared, so the visor turns away the heat of sunlight while the astronaut can still see out.

Which modern African country was once the 'Gold Coast', named for its rich gold?

Ghana took its name at independence in 1957 from a medieval trading empire that had actually lain far to the north-west, in what is now Mali, Mauritania and Senegal.

In Chaplin's 1925 comedy The Gold Rush, what does the starving Tramp cook and eat for dinner?

His shoe: he twirls the laces like spaghetti and gnaws the nails like chicken bones, a scene Chaplin drew from the Donner Party, snowbound pioneers who ate leather from their shoes.

Which ancient kingdom, later ruled by the fabulously rich Croesus, struck the first known coins containing gold?

Lydia could mint because the river Pactolus, beside its capital Sardis, carried a natural pale-gold alloy; Croesus later issued the first coins of pure gold.

Which god granted King Midas his golden touch as a reward for hosting the satyr Silenus?

Dionysus rewarded Midas for returning his companion Silenus; in Ovid's telling Midas soon begged to be rid of the gift and washed it off in the river Pactolus, whose sands then ran with gold.

In 1924 a German chemist announced, wrongly as it turned out, that he had turned which metal into gold?

Mercury sits one place above gold in the periodic table, which made Adolf Miethe's claim tempting, but attempts around the world failed to repeat it; real mercury-to-gold transmutation came in 1941, using neutrons.

Glenn Seaborg's team turned bismuth into gold in 1980 using which machine?

Particle accelerator: at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory it fired carbon and neon nuclei at bismuth, shearing pieces off its nuclei to leave gold; the run cost far more than the gold was worth.

The Super Pit, a huge open-cut gold mine on Kalgoorlie's edge, lies in which Australian state?

Western Australia's Super Pit swallowed a string of old underground mines beside Kalgoorlie; tycoon Alan Bond set out to merge them into one giant pit but could not finish the job.

Which 4th-century Roman glass cup shifts from green to red thanks to nanoparticles in it?

The Lycurgus Cup owes its trick to traces of gold and silver in particles too small to see; its Roman makers probably stumbled on the recipe by accident and never fully controlled it.

Which prize's gold medals did George de Hevesy dissolve in acid to hide from the Nazis?

The Nobel Prize medals of Max von Laue and James Franck sat dissolved in a jar on a laboratory shelf throughout the occupation; afterwards the gold was recovered and the medals were struck again.

An Olympic first-place medal must be plated with at least how much gold?

6 grams: under Olympic rules a first-place medal is at least 92.5% silver with a thin coat of gold; the last solid-gold medals were handed out at Stockholm in 1912.

Fort Knox, whose bullion depository holds some 4,580 tonnes of US gold, is in which state?

Kentucky: the depository at Fort Knox, beside the army post, was built in 1936 to move reserves inland from New York and Philadelphia, beyond the reach of any coastal attack.

Which British document sat in the Fort Knox vault during WWII after a 1939 World's Fair loan?

Lincoln Cathedral's Magna Carta, stranded after the 1939 New York World's Fair, shared the Fort Knox vault with the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and a Gutenberg Bible.

Whose Manhattan basement vault holds more gold than Fort Knox, over 6,000 tonnes?

The New York Fed's vault, cut into Manhattan bedrock 80 feet below street level, holds bars that belong mostly to foreign governments and central banks.

Which animal appears on the reverse of South Africa's Krugerrand bullion coin?

A springbok leaps across the reverse, opposite Paul Kruger's portrait; the coin held about 90% of the gold-coin market by 1980, until several Western countries banned its import over apartheid.

Which saint did engraver Benedetto Pistrucci put on the reverse of Britain's new gold sovereign in 1817?

St George, shown slaying the dragon, came from an Italian: Pistrucci expected to be made the Mint's Chief Engraver, but only a British subject could hold the post, a slight he never forgave.

Which president recruited the sculptor Saint-Gaudens to redesign America's gold coins?

Theodore Roosevelt picked Saint-Gaudens in 1904; the sculptor died in 1907 before his $20 piece was issued, and its Liberty returned on bullion coins in 1986.

Which US gold coin's 1933 issue sold for $18.9 million in 2021?

Double eagle: the $20 piece was struck in 1933 but never officially released, and nearly all were melted; the one example legal to own privately set the auction record for any coin.

Which US president signed the 1933 order forbidding the 'hoarding' of gold coin and bullion?

Franklin D. Roosevelt's order made Americans hand in all but about $100 of their gold at $20.67 an ounce; within a year his government had repriced the metal at $35.

Repricing gold from $20.67 to $35 in 1934 did what to the dollar?

Devalued it: each dollar now bought about 41% less gold, and in the years that followed foreign gold poured into American vaults.

In the Bible, ships that Solomon built at Ezion-Geber sailed with Hiram's sailors to fetch gold from which land?

Ophir's location was never pinned down — candidates range from Arabia to India — though an 8th-century BC ostracon from Tell Qasile in Tel Aviv reads 'gold of Ophir for Beth-Horon'.

In Exodus, who fashioned the golden calf from the Israelites' earrings while Moses was on Sinai?

Aaron cast the calf when the people feared Moses would never come back from Sinai; Moses returned, ground the idol to powder, scattered it on water and made the Israelites drink it.

Jason and the Argonauts stole the Golden Fleece from which Black Sea kingdom?

Colchis, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia, was ruled by King Aeëtes, who set Jason the tasks of yoking fire-breathing bulls and sowing dragon's teeth.

In the Grimms' tale, what does Rumpelstiltskin demand in return for spinning straw into gold?

The queen's firstborn child: her necklace and a ring paid for the first two nights of spinning, and on the third, with nothing left, she promised her first child once she was queen.

The El Dorado legend grew from Muisca gold offerings at which Colombian lake?

Guatavita, a lake high in the Colombian Andes, was where a new Muisca ruler, dusted in gold, cast offerings from a raft; repeated attempts to drain it have recovered only a few objects.

Which Inca emperor offered Pizarro a room filled with gold as ransom for his life?

Atahualpa, captured at Cajamarca in 1532, offered a roomful of gold and twice as much silver; the Spaniards took the treasure and executed him anyway in 1533.

A 5.5-tonne solid-gold Buddha in Bangkok revealed itself in 1955 when what happened?

It was dropped, cracking its plaster, when ropes snapped as workers hoisted it at Wat Traimit; the stucco had probably been added to hide the gold before Ayutthaya fell to Burmese invaders in 1767.

Heinrich Schliemann found the gold 'Mask of Agamemnon' in 1876 at which Bronze Age site?

Mycenae: Schliemann dug the mask from Grave Circle A in 1876 and believed he had found Agamemnon, but it dates from the 16th century BC, three or four centuries before any plausible Trojan War.

The largest Anglo-Saxon gold hoard ever found turned up in 2009 in which English county?

Staffordshire: a man with a metal detector found the hoard in a ploughed field near Lichfield, and almost every one of its gold pieces is a fitting from a sword or other war gear, not household treasure.

The golden 'last spike' of America's first transcontinental railroad was driven in which territory?

Utah Territory: the spike was tapped into a pre-drilled hole at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869 and then withdrawn; the 17.6-karat spike is held by Stanford's Cantor Arts Center.

James W. Marshall found the gold behind the 1848 rush while building what for John Sutter?

A sawmill: Marshall saw the flakes glittering in its tailrace on the American River; once word spread, crowds overran Sutter's land and destroyed nearly everything he had built.

Which merchant opened a dry-goods firm in gold-rush San Francisco in 1853?

Levi Strauss arrived from New York in 1853 to open a branch of his family's dry-goods business; Jacob Davis, a Reno tailor, later brought him the idea of riveted work trousers, which they patented together in 1873.

The 1854 Eureka Stockade revolt by gold miners took place in which town in Victoria?

Ballarat's miners were protesting a monthly licence fee charged regardless of what they found; troops stormed their stockade on 3 December 1854, killing about 22 diggers.

The 27 kg 'Hand of Faith', found with a metal detector in 1980, is displayed where?

Golden Nugget casino, Las Vegas: it paid over $1 million for the nugget, which stood upright just 30 cm below the surface near Kingower, Victoria, when a metal detector found it.

At Mponeng, a South African gold mine some 4 km deep, what is pumped underground to cool the scorching tunnels?

Ice slurry: the rock at that depth reaches about 66 °C, so the mine pumps slush down from the surface to bring the tunnel air below 30 °C.

A prospector's 1886 gold find on Langlaagte farm gave rise to which South African city?

Johannesburg grew up on the reef credited to George Harrison, who is believed to have sold his discoverer's claim for just £10 before leaving the Rand.

Grasberg, holding one of the world's largest gold reserves, is in which country?

Indonesia: Grasberg lies more than 4,000 metres up in Papua's mountains near Puncak Jaya, and the Indonesian state negotiated a 51% stake in it from US miner Freeport-McMoRan.

Where did prospectors at Nome, Alaska, find gold in 1899 that anyone could dig without staking a claim?

In the beach sand: the shoreline could not be claimed, so newcomers simply set to work on it, and by 1900 Nome's 12,488 residents made it the largest community in Alaska.

Which boomtown sprang up at the heart of the Klondike goldfields during the 1896–99 rush?

Dawson City held between 16,000 and 18,000 people in the summer of 1898; a year later, news of gold at Nome, Alaska, drew thousands of them away.

Reality series 'Gold Rush', with Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets, debuted on which channel?

Discovery Channel launched it in December 2010 as 'Gold Rush: Alaska', following Todd Hoffman's crew; from the second season the mining moved to the Klondike.

In Goldfinger (1964), what does the villain really plan to do to the gold in Fort Knox?

Irradiate it with a dirty bomb, leaving America's reserve untouchable and multiplying the value of his own gold; in Ian Fleming's novel he simply plans to steal it.

Whose 'Catch a Falling Star' became the RIAA's first certified gold record in 1958?

Perry Como's single earned the industry's first official gold award in March 1958, but the idea was older: in 1942 RCA Victor gave Glenn Miller a gold record for selling 1.2 million copies of 'Chattanooga Choo Choo'.

How many US album units does the RIAA require for a gold certification?

500,000 units: when the award began in 1958 a gold album meant $1 million in sales, and the unit count came only later; the Platinum award for a million units followed in 1976.

For three years of World War II, Oscar winners received statuettes made of what instead of gold-plated metal?

Painted plaster stood in during the wartime metal shortage; once the war was over, the Academy invited winners to trade the stand-ins for gold-plated metal ones.

Kyoto's gold-leaf-covered Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji, was destroyed in July 1950 by what?

Arson by a novice monk of 22, who then tried to kill himself on the hill behind the temple, inspired Yukio Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; the pavilion was rebuilt in 1955.

Which German chemist tried to extract gold from seawater to help pay WWI reparations?

Fritz Haber, the chemist behind synthetic ammonia, spent years in the 1920s testing seawater, only to find it held far less gold than earlier researchers had reported, so the scheme could never pay.

Uranium-238 on each Voyager Golden Record's cover lets a finder work out what?

Its age: uranium-238 decays with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, so measuring how much has decayed tells a finder how long the gold-plated disc has been travelling.

In April 1945, US troops found Nazi Germany's gold reserves hidden where near Merkers?

A salt mine: two women stopped by military police mentioned the hidden hoard, and within days Eisenhower himself went into the mine to inspect the gold and looted art.

Gold was named 'Allergen of the Year' for 2001, but which metal in cheap earrings took the title in 2008?

Nickel causes so many skin reactions that Denmark, and then the European Union, passed rules limiting how much of it earrings, watches and other skin-contact items may release.

The Krugerrand and Britain's sovereign use 22-karat 'crown gold', a standard introduced under which English king?

Henry VIII introduced the 22-karat alloy in 1526 with a new gold coin, the crown; it wears better than the softer 23-karat gold of earlier coins and became Britain's lasting standard.