97 Fun Facts About Gold

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

Au comes from the Latin aurum, whose Proto-Indo-European root meant 'glow'. Ag is silver, Fe iron and Cu copper.

What is the atomic number of gold?

Gold has an atomic number of 79, meaning each atom of gold contains 79 protons in its nucleus.

Gold purity is measured in what unit, where 24 means pure?

Gold purity is measured in karats, with 24-karat representing pure gold. The term 'carat' (with a 'C') is used for the weight of gemstones.

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

Malleability is gold's superpower: a single gram can be beaten into a sheet one square metre across, and gold leaf can be thin enough to be semi-transparent.

The gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun, over 10 kg of gold, came from which civilization?

The Egyptians made the mask for Tutankhamun, who reigned c. 1332–1323 BC; Howard Carter's team uncovered it in 1925, and it stands 54 cm tall and weighs about 10.2 kg.

What is the approximate density of pure gold in grams per cubic centimeter (g/cm³)?

Pure gold has a density of 19.3 g/cm³, about 1.7 times that of lead (11.34 g/cm³) and nineteen times that of water; only a few metals such as osmium, iridium and platinum are denser.

Besides excellent conductivity, what property makes gold widely used in electronics?

Gold is prized in electronics for its excellent electrical conductivity combined with its remarkable resistance to corrosion and tarnishing, ensuring reliable connections over time.

At what temperature in degrees Celsius does pure gold melt?

Pure gold has a melting point of approximately 1064 degrees Celsius, a property that facilitates its use in jewelry making and various industrial applications.

Which method of gold mining separates gold from loose sand and gravel in riverbeds?

Placer mining works loose river gravels rather than solid rock: because gold is far denser than sand, moving water carries the lighter sediment away and leaves the gold behind.

Where does pure gold land on the Mohs hardness scale?

Pure gold scores just 2.5 to 3, soft enough to dent, which is why jewellers alloy it with harder metals.

Roughly what share of newly mined gold ends up in jewelry?

About 50% of gold goes into jewelry — roughly 2,000 tonnes a year against some 3,600 tonnes mined — with investment bars and coins, central banks and electronics sharing the rest.

What is the primary reason that pure gold does not rust or corrode?

Gold is a noble metal, highly unreactive: it does not oxidise in air or water and shrugs off most single acids, which is why ancient gold coins emerge from the ground as bright as the day they were buried.

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.

Which of these is NOT a common industrial or high-tech application for gold?

Gold is used in electronics, dentistry, and even for sun visors in spacesuits due to its unique properties, but it is not used as a structural building material.

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

Alchemists paired gold with the Sun, sharing its circle-with-dot symbol, while silver belonged to the Moon, iron to Mars and copper to Venus.

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

China was the world's largest gold producer in 2024, mining roughly 380 tonnes; it first overtook South Africa for the top spot in 2007.

Which rush, sparked by a find at Sutter's Mill in 1848, drew some 300,000 people to the American West?

California was technically Mexican territory when gold turned up in a mill tailrace in January 1848; about half the 300,000 newcomers came by sea and half overland.

What acid mixture is famous for dissolving gold?

Aqua regia, Latin for 'royal water', earned its name by dissolving the king of metals; the usual recipe is one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid.

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

Electrum is a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, used in ancient times for coinage and decorative objects.

Which unit is commonly used to weigh gold and other precious metals?

Gold and other precious metals are typically weighed using the troy ounce, which is slightly heavier than the standard avoirdupois ounce.

The world finally abandoned the gold standard for fiat currency after which set of 1971 measures?

Nixon suspended the dollar's convertibility into gold in August 1971. Bretton Woods was the 1944 conference that had set up the post-war system he ended.

Which process, used in about 90% of gold production, dissolves gold from low-grade ore into a soluble complex?

Cyanidation, also called the MacArthur–Forrest process, leaches gold from ore holding as little as one part per million; its toxicity has led a few jurisdictions to ban it.

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

Silver is the best electrical conductor among all metals, even better than gold and copper, though gold is often preferred in electronics for its corrosion resistance.

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: some 210,000 tonnes have been mined through history, and at 19.3 tonnes per cubic metre that is only about 11,000 cubic metres of metal.

What color is pure gold?

In its pure form, gold is a distinct bright-metallic-yellow color, a unique characteristic among metals.

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

Copper gives rose gold its pink tint — 18-karat rose gold is typically 75% gold and about 25% copper — while nickel or palladium bleach gold toward white instead.

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

Gold frequently occurs as native metal in alluvial deposits, which are loose sediments like sand and gravel in riverbeds, where it accumulates due to its high density.

Which hand method separates gold from gravel by swirling it with water in a shallow dish?

Panning works because gold's high density lets it settle to the bottom while lighter material washes away; it is the simplest form of placer mining.

Which 14th-century ruler gave away so much gold passing through Cairo that Egyptian prices sank for a decade?

Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, made the hajj in 1324 with a caravan of thousands and some 80–100 camels loaded with gold; his spending in Cairo depressed the gold price there for years.

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

North Carolina: in 1799 Conrad Reed, aged 12, pulled a 17-pound nugget from Little Meadow Creek, and his family used it as a doorstop until a jeweler identified it in 1802.

What is a thin layer of gold applied to another metal's surface called?

Gold plating is the process of depositing a thin layer of gold onto the surface of another metal, commonly used in jewelry, electronics, and decorative items for aesthetics and conductivity.

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

Tungsten's density of 19.25 g/cm³ is within half a percent of gold's 19.32, so a gold-plated tungsten bar passes a simple weight check; lead, at 11.3 g/cm³, would be caught at once.

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

Greenish-blue: gold absorbs and reflects the yellow and red end of the spectrum so strongly that only blue-green light passes through a leaf around 100 nanometres thick.

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

Gold is widely regarded as a safe-haven asset, an investment that typically retains or increases in value during periods of market turbulence or economic crisis.

What kind of alloy does mercury form with gold at room temperature, once used to pull specks from placer gravel?

An 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 is quoted on world markets per troy ounce in which currency?

US dollars: the twice-daily London benchmark price is set in dollars per troy ounce, and euro and sterling prices are published as conversions from it.

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

James Webb's gold coating gives the beryllium segments their infrared reflectivity, under a thin glass layer; the full mirror is 6.5 metres across, nearly three times Hubble's.

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 into placers.

Approximately how many troy ounces are in one kilogram of gold?

A troy ounce is 31.1035 g, so 1,000 g works out to 32.15 of them. The everyday avoirdupois ounce is lighter, at 28.35 g.

The 1896–98 Klondike stampede was centred in 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, the first emperor, reformed the coinage around 23 BC: gold aurei served big purchases and stored wealth, silver denarii paid wages and taxes, and bronze handled small change.

What share of all gold ever mined is still in use, by the US Geological Survey's count?

Because gold does not corrode and is almost never thrown away, most of it is simply melted down and reused. Some of the metal in a modern ring may have been mined in antiquity.

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

An ingot: refined gold is poured into a mould and cast as a bar, and the London market's standard 'Good Delivery' ingot weighs about 400 troy ounces, roughly 12.4 kg.

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

Pyrite, an iron sulfide, has the brassy yellow colour and metallic luster to fool prospectors, and it often sits alongside the real thing in quartz veins.

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

The United States held about 8,133 tonnes in 2024, more than double second-placed Germany's roughly 3,350 tonnes.

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

Platinum, like gold, is a noble metal that resists oxidation and most acids, which is why both serve in jewelry and laboratory crucibles; iron, zinc and aluminium all react with oxygen in air.

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

Gold's high reflectivity, especially in the infrared spectrum, makes it excellent for thermal shielding, such as in the visors of spacesuits.

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

European traders called the stretch of West Africa the Gold Coast for the gold it yielded; the region became modern Ghana.

Which is gold's only stable isotope?

Gold-197 is the element's only stable isotope, making natural gold monoisotopic; radioactive gold-198, with a half-life of about 2.7 days, is used in medicine.

Which kingdom of Asia Minor struck the first known coins containing gold, around 600 BC?

The earliest Lydian pieces were a natural pale-yellow alloy panned from the river Pactolus near Sardis.

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

Dionysus rewarded Midas for returning his foster-father Silenus; Midas soon begged to be rid of the gift and washed it away in the river Pactolus, which is why its sands ran with gold.

Which physicist claimed in 1924 to have turned mercury into gold with a high-voltage discharge?

Hantaro Nagaoka claimed in 1924 to have produced gold by passing a high-voltage discharge through mercury; the first confirmed synthesis came at Harvard in 1941 using neutrons, and every gold isotope made was radioactive.

Glenn Seaborg transmuted several thousand atoms of which element into gold in 1980?

Bismuth: at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1980 Seaborg's team knocked protons and neutrons out of bismuth nuclei in a particle accelerator, yielding a few thousand gold atoms at a cost far above the metal's worth.

Alloying gold with which metal produces purple gold?

Aluminium: the intermetallic compound AuAl₂, about 79% gold by weight, has a striking purple colour but is brittle, so it is set like a gemstone rather than worked like ordinary gold.

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

The Lycurgus Cup, held by the British Museum, contains only about 40 parts per million of gold, with silver, in nanoparticles that make the glass look green in reflected light and red when lit from behind.

Which chemist dissolved two Nobel medals in acid to hide them from the Nazis in Copenhagen?

The jar sat unnoticed on a shelf through the occupation; afterwards the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation recast the medals.

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

6 grams: Olympic rules require at least 6 g of gold plating on a medal that is otherwise at least 92.5% silver, so a Tokyo 2020 gold medal held roughly $800 worth of metal.

The US Bullion Depository, holding some 4,580 tonnes of gold, sits 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, designed by Coert Steynberg, bounds across the reverse while Paul Kruger's head fills the obverse; by 1980 the coin held about 90% of the world gold-coin market.

Which engraver's St George and the Dragon has adorned Britain's gold sovereign since 1817?

Benedetto Pistrucci, an Italian gem-engraver at the Royal Mint, first cut the St George design for the 1817 sovereign; the Mint revived it in 1871 after decades of shield reverses.

The American Gold Eagle's Liberty figure is borrowed from which sculptor's $20 coin?

Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed the 1907 double eagle at Theodore Roosevelt's request to rival the beauty of ancient Greek coinage; the Gold Eagle revived his striding Liberty in 1986.

A 1933 double eagle sold at Sotheby's in 2021 for roughly how much?

$18.9 million, then a record for any coin, was paid in June 2021; the seller, shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, had quietly owned the only legally private specimen since 2002.

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

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 on 5 April 1933; it rested on the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, a wartime law that had never been repealed.

After the 1934 Gold Reserve Act, FDR reset gold's official price to what per ounce?

$35 an ounce, up from $20.67, devalued the dollar overnight and pulled record amounts of foreign gold into American vaults.

The Bible says Solomon and Hiram of Tyre sailed from Ezion-Geber 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, Moses' brother, collected the people's gold earrings and cast the calf after Moses had been gone on Sinai forty days and the Israelites feared he would not return.

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?

Lake Guatavita, a near-circular crater lake northeast of Bogotá, was where a new Muisca ruler, dusted in gold, threw offerings from a raft; drainage attempts in the 1580s and 1900s recovered some gold objects.

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

Atahualpa, captured at Cajamarca in 1532, offered a room about 22 by 17 feet filled with gold, plus twice over with 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?

The stucco coat had likely been added before Ayutthaya fell in 1767, and hid the gold for almost two centuries.

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: the hoard found in a field near Lichfield in 2009 holds some 5.1 kg of gold, more than three times the Sutton Hoo ship burial's, and nearly every piece is a fitting stripped from weaponry.

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.

Who spotted the flakes of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848?

James W. Marshall, building a sawmill for John Sutter on the American River at Coloma, found the flakes on 24 January 1848, nine days before the treaty that passed California from Mexico to the United States.

Which future blue-jeans maker opened a dry-goods firm in gold-rush San Francisco in 1853?

Levi Strauss arrived from New York in 1853 to sell dry goods to the miners; 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?

The Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas bought the nugget for about $1 million in 1981 and put it on display; it had lain some 30 cm down near Kingower, Victoria, the largest nugget ever found with a detector.

Mponeng, the world's deepest mine from ground level, chases gold more than how far down?

4 km: Mponeng's workings near Carletonville, South Africa, reach about four kilometres below ground, where rock temperatures pass 60 °C and ice slurry is pumped down to cool the air.

Credit for the 1886 main-reef find that launched Johannesburg's gold rush goes to which prospector?

George Harrison, an Australian prospector, stumbled on the outcrop on the Langlaagte farm in 1886; he sold his claim for £10 and left the area.

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

Indonesia: Grasberg sits about 4,100 metres up in the highlands of Papua, near Puncak Jaya, and is operated by PT Freeport Indonesia, a Freeport-McMoRan joint venture with the Indonesian state.

During the 1899 Nome rush in Alaska, where was much of the gold simply lying?

In the beach sand: in 1899 gold was found in the sands of Nome's shoreline, which anyone could work without a claim, and the town became Alaska's largest almost overnight.

Which boomtown at the heart of the 1896–99 Klondike rush swelled to some 17,000 people?

Dawson City, at the Klondike–Yukon confluence, held some 17,000 people at the 1898 peak; its 1,577 residents at the 2021 census made it Yukon's second-largest municipality after Whitehorse.

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 is the villain's real plan for the gold in Fort Knox, once Bond works it out?

Irradiate its gold with a dirty bomb, making America's reserve untouchable for decades and multiplying the value of his own bullion.

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

Perry Como's 'Catch a Falling Star' was certified on 14 March 1958; the Oklahoma! soundtrack followed four months later as the first gold album.

Since 1976, how many US album units earn an RIAA gold certification?

500,000 units: the RIAA added the unit threshold in the mid-1970s alongside the new Platinum award at one million, replacing the original 1958 standard of a million dollars in sales.

The Oscar statuette's bronze core is electroplated in what?

Pure gold: the statuette is cast in bronze and finished in 24-karat gold; during WWII's metal shortage winners took home painted plaster Oscars for three years, exchanged for gold ones after the war.

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

Arson by a novice monk, 22-year-old Hayashi Shoken, inspired Yukio Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; the 1955 rebuild got thicker gold leaf in the 1980s.

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

Fritz Haber, the chemist behind the ammonia process, sampled the oceans through the 1920s and found gold at only about 0.004 parts per billion, far below published estimates, so he abandoned the scheme.

The Voyager Golden Records' covers carry a sample of which isotope as a built-in clock?

Uranium-238, with a half-life of 4.47 billion years, was electroplated onto each cover so a finder could date the gold-plated disc from how much of it had decayed.

In April 1945, US troops found the Reichsbank's gold hidden in a salt mine near which town?

Merkers, in Thuringia: behind a blasted vault wall in the Kaiseroda mine, Patton's Third Army found thousands of gold bars, bags of coins and crates of looted art, inspected by Eisenhower and Patton on 12 April 1945.

Which group named gold its 'Allergen of the Year' for 2001?

The American Contact Dermatitis Society chose gold as its Allergen of the Year for 2001; gold allergy mostly affects women who wear gold jewelry, and nickel is a far commoner culprit.

The Krugerrand and the British sovereign are struck in gold of which karat?

22 karat: both coins use 'crown gold', 91.67% pure and alloyed with copper, a standard first set for English coinage under Henry VIII in 1526.