![]() Roughly 2500 years later, with the current price of gold at about $1200 per ounce and a loaf of bread at $2.50, an ounce of gold would buy 480 loaves. “King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, reigning in the 6th century BCE, bought 350 loaves of bread for an ounce of gold,” John Mulligan, head of member and market relations at the World Gold Council, tells Mental Floss. Gold’s value has remained surprisingly steady over time. As of September 2017, the government’s gold reserves total $335.5 billion in market value. (A troy ounce is a few grams heavier than a regular ounce.) The goods are in the form of gold bullion (bulk gold shaped into bars), as well as coins and miscellaneous units, and stored in vaults at federal mints and reserve banks. Treasury still holds on to 261.5 million fine troy ounces of gold, using a unit of measurement that dates to the Middle Ages and is named after the city of Troyes, France. got rid of the gold standard entirely in 1971. The United States adopted this standard in 1879, but began to abandon the system in 1933 to stimulate the economy at the height of the Great Depression. The gold standard is a monetary system that ties a currency’s value to gold itself, which theoretically keeps inflation in check. GOLD CAN BE MEASURED WITH A UNIT FROM THE MIDDLE AGES … Two years after the discovery, Congress passed a law stating that riches found in wrecks within three miles of a U.S. Under admiralty law, Fisher was entitled to keep what he found, but archaeologists, historians, and conservationists protested. Fisher’s motto was “finders, keepers”-and in the following decades, he retrieved gold, silver, emeralds, and pearls worth millions of dollars. In 1985, Florida diver Mel Fisher located the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a famed Spanish naval ship loaded with valuables that had sunk in a hurricane in 1622. YOU CAN FIND SUNKEN TREASURE, BUT YOU MIGHT NOT GET TO KEEP IT. That’s why electrical contact surfaces are plated with a microscopic gold coating in smart phones, airbag sensor modules, and other devices. (The opposite would be true of insulators like glass, in which electrons move only when compelled to do so by thousands of volts of electricity.) Because gold resists oxidation and corrosion, it continues to move electrons even if occasionally exposed to the atmosphere. In general, some metals conduct electricity well because their atoms share electrons easily: As electrical current flows, electrons move along in the same direction with just a little voltage. Gold efficiently transfers heat and electricity-though not as well as copper and silver. IT’S AN EXCELLENT CONDUCTOR OF ELECTRICITY. The finding supports the theory that all of the gold in the universe was formed this way-and that particles of that gold arrived on Earth in meteorites billions of years ago. For the first time, researchers observed red light emanating from the collision, indicating the production of heavy metals like uranium, gold, and platinum. When the two stars-each with a mass up to twice that of our Sun-finally collided, gravitational waves rippled through the universe and clouds of neutron-rich material shot out. ![]() In 2017, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley and other institutions observed two massive neutron stars spinning around one another at an accelerating rate. ALL OF THE GOLD IN THE UNIVERSE MAY HAVE COME FROM COLLIDING NEUTRON STARS. ![]() That year marked the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, launching the California Gold Rush. Despite its presence in world cultures for millennia, “more than 90 percent of all of the gold ever used has been mined since 1848,” according to the American Museum of Natural History. The oldest known worked-gold artifacts, from the Thracian civilization in present-day Bulgaria, date back 4000 years the death mask of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun contains about 220 pounds of gold. Gold, number 79 on the periodic table, is almost twice as heavy as iron, but it’s incredibly malleable-and for that reason, it was probably the first metal humans ever wrought. GOLD WAS PROBABLY THE FIRST METAL USED BY HUMANS. Gold’s symbol on the periodic table, Au, comes from its Latin name aurum, which means “glowing dawn.” This metal’s tantalizing yellow color and shining exterior has made gold a prized element in jewelry and treasured objects for thousands of years-but, amazingly, all of the gold that has ever been refined could melt down into a single cube measuring 70 feet per side.
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