Life with Gold
I caught gold fever when I was in high school. While the other boys engaged in more frivolous pursuits on summer weekends, I would head for the hills of central Nevada in my '49 Ford with my gold pan and bedroll.
By the end of the summer I had amassed what I now estimate to have been about an eighth of an ounce of the powdery stuff. It seemed like a fortune. But then, I decided that what I really wanted was my own gold ingot. This could be obtained, I reasoned, by carving a mold in a block of charcoal, into which I would place the fruit of my summer's labor. Then, some night in the Future Farmers of America shop at school (to which I was privileged to have a key) I would use the oxyacetylene torch to melt down my gold dust into a solid, gleaming ingot. Secrecy, of course, was essential, because I had heard that there was something vaguely illegal about melting gold.
At any rate, my plans proceeded swimmingly right up to the point of lighting the oxyacetylene torch. It was then that I learned two things: (1) Forty pounds per square inch of pressure from any hose whatsoever is enough to scatter an eighth of an ounce of any kind of dust all over a fair-sized workbench. (2) It is an old wives' tale that gold, just because it is soft, is easy to melt. Even the few particles that I managed to salvage didn't seem to melt as easily as the scrap steel that we practiced on in shop. But that may have been because I was blubbering all over them and I'd turned the torch down to little more than a candle flame. This end to my first experience helped cure my fever but not my fascination with gold, the noblest metal of them all.
Gold, silver and platinum are called the noble metals, a name that in chemical terminology refers to their outstanding resistance to the corrosion and oxidation that cause base metals such as iron, copper and tin to weaken and disintegrate. But permanence is only one of the noble metals' attributes. They are strong, heavy, wonderfully malleable, and pleasing to the eye and touch--and people have long found gold most pleasing of them all. Portable and universally accepted, gold became the coinage of trade between peoples and nations. It is said that the history of gold is the history of the world. It supported conquering armies and voyages of exploration. It built empires. No civilization has risen to greatness without it.
Sadly for the romantics, the noble metals are rapidly losing their status as a medium of exchange, but are more than making up for it in the many services they fulfill in science, medicine and technology. In the final analysis, this makes them more valuable than before.
While old prospectors may weep at the sight of all that gold foil floating around in space and being left on the moon. It is in the exploration of space that the most spectacular and far-reaching uses are being found for the noble metals. Gold and silver electrical conductors are used widely in the high-technology components of all types of space vehicles. Extensive gold coating on rocket engines' heat shields protects delicate instruments inside, and gold films on the astronauts' visors protect them from solar radiation. Finely powdered gold is even used in the space program as a lubricant. In the vacuum of outer space, conventional oil-based lubricants can be affected by radiation, evaporation or chemical breakdown, while gold is unaffected. Gold is also used extensively in modern medicine, the practice dating back to 1890 when the German physician Robert Koch found that some synthetic gold compounds inhibited growth of the bacillus that causes tuberculosis. Today, a treatment that eases the pain of rheumatoid arthritis involves injecting gold compounds into the body, and in the treatment of cancer, radioactive grains of gold are inserted into malignant tumors.
Gold is one of the few metals found free in nature and one can imagine the wonder of a primitive hunter thousands of years ago examining the shimmering specks and nuggets lying at the bottom of a shallow stream. Only slightly less awestruck must have been the prospectors of 1899, in feeling that they had stumbled onto the easiest gold mining of all time on the barren beaches of Nome. And for a while they had. The sands of the beach, which could be worked with no more equipment than a shovel, were rich with gold. But the bonanza was brief. As only the more persistent of the prospectors discovered, the placer deposits from which the gold came lay buried under 50 feet of frozen tundra three miles inland. In the end, the ancient terraced beaches in which the deposits lay were to supply the bulk of Nome's gold, but at a far greater expense in labor than was required for the early easy picking.
