There is more to gold than pretty baubles

While we all love pretty baubles made from gold, there’s more to it than that. Gold is actually created inside massive stars when they explode into a supernova and delivered to Earth by asteroid impacts about four billion years ago. Because gold is so rare and highly valued it makes a natural currency.  It’s often used as being a ‘safe’ investment choice when economies and currencies get volatile.

So yes, there is more to gold than pretty baubles. (Although we’d all love that gorgeous gold bracelet for Christmas and I have been dropping hints to Father Christmas all week). 

Did you know ‘according to Google’-

• Gold is used in window glass and astronaut helmets to reflect infrared rays, while allowing sunlight to pass through and at the same time keeping it cool.  I wonder if Tim Peake knows that?

• Gold is chemically liquified and injected into the muscles of thousands of rheumatoid arthritis victims. Treatment is successful in seven out of ten cases.
• In every cubic mile of sea water there is 25 tons of gold! That’s a total of about 10 billion tons of gold in the oceans.  However, there’s no known way to economically recover it.
• If you take a single gram of gold and beat it out flat you can get a sheet one square meter in size and a fraction of a millimeter thick out of it.
• A single ounce of gold is so pliable it can be stretched over 50 miles.
• The largest gold nugget found in the world was called the ‘Welcome Stranger’. It was found just two inches below the surface in Victoria, Australia on 5 February 1869.  It weighed 72.02 Kg (11 stone 5 ish in old money). That’s the same weight as person!!
• A one-ounce gold nugget is rarer to find than a five-carat diamond.
• Gold is said to be so rare that the world pours more steel in an hour than it has poured gold since the beginning of recorded history.
• Finally, gold flake was used by the nobility in Medieval Europe as a decoration in food and drinks, in the form of leaf, flakes or dust, either to demonstrate the host’s wealth or in the belief that something that valuable and rare must be beneficial for one’s health. 

So on that note Cheers and Happy Christmas to one and all, although I certainly shan’t be drinking gold. (More likely to be red wine.)  

See you all in the new decade in January.