Golden wonders
★ THERE really is gold in them thar hills! Yesterday we reported how Britain’s largest ever nugget of the stuff has been found in a Scottish river.
The 22-carat Reunion Nugget, weighing in at 121.3g, is worth a cool £80,000 and was picked up by a lucky treasure hunter.
★ But how much do you know about the precious metal? Here JAMES MOORE unearths 15 golden nuggets of knowledge…
1 THE world’s largest nugget of gold ever found is the 24-inch Welcome Stranger, weighing a whopping 99 kilos (15st 8lbs) and found in 1869 by English prospectors at Moliagul, Australia. It was melted down but would be worth £2.3million today.
2 The largest specimen of gold, embedded in quartz as opposed to a single nugget, was found in 1872 by German miner Bernhardt Holtermann, also in Australia, and weighed 290kilos.
3 Gold has been mined for more than 5,000 years and the famous 19th century gold rush in the US was sparked by the find of a single piece. The first gold coins appeared around 700BC.
4 The tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun contained 1.5tonnes of gold. The Incas revered gold as the sweat of the sun, while Aztecs called it the “excrement of the gods”.
5 Gold is dense, which makes it heavy. A standard gold bar, also known as bullion or an ingot, weights 12kilos – the largest ever weighed 250kilos. Yet one gramme of gold is soft enough to be beaten into a metre square sheet and you can sew with gold thread.
6 Although not the most expensive element, it’s rare – 80% of the gold in the world has already been mined, yet all of it would only measure a ball 78ft across. Most came from South Africa.
7 The purity of gold is measured in carats from the Greek word for the carob tree – its seeds were used to weigh it. A pure gold coin weighed 24 carob seeds – hence 24 carat for the best quality.
8 Its chemical symbol, Au, comes from the Latin aurum, meaning dawn light. Gold doesn’t react easily with other things so doesn’t tarnish. Most of Earth’s gold arrived from space via meteorites. 9 There’s about 50mg of gold in a mobile phone and 0.2mg in a human body. Gold flakes are edible and dentists have been using it to repair teeth since the 3rd century BC.
10 Fort Knox in the US is famous for its huge reserves of gold bullion, but the vaults of Britain’s Bank of England contain 400,000 bars worth £100m.
11 The Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1983 at London’s Heathrow airport saw thieves escape with £26m in bullion.
12 A solid gold toilet, left, worth £4.8m, was stolen from Blenheim Palace, Oxon, in September.
13 It’s an urban myth that Bond girl Shirley Eaton died in real life after being painted with gold for her fictional execution with the stuff in 007 film Goldfinger. She is still very much alive. Lavish items made
14 from gold include a £4m gold-plated Lamborghini Aventador, a gold-plated £100,000 barbecue and a £182,000 gold shirt. However, Olympic gold medals are actually mostly silver! Most gold mined today is
15 used for jewellery, like Mr T’s collection. Rare Welsh gold is used for royal wedding rings like Meghan Markle’s.