Why Gold?!

In my blog I’ve frequently talked about the value of gold as a commodity. Look at the periodic table and you have 118 building blocks to everything you could ever and can’t even think of. So why out of all these incredible pieces have we humans isolated Au to be ours to cherish as singularly ours? To answer this, NPR’s Planet Money approached chemical engineer Sanat Kumar at Columbia University.

So of course they pulled out a periodic table and began crossing eliminating elements. Start with the right side of the table. Some of these elements are extremely stable but all are gasses. So basically as soon as you contain your money everything’s great but you’re just an open lid away from being broke. Plus I’m not sure how you’re going to give a cashier some gas for the week’s groceries. So gasses are out. Now over to the far left where we run into highly reactive metals; basically if you were to expose any of your money to the air you’d have a spontaneous fire. Not good. Similar less severe spontaneous reactions rule out more elements. Next we look at the two rows of elements at the bottom of the periodic table. Unfortunately for us, all of these elements are highly radioactive and carrying any of them around would deform and/or kill us.

Our list is getting pretty small. Now we want our element to be somewhat rare so it’s actually cool to have it so we lose some more elements. At the same time we don’t want our element to be too rare like osmium which occurs when meteorites bring some in when they crash into the earth. So can’t disappear right in front of our eyes, can’t explode the moment we take it out, can’t kill us, and has to be acceptably rare; we’re not asking for too much but that only leaves us with rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold all of which we love.

So let’s narrow it down further. Rhodium and palladium weren’t discovered until the 1800s so that takes them out of much of our history. Silver tarnishes so it can’t be good enough even though we do like it. Platinum is more valuable than gold today but, due to its 3000 degree melting point, was pretty useless until modern powerful furnaces. And there you have it, GOLD. It was just meant to be.