Metal Gold Hides Wealth Well!
As a precious metal, gold has probably been used longer, and for more purposes, than any other. It may have been humanity’s first metal, used for ornamentation and ritual purposes. Metal gold is the most ductile and malleable of all the metals, followed by aluminum. This means metal gold can be flattened, stretched, hammered, and shaped, while many other metals must be melted and poured into a mold because they fracture easily. Its chemical properties are rare and interesting: for example, it will not dissolve in nitric acid, unlike silver and all base metals. For this reason, nitric acid is used to confirm whether or not an item contains metal gold.
Gold comes in many shades of color, from a silvery white to yellow to red-orange. This makes it ideal for jewelry, as does its great malleability. An ounce of metal gold will stretch into a wire 85 kilometers (almost 53 miles) long! The ductile quality of metal gold means that just a single ounce of gold can be hammered into a plating so thin that it will cover about 300 square feet (10 square meters). These qualities enable goldsmiths to produce very elaborate and delicate designs with metal gold.
Metal gold’s chemical symbol is Au (from the Latin Aurum). The specific gravity of metal gold is 19.4, compared to water, which makes it the third heaviest known metal. Only tungsten at 19.6, plutonium at 19.8, and platinum at 21.0 are heavier. Metal gold is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Gold is chemically inert, so it is non-reactive to most chemicals; this makes it valuable in photography processes and in dental work. This chemical property means that air and the general environment do not cause metal gold to “wear”. Gold is one of the only metals that continue to show their original color, shine, and luster over many decades.
The natural state of gold is as a metal, usually alloyed to some degree with silver. Native metal gold is found in nuggets, when gold particles and dust have been washed into streams and rivers and compacted by water action into small chunks. Gold ore is found embedded in rock, often along with veins of quartz or pyrite, in “lode” deposits. The processing of nuggets to extract the pure metal gold is relatively uncomplicated, while the processing of ore requires a complex extraction technology, ending with molten metal gold being poured into a bar form. When gold’s market price is low, some production operations become economically unsustainable, since their costs are so high. A small amount of gold is also found in sea water, but so far no effective method of retrieving this metal gold has been developed.
Gold, like other precious commodities, is surrounded by a set of government-issued regulations. For the USA, the National Gold and Silver Marking Act oversees standards of purity for gold and its alloys used in the jewelry-making industry. This law was originally enacted in 1906, but at that time it lacked requirements for quality. It was revised in 1976 and went into effect in 1981, more tightly regulating specifications for precious metal standards. Now it is necessary for jewelry manufacturers to state the value in karats of their finished pieces. The karat system refers to pure metallic gold (99.95%) as 24 karat; 18K is 75% gold; 14K is 58.33% gold; and 10K is 41.67% gold. The remainder in each case consists of alloys, normally silver, copper, nickel, and zinc. Most jewelry produced is made of 14K metal gold, although there is also a good quantity of 10K gold jewelry. Italian goldsmiths often work in 18K metal gold.
New techniques for discovering and refining of precious metals are constantly being developed. The demand for gold continues to grow, as technology requires more of it for electronics and other applications. The gold exchanges show its price as relatively stable, because demand is consistent as well. We can expect that consumption of this precious metal by various industries, will serve to maintain high prices in the foreseeable future.
Great info here, no doubt, for dealers or those who are going to start dealing. To the public, though, especially women who only care about it in the form of jewelery, all that matters is the final product. If the setting is cool, they will never ask about karats or purity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.