12 Jaw Dropping Facts about Gold

Gold seems to stand tall above nearly other substance on the planet. We measure things by their ‘weight in gold’ and we value gold as a piece of currency that will survive just about any financial meltdown. Is this the rhetoric of gold hockers as they try to make some extra cash on the market? Is there any real truth to the value of gold? We are sure that there is hyperbole in the gold selling world but there is also a ton of truth. Gold has more uses then simply the world of investing in gold. We picked out 12 jaw dropping facts about gold that you had no idea about!

Gold spoons are heavily used in taste testing.

No, we aren’t talking about taste testing for those heavily involved in gold investment either. People in the food industry prefer to use golden spoons when they taste test a product due to the fact that it won’t leave an aftertaste like a regular spoon will. Can you imagine that you buy gold so much that you can buy golden spoons for no other reason? Well that isn’t the case here, at least. But still we get a little bit of a chuckle out of the thought that there are ice cream testers out there with golden spoons moving from bowl to bowl while taking notes. We live in a strange and unfair world where most of the population is starving but golden spoons are standard operating procedure for the food industry. Well, what can you do.

The fear of gold is called Aurophobia.

We are sure that people legitimately have this phobia but it is hard to wrap your mind around if you ever want to make an investment in gold. How can people drum up a fear of gold? Is it the shine? Is it the fact that it likely came from an asteroid strike? Was this person hit with a brick of gold when they were kids or forced to watch too much Duck Tales? The world may never know — at least we don’t.

Gold isn’t as rare as you think.

…It just happens to be really hard to get to. Gold itself is valuable because it is so hard to get a hold of, not due to the innate rarity of the material itself. In fact, were you to excavate the ocean for all of the gold that it possessed then you would have enough to give every single person on the planet nine pounds of the valuable commodity. Nine pounds of gold is worth roughly $225,000 in today’s economy. Of course were we to steal every ounce of gold from the ocean then the gold market would crash and the value would be nil. Still, it is sort of fun to think about how much you could do with all of these gold funds were you able to access them. We’ll settle for just daydreaming about ever having nine pounds of gold.

Sailors wore gold earrings for a morbid reason.

At some point in time, especially during days of war, sailors would have to face the fact that they might never make it home. There are so many ways that things could go wrong aboard a ship even excluding the idea of enemy’s trying to cause them harm. Because of this mindset many sailors would often use their earnings to purchase golden earrings in the event that they ended up overboard and washed up on a beach. The reason for the gold earrings was so that they would be afforded the proper Christian burial despite not having family around to pay for it. There was nothing ever stopping someone from simply pocketing the earrings but we’re sure that there was some solemn comfort in knowing that there was a chance at a decent burial despite an anonymous death at sea.

Dubai has gold bar dispensing ATM machines.

If your only exposure to Dubai is through Google Images and articles like this then you probably see the place as some sort of haven for the wealthy. You are not wrong. Dubai is the most highly populated city in the United Arab Emirates and it is considered one of the richest city’s in all of the world with an average income of $57,000 per person. This number is heavily influenced by the top heavy millionaire and billionaire classes that call the ritzy city home. In any event, the significantly wealthy can get access to their personal golden bars by hitting up any of the special ATM’s that are located around the city. These ATM ‘s actually vend out golden bars, if you can believe it. We’re not sure how safe they are to use considering, well, robbery but it is still pretty much baller status to even be able to walk up to one with a straight face.

LEGO rewards employees with gold.

We all have been with companies that give you little gifts or bonuses for a job well done. Some places give you a gift card to a nice restaurant while others slip a paycheck onto your desk with a nice congratulations card. At the toy-brick company of LEGO employees are rewarding with a 25 gram brick of gold on their 25th year of service. As of this writing that much gold would be valued at around $1,000. That’s not a bad little treat for years of service at what we assume is a fun company to work for. Not to mention the gold is probably decorated and worth extra money as a collectible item.

Most gold on Earth arrived via asteroid.

It is a fact that the majority of gold on Earth is located beneath the Earth’s crust. How did the gold get there you might ask? Aliens? Well, not quite. Asteroid strikes over millions of years have contributed to the majority of the gold in our Earth’s crust. How did the gold get on said asteroids? Now that’s another question to be asked. The prevalence of gold in asteroid has many people monitoring for the rocks to strike Earth so that they can be on the scene to collect any potential gold.

Indian housewives own a surprising amount of gold.

Indian culture is steeped in various decorative pieces of jewelry for housewives so it doesn’t completely surprise us that Indian housewives own a ton of gold. Conservative estimates say that these Indian wives own nearly 11% of the gold in the world. For perspective that means that they have more gold than the United States, Germany,, and Switzerland all combined.

Gold has an interesting history in the world of online gaming.

World of Warcraft is one of the most popular online games created in the history of the platform. It has single handedly contributed to countless hours being spent by countless people in front of the computer screen. The game bases their currency around in game gold and the value of this in game gold actually translated to the real world. In China people would either be hired or imprisoned and their sole job would be to mine gold inside of the video game. For those not in the know: mining gold in World of Warcraft is the very definition of repletion. You would click and then wait. Sources show that up to 100,000 people are currently enslaved, clicking away mining for gold to be sold by their ‘bosses’.

All of the mined gold in human history can fit into three swimming pools.

You can trace various gold rushes around the world throughout all of history. Thousands of people pick up their lives during each of these frenetic times as they chase prosperity in the form of the material below the Earth’s surface. Gold rushes have occurred on every continent because gold can be found on every continent in the world. Yet despite our affinity for the precious substance there really hasn’t been that much gold mined successfully throughout human history. In fact, you could fit every ounce of gold ever mined by human hands into three Olympic sized swimming pools.

Half of the gold in the world has come from Witwatersrand, South Africa.

We’ve all heard of ‘Blood Diamonds’ and the effect of slavery on regions in Africa for the precious metal but things go even deeper. The majority of gold in the world, that has been excavated, can be traced all the way back to Witwatersrand, South Africa. Witwatersrand is located in the Gauteng Province and is filled largely with sedimentary rock. The basin and scarp has become a hot spot for gold activity that can be traced all the way back to the Witwatersrand Gold Rush back in 1886. Since then the strip of land has been harshly mined for gold and other valuable metals. Due to this sever mining there have been an increase in earth tremors, sinkholes, and other ground based instabilities including the existence of excess sulfuric acid leaking its way into the ground water — damaging bridges and buildings wherever the water meets. There is a price for all things in the Earth and she starts to groan when taken advantage of.

There is gold in your body!

Now before you start looking for operations in order to ‘withdraw it’ you should know that your body only possesses about .mg of gold. This gold is centralized in your bloodstream for the most part. For a long time scientists and doctors had no idea as to why we had blood in our body at all. But after long years of research it was finally realized that gold serves as a maintenance substance for your joints as well as a conduit for sending electrical signals all the way through your body. Pretty interesting, right? In fact, golden isn’t the only ‘odd’ substance in our body. We also have about one gram of silicon and 7 kilograms of hydrogen. Isn’t the body just fascinating? Before you start eyeing up your rivals just know that it would take over 40,000 individual people being drained of their blood, and filtered, before you’d get enough gold to make even an 8 gram paperweight. Not worth the effort and, also, it’s super lame to kill people.