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  The explorer, Christopher Columbus, said of gold: “Gold is the most exquisite of all things … Whoever possesses gold can acquire all that he desires in this world. Truly, for gold he can gain entrance for his soul into paradise.”

  Man has been recovering gold from the earth for at least 7,000 years, yet for most of that period, gold was a useless metal in terms of its contribution to material progress. From bronze and iron, the early civilizations wrought tools and weapons which shaped the world, but gold was too heavy, too soft to be of much practical use. The early civilizations treasured gold as a symbol of the life-giving sun. The pre-Columbian Indians called it ‘the sweat of the sun’. To the Egyptians, it was the gift of Ra, the sun king. Gold became the prerogative of church and court.

  Today, half the gold used by industry is made into rings and slender chains, earrings, elegant watch cases and other pieces of jewellery.

  The next largest consumer of industrial gold is the world’s mints. When in 650 bce, King Gyges of Lydia struck the first gold coins, he established gold as a medium of exchange, an act which was to have far-reaching effects over the centuries. The mints used 221 tonnes of gold in 1975, compared with 532 tonnes used by the jewellery industry.

  Gold has a role in manufacturing, in the electronics industry, in the textile industry, in the building industry and in space ... an ounce of gold (28 grams) can be beaten out to produce 100 square feet (nine square metres) of foil. In 1975, some 65 tonnes of gold were used in dentistry.

  Gold’s physical properties, apart from its value and malleability, are mechanical strength, resistance to wear and a low coefficient of friction. Gold too has high thermal conductivity which is important because it rapidly dissipates heat and, most important, in its applications in the electric and electronic industry, it is an excellent conductor. Equally varied are the uses of gold in engineering. Gold has been described as ‘indispensable in space as on earth’ and its use as a heat shield in spacecraft and in space-suits has received much attention. On earth, gold has made modern buildings with their acres of glass fit to work in by insulating people from solar radiation. Gold is used not only to protect people from the sun but to collect solar energy by absorbing it and so economizing on the earth’s diminishing energy resources. It is used by a wide variety of manufacturers in many other different ways.

  Many influential people throughout the world advocate the return of gold to a central position in the currency system.

  Gold, the dream of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow … the symbol of man’s hope and of man’s greed. It is neither the rarest metal nor the most expensive (platinum is rarer and more costly than gold), but gold has a mystique that has lasted through the ages. Why? Nobody seems to know. Gold is easy to shape and polish, it does not rust, tarnish or corrode … the attraction of gold goes back long before the birth of Christ. The Egyptian King, Tutankhamen, was buried in a 1.8-metre solid gold coffin more than 3,300 years ago. It weighed 1,111.3 kilograms.

  Gold was partly responsible for the exploration of the Americas. King Ferdinand of Spain told his conquistadors to search for gold when he sent them to the New World in 1511. From 1492 to 1600, more than 8 million troy ounces of gold (much of it mined by slaves or stolen) came from South America. Today, South Africa and the Soviet Union are the world’s biggest gold-miners, but during the 17th and 18th centuries, South American mines produced up to 80 per cent of the world’s supply.

  ‘El Dorado’ means in Spanish, ‘The Golden’. It was the name given to a fabulous city long believed to exist somewhere in the interior of South America. Belief in the existence of this mythical city of gold was based on the tales of a Spanish sailor, Martinez, set adrift in 1500 by his companions when exploring the Orinoco. Finding his way back to Spain, he told how he had been taken by the Indians to a great inland lake with golden sands, on which was a vast city roofed with gold. Numerous Spanish expeditions set out to find it, and most of them came to grief on the Amazon. Also searching for El Dorado was Sir Walter Raleigh. In his ill-fated expedition he lost his son, his health and his fortune. Nevertheless many expeditions followed. The last attempt to find the city of gold, and the ceremonial golden treasures the Indians were believed to have thrown into a lake, was in 1965. It failed, like all the others.

  Even so, plenty of evidence exists that a great deal of gold existed in this part of the world, and a primitive Indian society in Columbia developed a high skill of technology in fashioning gold objects. An Indian peasant found the El Dorado ceremonial gold raft in 1972 near Lake Pasca. It is now considered to be Columbia’s greatest national treasure. It is on view in The Museum of Gold, which has a unique collection of 26,000 pieces of gold. An earlier raft, very similar in design, was discovered at another lake in 1856. This raft has now vanished and may have been destroyed in Germany during the Second World War. Some people believe it is still in East Germany.

  The discovery of gold in California and Australia in the mid-19th century marked another expansion in production. More gold was mined in the 25 years from 1850 to 1875 than had been mined in the preceding 350 years.

  Exploration and modern technology have boosted production but gold remains a rare commodity. The amount mined in 1977 throughout the entire world was just under 2,000 tonnes. In contrast, the United States alone that year produced more than 600 million tonnes of coal.

  In the US, gold was discovered by accident in a remote mill-race in Sacramento in California in 1848. The discovery started the hysterical nineteenth-century gold rush. The mill-race was owned by John Sutter. California was in the process of being bought from the wild Mexicans, There were few white settlers. Twelve thousand people flooded into Sacramento within a year. There were another 85,000 the next year. They came from America, Australia, even China. It was reckoned that in the first seven years, California yielded US$250 million worth of gold. One of the successful gold miners was an Australian. He returned home and within a week struck gold at Summer Hill Creek near Ophir. By 1854, more than 1.25 million seekers for gold had reached Australia from Britain and other parts of the world. In the first year of the Australian gold rush, about 20,400 kilograms of gold were gleaned from New South Wales alone. This rate was to be surpassed by Victoria which produced about 625,000 kilograms of gold in 10 years.

  Gold was discovered in South Africa in 1853 at the height of the American and Australian gold rushes, by a veteran of both California and New South Wales, but the news of the discovery was quashed by the Boers, and the modest finds of gold were soon eclipsed when the first diamonds were found. So the richest mother lode in the world—the 18,000 square kilometres of the Rand goldfields—lay undisturbed for 20 years in a country gripped by its own diamond rush.

  Then, in 1886, George Harrison, an Australian digger, stumbled on gold in Witwatersrand, and a new rush began.

  In 1895, an American and two Indians found gold in the Yukon River in Alaska. Although gold was plentiful in Alaska, it was covered by a 4.5-metre blanket of frozen mud. Gold diggers found over 2,000 kilograms in 1899, and seven times as much the next year.

  After 50 years of frenzied, often unskilled, digging, a total of about six million kilograms of gold had been won in America, Australia and South Africa. This was estimated to be more than 20 per cent of all gold mined since 1500.

  Gold (symbol Au, atomic number 79, atomic weight 197.2) is a metallic element that has been known and valued from the earliest time on account of its occurrence in the free state, the ease with which it can be beaten into articles and ornaments, and its unalterability by water or air. As the Roman poet, Pindar, wrote 2,000 years ago: ‘Gold is the child of Zeus: neither moth nor rust can devoureth it.’

  Gold is found almost always in the free state, and sometimes in combination with silver, mercury and tellurium. It is very widely distributed, and in fact there is scarcely a country or deposit in the world which has not been found to contain gold. It occurs principally in rock formations or in alluvial deposits.

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p; Until recent years, the alluvial deposits were the chief sources of gold. These ‘placers’ consist of an accumulation of gravel, sand and clay mixed with particles of gold varying from minute grains to nuggets of considerable size. In Europe, the most alluvial deposits are those in the Urals; in Asia those of Siberia; in Africa those of the Rand. In America, the Californian deposits were the cause of the gold rush in 1849 and are now practically exhausted: the Klondike district in Yukon, Canada, also attracted considerable but short-lived attention.

  Australia contains the most famous alluvial deposits: nuggets of considerable weight have been found in them. The largest ever found, the Welcome nugget, was discovered in 1858 at Ballarat in Victoria. It weighed 83 kilograms. Another nugget, the Blanch Barkly, was found in South Australia. It weighed 66 kilograms. A gold nugget weighing 2.07 kilograms was found by Russian gold miners in the Magadan gold fields in July 1976. Two men found a nugget weighing over 6.3 kilograms in 1979, some 320 kilometres west of Sydney, near the town of Orange.

  Gold is a very heavy metal (sp. gr. 19.4). It melts at 1067°C, and is volatile at the temperature of the electric arc. It has a specific heat of 0.0316, is a good conductor of heat and electricity and is quite unaffected by air and most reagents.

  Gold is the most malleable and ductile of metals and may be beaten out into leaves having the thickness of only 1/260,000 of an inch. Thus one grain of gold may be made to cover 56 square inches or drawn into a wire 500 feet long. Or, in other words, an ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet covering an area of nine square metres. It can be drawn into a wire that stretches for 32 kilometres. All the gold mined in the world in the past 500 years would fit into a 20 metre cube.

  Pure gold is 24 carats. 18-carat gold is composed of 18 parts of gold and six parts of copper or silver.

  There is gold in the oceans. The seas contain six parts gold for every trillion parts of salt water.

  So far, alchemists have failed to make their own gold from base metals though not from want of trying over the centuries. Experts hold the opinion that modern work on the structure of the atoms indicates that the problem is by no means insoluble. In fact, there were rumours in 1980 that Russian scientists had already discovered the secret.

  Diodorus Siculus wrote of the problems of gold mining in the first century BC: “Nature herself makes it clear that the production of gold is laborious, the guarding of it difficult, the zest for it very great.”

  South African gold is extremely difficult to mine. The reefs are severely faulted. They are mostly between one and two miles underground and the gold ore is concentrated in very narrow bands, often only a few inches wide, and sometimes as narrow as one inch. It is necessary to haul and crush anything from two and a half to three tons of rock to extract an ounce of gold. At the worst period, in 1950, it took five tons of rock to extract an ounce of gold. The amount of water pumped through a single mine (and there are 40 working mines) for hydraulic drilling and cooling is greater than the amount used by a city of almost 1.25 million people.

  Gold mining in South Africa is one of the world’s toughest jobs. Most miners are blacks, working in arduous conditions, 1,800 metres underground, the temperature at times climbing past 25 degrees centigrade despite huge air-conditioning plants. The Kinross Gold mine, about 100 kilometres outside Johannesburg, lies at the extreme edge of a giant 500 kilometres semi-circle where thousands of miners mine seven veins in the world’s richest gold-bearing basin. The world’s biggest gold mine, Vaal Reefs, 150 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg, employs 41,000 workers, most of them blacks. Altogether, about 430,000 Africans work in South Africa’s mines, most of them in the gold operations which need the most labour. The average salary is US$180 a month plus food and lodgings. A study by the main mining group, the Anglo-American Corporation, described the life of the black miners as being marked by ‘degradation, humiliation, corruption and sexual blackmail’.

  An ILO report in 1978 said South Africa’s black gold mine labourers were ‘living under prison-like conditions’. The gold miners, said the report, ‘are subjected to almost unbearable conditions of confinement, heat, noise and dust, making for an inevitably high accident rate’. South Africa was expelled from the ILO in 1964.

  The South African gold mines are believed to go back perhaps 2,500 million years. Geological evidence has led experts to believe that when the earth was young and the continents still unsettled, nature’s forces—pressure, heat, cold and storms of unimaginable violence—scoured from mountains debris containing gold which was carried by glaciers and rivers to a great inland sea which was formed in what is now the Transvaal high level. The gold washed down and settled in successive layers of pebbles along the shore of this inland lake. Over a period of millions of years this basin which must have been about as big as the Caspian Sea, silted up. Extremes of climate over successive ages caused the land surface to buckle and change. The gold, which Nature had collected and tidily stored in one place, was embedded in rock that today dips from the earth’s surface to perhaps eight kilometres or more below ground.

  Today, South African gold miners are venturing more than 3.2 kilometres into the earth’s crust—deeper than any man has gone before. More than a quarter of a million men go underground each working day into the complex mines beneath the veld. To get about 800 metric tons of gold in a year the South African gold miners blast, haul to the surface and crush, about 80 million metric tons of rock. The result is about 0.28 cubic metres of gold.

  Although South Africa produces most of the world’s gold it is not the richest nation in the world. There are about 4 million white South Africans and they receive 75 per cent of the national income (the 20 million black South Africans sharing the rest) and their living standards rank with the world’s elite of Germans, Canadians and Swedes. The black South African’s standard of living has been compared to that of the better-off developing countries, like Malaysia and Zambia.

  South Africa’s gold revenue surplus in 1979 came to over US$400 million.

  Until 1920, South African gold was refined in London. Since then it has been refined at Germiston near Johannesburg, by the Rand Refinery, owned by the South African Chamber of Mines.

  Mine bullion reaches the refinery in 1,000-ounce bars containing about 88 per cent gold, about 10 per cent silver and a residue of copper, lead and zinc. It is refined by a chlorine process which skims off the other metals to produce standard delivery bars with a gold content of at least 88.5 per cent and a pure gold weight of 400 troy ounces. A small amount of gold is electrolytically refined to an even greater purity of 99.99 per cent for some industrial uses (and all Russian gold is thus refined and recognizable).

  The South African gold mining industry is an oligopoly domi-nated by seven mining groups working through the South African Chamber of Mines. The mines of the seven groups produce 99 per cent of South Africa’s gold, all of its uranium, 80 per cent of South Africa’s coal and most of its diamonds.

  In 1976 the first shafts were sunk at South Africa’s newest gold mine near Carletonville. It is expected to have a life of about 34 years and produce 800 tonnes of gold. It is expected to be operating

  by 1981.

  The gold world is surrounded by a cloak of self-perpetuating secrecy, making accurate figures of supply and demand difficult to come by. This difficulty is accentuated when it comes to attempting to assess production and sales of the communist countries. The flow of gold from Russia and other communist countries tends to follow economic circles and sales coincide with needs for foreign currency for imported capital equipment, or to buy grain to offset a bad harvest. In the opinion of experts the Russians use the world gold market well and do not seek to depress the market for political reasons.

  Russia last published information about the Soviet Union’s output of gold in 1935. The figures then were production, 150 tons; reserves, 745 tons. Since then a total of just under 3,000 tons were sold to the West over 13 years to 1965, when sales were made every year building up fr
om a modest 70 tons a year at the beginning of that period to 1,400 tons annually in the three final years. Then followed an interval of six years in which there was nothing beyond some token sales. From 1973 to 1975, Russian sales averaged over 200 tons a year. Experts guess that Russian production is about 400 tons a year, with present reserves of 2,700 tons. The three biggest mining groups are Severovostokzoloto, Yakutzoloto and Zaibakalzoloto.

  In 1980, Consolidated Gold Fields estimated Russian gold production to be in the range of 280 to 350 tonnes a year. By contrast, South Africa, which mines about half the world’s gold, produced 706.4 tonnes in 1978.

  In 1976, 1977 and 1978, the Soviet Union sold more than 400 tonnes to the West; in 1979 about 220 tonnes.

  In 1980, Russia’s gold production was expected to rise. Two main mines had been identified, partly by satellites and partly through intelligence from defectors such as Colonel Penkovsky. One of these mines, Muruntau, in southwest Soviet Union, is thought to produce about 80 tonnes a year. This would make it the biggest gold mine in the world, the next being Vaal Reefs, the Anglo-American mine at Klerksdorp in the western Transvaal, which produced 67 tonnes in 1978. The other identified Russian gold mine is at Zod, quite close to the Turkish border. This is much smaller. In combination with other deposits in the vicinity it is estimated to produce 10 tonnes a year. Both Muruntau and Zod are mainly open-pit workings, though underground reserves are also thought to be extensive. Muruntau, in particular, may look forward to a long life. About 60 tonnes a year come from copper ore mines and zinc mines. The balance of estimated production is provided by the older mines in Siberia where the output is believed to be falling.