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The chemical element gold has been valued throughout history, because of its colour texture and malleable properties. As it is found naturally in its pure form it has been easily accessible to large amounts of people. As it is a valuable metal it has
also been used for money and the Romans became masters at passing on a message to their subjects in the conquered lands by using the two sides of the coin.
Although gold is found in rocks it is rarely visible because it is found in such small concentrations. It is not easy to extract the gold from rock, but it is often found with other metals such as copper and lead. Gold is often mined as a by product
of mining copper. When the surrounding rock has been washed away by erosion or water the golden treasure hidden below is unearthed. On many occasions it is washed far from its original bed by streams and rivers.
It is likely that the earliest discovered gold was found by this method and it certainly led to some of the largest gold rushes in history. Some of the greatest gold rushes were in America Canada and Australia. Now in the twenty first Century South Africa,
Russia, Chine, Peru, Australia are amongst the largest producers of gold.
Gold is not used just for jewellery though gold jewellery has always been a major use for gold it has industrial properties as well. Because it is very soft it can be hammered into very thin sheets known as gold leaf. It has been used to decorate early
manuscripts, when the earliest manuscripts were written by hand often by monks they used it to decorate letters at the beginning of the page. Sometimes it was used to decorate the drawings that accompanied the manuscript.
Many of these priceless Christian manuscripts decorated with gold leaf still survive today, despite the fact that the museum and library were housed in the Library at Alexandria. They were destroyed in the civil war under the rule of the Roman emperor
Aurelia in the late 3rd century AD.
Gold today is used for jewellery and industrial uses, it conducts electricity very well. Because the metal gold is soft in its pure form which is 24 carat gold it is often mixed with other metals to form an alloy. When gold has a 12 carat it is half
gold and half another metal.
Gold is popular on satellites because one of its properties is the fact that it can reflect a large amount of radiation from the sun. Because of this characteristic they are used on the space suits to provide protection for the astronauts. They are used
on space satellites that track the weather or are used to transmit television programmes as they help to keep the temperature stable. Some large office blocks have also used gold to treat the windows so that it regulates the ambient internal temperature.
Gold and silver were used by the ancient Romans to make coins, and this was a powerful reminder to their subjugated peoples of who was the boss. Today gold coins would be too expensive to manufacture and paper and other metals are more common. However, most
governments still keep huge amounts of gold bars in their treasuries. The US treasury is at Fort Knox and it was sometimes used to pay to pay their depts.
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