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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

And corrosion-resistant contacts of all kinds, and soft and biocompatible and corrosion-resistant tooth fillings, and low-resistance conductors (e.g. for bond wires), and coating glass to get ultra-low-loss mirrors well into the infrared, and measuring electrical charge in electroscopes, and coloring glass deep red, and conductive sheets so thin they are transparent, and in anti-inflammatories for arthritis, and in immunogold labeling, and in making random things conductive and emit lots of secondary electrons so you can easily look at them in an electron microscope...

This is why you're being downvoted. Check Wikipedia before commenting next time.

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It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. Gold has some nice useful properties, but it seems the properties that have mattered most to people throughout the millenia are 1) it has a pleasing color, and 2) it's hard to come by.

Probably more important, it's chemically inert (so it doesn't rust away to nothing) and it's easy to assay, at least once you can make aqua regia, an ability which was mastered by the 13th century CE, and possibly by the 14th century BCE. Harappan touchstones have been recovered, and although cupellation can't separate gold from silver, it can certainly separate it from iron, lead, tin, and copper, and we've found cupels with litharge deposits from the 4th millennium BCE.

Cupellation plus touchstones are adequate both to refine electrum and to destructively measure the quantity of gold in the electrum. By Roman times, we were smelting electrum with salt to separate out the gold by chloriding the silver, and the Lydians may have been doing that already by the fifth century BCE, when they started debasing their electrum coins with extra silver.

This sounds kind of stupid, since at this point we're used to being able to purify and quantify all kinds of materials, but in fact these attributes made gold and silver unique among rare elements for centuries.

That's cool! I don't know much about chemistry or metallurgy. I can see a connection from making gold for real to alchemy to chemistry. So perhaps gold is partially responsible for creating science? If for no other reason than its a really good motivator.

Absolutely! Although it might also be responsible for the pathetic and obsessive secrecy that slowed the progress of alchemy.

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