Dissolve My Nobel Prize Fast. It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen

npr.org

30 pointssamwillis5 comments

Obviously, these individuals are far more intelligent than myself, but wouldn't it have been significantly faster to create an amalgam with mercury?

IIRC, it doesn't look golden or valuable at all once complete.

Getting the gold back is apparently as easy as heating up the amalgam to vaporize the mercury. Maybe too easy for the Nazi to do or maybe they left some mercury out as a decoy.

It's probably that mercury is incredibly toxic. Heating up the amalgam was done to create traditional gold gilding, but it also left the tradesman with mercury poisoning and bit insane to boot

Wikipedia says gold must be ground to form an amalgam. Whereas, dissolution presumably could proceed unattended if necessary.

Also, Hevesey was limited to materials on hand; a sufficient quantity of mercury simply may not have been present in the lab.

"This was not an obvious solution..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com