Is gold magnetic? Will gold float? Is gold transparent? Is gold bulletproof? What color is gold?

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and you want to find a lot of gold in 2020 and beyond well if you're gonna go hunting for that elusive yellow yellow metal well you better know a lot about it and today I'm gonna talk about 12 things that are little known that a lot of people don't know or understand about gold now you may be saying to yourself hey Chris I know what I need to know about gold I'm already educated I know it well I'm gonna tell you some things that you probably don't know or at least we're not fully aware of we're gonna really get into the weeds on what gold is and what it does and what you need to know to find that yellow metal let me go over a couple of things that we're gonna talk about in this video so you can see what I mean how they're little known the first of these things is hey is gold magnetic well you may not think it is but yes yes it is and I'm gonna prove it to you and then you're gonna am gonna ask hey does gold float well of course it floats now you might ask is gold transparent can you see through gold well yes of course you can then I'm gonna say hey is gold edible well of course it is people eat it all the time especially rich people and then I'm gonna ask is gold bulletproof sure sure it can be bulletproof and then we'll talk about well what color is gold well the truth is it can be any color you want it to be then we'll talk about is gold important industrially is it important in electronics well yeah everything electronic you use couldn't be there if it wasn't for gold then we're going to talk about how pure is natural gold you see beautiful natural nuggets being found on internet videos on YouTube how pure is that stuff well we're going to talk about that then we'll ask why is gold so valuable because it really is pretty diable and it's getting more valuable all the time then we'll talk about what does gold really is for is it really just something that rich people put in banks and in the form of bricks and wait for some day when the stock market crashes well gold is valuable for a reason and we're gonna talk about that and a whole lot more so stand by because today you're gonna learn twelve special secrets or things that are little known that most people don't know about gold so my first question is is gold magnetic now it seems to be a question that just like everybody on the internet is interested in and there's videos that say yes and there's videos that say no and and so it's kind of a point of confusion part of that is what do you mean by magnetic so I'm gonna answer this question once and for all is gold magnetic I'm gonna show you okay so I'm gonna do a little experiment here I've got several pieces of gold I've got a very powerful rare earth magnet this is a really strong big rare earth magnet super powerful it will lift many pounds of steel okay so it's very powerful and I've got here a $5 u.s. gold coin minted in 1908 the year my grandfather was born I've got a 3/4 ounce gold nugget I found with a metal detector in Alaska a couple of years ago and I've got four smaller nuggets from Australia that I also found there with a metal detector in Western Australia and we're gonna do an experiment and I'm going to show you once and for all what the reality is about magnetic gold okay so first the magnet and the coin you can see there's nothing the magnet has no interest I've got the pan tilted a little much so the magnet is but the magnet does not pull the coin away and then so let's try our Alaskan natural gold nugget that's a an example of refined gold American gold coins are about 90 percent I think gold all right here's the Alaska nugget and again the magnet has no interest in the gold just there's no attraction at all so then I have the four small nuggets from Australia okay now let's take the big magnet and see what they do and you can see the Nuggets stuck to the magnet here's the four nuggets again and you can see they come up and the fact I'll put them on here and you can see how the magnet pulls them see the magnet they're definitely magnetic so what's the takeaway from this well let me tell you so is the takeaway from this that refined gold and big nuggets aren't magnetic but little nuggets are no that's not is it that gold from Alaska is not magnetic but gold from Australia is yeah that's that's not it either what happens is there are minerals that form with gold and iron minerals are very common with gold and in fact prospectors you guys from from Australia know how common iron stone is in the areas around your goal and you know in guys in Arizona in the United States there's a fair amount of Arizona gold that's closely associated with iron stone - and iron stone just basically means a mix of iron oxide minerals and what you see is basically one the most important iron oxide minerals is magnetite and magnetite as the name implies is magnetic and if you have a gold nugget and it grows around a piece of magnetite well then the gold isn't magnetic but the magnet comes close to the magnetite and up goes the the magnetite to meet the magnet and those four little nuggets from Australia they're all mixed with some is a magnetite iron stone in there with the gold it kind of grew around them or grew with them and so they're mixed together and want to put the magnet to the magnetite of course the magnetite is magnetic absolutely and that's how you end up with magnetic gold or at least what appears to be magnetic gold there's no trick photography to this this is not you know painted nugget painted rocks or anything goofy like that and there's no trick camera angles or anything it's just a matter of nuggets that grow with magnetite will the magnetite will drag them along now there is a kind of thing where if the Nugget is big enough and there's not enough magnetite the magnetite will have a hard time dragging all that gold with it so it's less common in bigger nuggets but I've never and I know people have had this happen where they've been metal detecting and they the target gets sucked on to the magnet on their pick and it disappears on the ground and and they look and then hey there's I'm not get attached to their pick well it's a magnetite gold nugget so they'd happen and and they're not that unusual I I picked these out of my bottle of nuggets that I got from Western Australia now another thing about the magnetic properties of gold is that any conductive metal and gold is conductive any conductive metal that you pass a moving electric field over so if I were to take that magnet and go over like this over the gold it induces a little bit electric current in the conductive object in this case gold and the conduction of the electricity in the gold itself produces a little bit of a magnetic field coming back so that's actually how generators and alternators work is they spin things spin around and motors to is except they run in Reverse in a generator you spin things or spin magnets around next to wires usually copper it's almost all copper in a generator spinning around you generate electricity and that's how you make electricity in a generator you know that has a gas motor on it you know it generates electricity by spinning magnets around next to wires the reverse of that for a motor is that instead of putting energy in to spin things around you put electricity in going the other direction and electricity coming it makes things spin so motors and generators are actually very closely related anyway the little when you you know induce a little bit of a current in a gold object and it makes a little bit of an electric field that's actually how metal detectors work now the detectors have electric fields in the coil and they induce that into a nugget and the nugget generates a little bit of a magnetic field itself just because it's conductive and that's what the metal detector sees but if you turn the electricity off and don't do any motion or anything there's no magnetism to the gold anyway hope that clarifies the truth about is gold magnetic because it kind of means it means what you want it to mean you know like I say if you move a gold piece past a magnetic field you will induce some sort of a magnetic field temporarily in the gold while you're moving something past it but gold nuggets are usually the only magnetic if they're wrapped around a piece of magnetite so we'll go float you know will it float on the surface of water gold pretty heavy it's really dense how can it float on the surface of water if it's heavy and dense I mean if you made like a boat of it it would float the same way steel floats but do natural flakes and nuggets just float on water sometimes well let's do an experiment and I'll show you okay does gold float let's take a look and see there's some gold I've got this is actually about here I'll show you it's about two penny wait about tenth of an ounce of gold in this little bottle we're gonna see if that gold will float what do you think you can see a lot of it's floating on the surface of the water honey you got a bother putting the rest of the vial in there you can see as it moves that that stuff is floating right on the surface so how does that work what's the lesson of this how can you make gold float on the surface of water that just doesn't make any sense does it well I'll explain it so how does gold float on the surface of water well gold actually doesn't wet very well you know some things you put water on it the surface wets very easily gold kind of repels water it doesn't wet very easily and actually it uses that property to float so what happens is if you put dry flat flakes on the surface of water the surface tension and gold repelling the water will allow the gold to float on the surface and what happens is if you add some sort of a wetting agent or you stir the surface up the gold will be overcome by the water and will sink okay so I can take this pan here and stir the water up and mix it all around and that gold will go to the bottom of the pan so that's how gold floats yes it does it because the surface tension and because of the property that gold has that it repels water yeah it tends to float in little tiny pieces bigger or heavier pieces the surface tension can't hold them up but little tiny flat flakes they'll float so did you know that gold is transparent now you probably saying to yourself hey Chris you're crazy I've seen a lot of gold it's not transparent you can't see through gold well actually if you make it thin enough it is transparent and actually that's an important use because there's glass that's infused with gold where it's you know it reflects the material astronaut helmets take a look at this are actually put with real thin amount of gold enough that the astronaut can see out but it acts like a one-way type of glass where a lot of the sun's rays coming in are reflected and so yes gold can be transparent another use is that they actually put gold into glass and if it's finally divided in individual particles it actually can color the glass red another thing that we should talk about is gold edible can you eat gold well gold is pretty inert substance so you know it pretty much goes right through your system so it's not poisonous it doesn't react with other parts of your body and and cause damage but it is used in food surprisingly more common than you would think I can show you some pictures of gold very very very super thin foil that's put on food as a decorative item here's a gold doughnut and you can see from some of these examples that you know it is used in in high-dollar food as a decorative thing most commonly actually in desserts and I'll say that I've eaten some desserts that have gold foil on them for decorative purposes now it's true that the amount of gold that's used in these is super thin and we're going to talk in a little bit about how thin and how malleable gold is cuz it's it's actually the most malleable metal or element that's out there so is gold bulletproof well you know gold I said it's very malleable it bands easily and and when it was pure anyway and so it actually is bulletproof if you have a thick enough thickness of it obviously if you have like the super thin thickness that they use as a decorative thing in desserts no that's not stop even your finger let alone a bullet but if you have a thick enough piece of gold because it's malleable it will stop a bullet but it's really mostly on the basis of how thinking is being thick enough to stop the penetration of the bullet as it goes in because it absorbs you know it absorbs and bends and deforms in order to stop the energy of the bullet so what color is gold I mean you might ask again Chris what are you thinking gold it's gold colored because there's actually a word that means gold right then it can mean a color but there's more to it than that you see gold is used in jewelry a lot and even in nature different alloys of gold because gold found in nature is never 100% perfectly pure it always has different elements in it that are mixed in with the gold and I've found gold nuggets that have a decidedly greenish cast I'll show you a couple of them right here you see these have a little bit of elevated silver content and if you elevate the silver content some but not a huge amount you end up with this greenish cast in fact if you Alif if you add a whole bunch of silver then of course it will overload the gold color and you'll get a silvery white gold which white gold is very common in jewelry and actually there's a whole mix in fact there's a type of jewelry called Black Hills Gold that's made with gold that has a little bit of silver enough to give it a greenish cast other pieces that have extra copper that give it a reddish cast and then regular gold colored material that has the normal gold color and they're used as different accents in different kinds of jewelry and black hills type jewelry is really pretty common in Endura stores but you know it's not even just the white gold the red gold and the regular gold color and white gold as you can see in this chart see I've got a chart here that kind of shows the percentages of what each one is and how the different percentages affect the color but it's more than just that it's more than just what you see on that chart you can actually add other elements like aluminum or cadmium or other types of things to gold and get bluish color gold like this this is actually a 14-karat ring that's been treated and has a bluish color to it there are 1 versions of gold that alloys that have a purplish cast to them so there's all different kinds of colors reddish yellowish whitish bluish purplish there's just a variety depending on what you alloyed the gold with and how much of the other metals are in with the gold that make a huge difference now you don't see the blue or the purple very much in jury because they tend to be a little bit on the brittle side and so if you have a ring and hit it against something you could actually break the ring because the metal becomes brittle instead of the normal bendable malleable gold that you're used to so like I say gold can be pretty much any color you want it to be okay so King gold he dissolved in water well let's let's clarify that a little bit in regular water no gold won't dissolve but it's been known for centuries that a mixture of certain chemicals that was called aqua regia is capable of dissolving gold it reacts with the gold metal and dissolves it and it becomes a gold chemical in solution in the water and that's been known that that can you know happen for centuries in fact a version of this kind of technique was used by early artists to gild and gold color things alright so yes if you have the right chemicals gold can be dissolved in a watery solution not pure water but in waters mixed with chemicals there are other chemicals that will dissolve gold in fact cyanide is the biggest source of how gold is extracted from the rock on the planet and they only mix a little bit of cyanide with the gold with the water in order to dissolve the goal it takes a little time but the cyanide will dissolve the gold there are other chemicals as well so there's a variety of different chemicals and in the earth slightly acidic sulfur compounds actually are capable mixed with water of dissolving small amounts of gold and that's how gold cork most gold quartz veins and other gold deposits are formed as by the gold being dissolved and and carried along in these acidic sulfur solutions and the sulfur then it's not a very stable compound and it it will dissolve and carry it for a ways and then the compound which is not very stable will fall apart and the gold metal will come back out and that's that's how basically gold a lot of gold deposits are formed one of the the things that it shows you know you see a lot of gold veins there's pyrite and other sulfur minerals well this offers there it carries the gold too so anyway yes gold can be dissolved if you have some chemicals to mix in with your water I mentioned before that gold is incredibly malleable it can be flattened into unbelievably thin sheets like I say they use it for decorative purposes but those same kind of thin sheets also get used for building decoration and gilding signs you know buildings that are like temples and churches and places of worship you know are commonly gilded for their beauty and many famous buildings of worship all over the planet are in part at least covered with this thin thin gold foil that and it adds beauty it also protects because gold is of course so resistant to corrosion and that sort of thing the guilting on the surface helps protect whatever is underneath so gold can be like I say drawn out incredibly thin and they have lots of you can buy you can buy on the market sheets of thin gold and it's it's not actually that expensive simply because the gold is so thin it's it's just amazing they can actually be gold and and it is a compressing process it's not a plating type of thing although gold can be plated too they they actually take the gold and Hammer it and beat it that's how it didn't in ancient days they would put flat pieces of gold between layers of leather in the ancient days and hit it with a leather or with a wooden hammer or a mallet and and thereby flatten the gold out to be incredible thin sheets these days with presses and that sort of thing you know industrial types of equipment to do that flattening and gnashing of the gold we can produce sheets so thin that it would take more than seven thousand sheets to equal the thickness of a dime a dime is you know it's for my US viewers you know how thin a dime is for reference for viewers outside it's about one and a third meters 7,000 sheets to equal 1/3 millimeters that's incredible and it can also be drawn into thin wires they can actually take an ounce of pure gold and draw it into a wire continuous wire 50 miles long over 50 miles so how small a wire diameter would that be if you have just one ounce of gold and you made it 50 miles long just amazing so gold is incredibly bendable and malleable and flatten a bowl and drawable it has those characteristics and and it is the most malleable metal that exists how pure is natural gold I mean you've seen gold nuggets found out of the ground you know I find gold nuggets other people do too how pure is natural gold well it's never 100% pure it never is I mean there are come some cases that are like almost 99.8 or something like that very close pretty pure but it's never actually 100% pure there's always a little bit of impurity and usually those impurities are silver and sometimes copper but sometimes iron and palladium and some other things that are in there and in small amounts and you know it's it's always got some impurity but how impurity well it can vary a lot most placer nuggets most alluvial gold nuggets are in the range of about 20 to 23 carats pure which which in a percentage is about 80 to 93 percent pure 95% pure somewhere around there and the high-end there's not as much of that and they're really low in most of it's in them the kind of the middle kind of the eighty-five ninety percent well a lot of alluvial gold falls in that category but there are other types I say that I've found myself nuggets that have a green cast to them because they have somewhat silver content and if they have more even more silver content than the greenish cast then they start looking white and white colored gold is not that uncommon whitish tint gold it's not that uncommon in Nevada no how does a stay with a lot of silver and it just is a natural thing there's actually a word for a natural gold silver alloy it's called electron and electron is not that uncommon in Nevada so natural gold you know it varies and there are some examples of natural gold that's you know maybe 50 50 or even more silver than gold but the most of the gold nuggets that you see or hear about or are found in alluvial nuggets they tend to be in that 80 85 90 kind of a percentage purity so why is gold so valuable I mean you know it currently as I'm taping this it's about fifteen hundred and fifty dollars US dollars per troy ounce that works out to be in US dollars again around $50 a gram pretty expensive stuff valuable why is it so valuable well gold is very durable it doesn't rust and corrode and fall apart I mean there are gold bars that sit on the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of years and all they have is that there's been barnacles growing on them and they don't have any corrosion whereas even silver bars sitting on the bottom of the ocean for a long time they get corroded from the seawater just it's a very durable metal I mean that's partly why we have alluvial kinds of deposits placer deposits is because the gold after it comes out of a vein or some other kind of deposit it goes into a river it doesn't corrode and fall apart over time it stays in there it finds its way into crevices and cracks and bedrock and that sort of thing and just sits there it lasts for long time because it doesn't corrode so it's durable it doesn't corrode it's beautiful hey it is pretty stuff it's rare it's not like there's gobs and gobs of it it's pretty dense so it's relatively small size you know a 1 kilo bar that has many thousands of dollars you know can easily just slip right in your pocket no problem so it's a very portable store of wealth that is easy to transport if you get huge amounts like millions of dollars they can add up to be a weight that's imposing but you can transport reasonable pretty good-sized amounts of money real easily with gold for thousands of years gold has been money man has recognized gold and gold objects as being highly valuable for they saved more than five thousand years and it's been made into money for centuries it was something like 800 BC that they took the first bits of gold and and made them a uniform size and stamped an image on them the first coins and the coins have been used by all people civilized peoples ever since the Romans used them and they made gold coins the Spanish made loads and loads of gold coins and that have been very beautiful and famous over the years and so it's been recognized as real money has a real source of wealth for thousands of years and accepted worldwide it doesn't matter whether you're in the Far East in China in in Spain in Europe in Africa or South America wherever cultures have always accepted gold as an extremely valuable and beautiful thing and in fact something like forty five percent of all the gold that exists the planet right now that's that's stored away that people have is exists in the vaults of banks that are storing it as a monetary backdrop and what happens is different countries like hey you know I'm France and why should I trust you Yugoslavia or why should I trust you Greece and Greece says well why should I trust you Turkey and they don't like each other and why should I trust you United States whatever the money and unit of money they have countries have gold to back it up and if worse comes to worse they have gold and you know you can print a zillion paper dollars but there's only so much gold and if you want more you have to go mining so it's been it's valuable because it's accepted everywhere by cultures all over the planet as money so what is gold actually used for you know what is it you know what is a use for well something like seventy eight percent of all newly mined gold gets made into jewelry that's that's what the bulk of newly mined gold gets made into around twelve percent gets used in various applications of mosted like dental and other consuming applications most of which about ten of that 12% is electronics everything that you have that's electronic be it your cell phone your television your computer your tablet you name it your camera that I'm filming this on all of those use gold and they use it the TV behind me all of them use gold for contacts because that you know chips and other things that have to touch and make an electrical contact and and the heck electricity has to flow through there through those contacts Gold is great because it's so resistant to corrosion if they used iron it would rust if they use silver it would corrode if they use thing you know they could use some other things like platinum but they're super rare so they they use gold and gold is easy to play it on and that sort of thing and so electric connectors electric connections throughout all of your electronic devices will have gold and about ten percent like I say about 10% of all newly mined gold goes to that two percent to dental and other uses and then making desserts that have you know that have gold foil or you know decorating buildings like I say that have guilt to guilt signs and that sort of thing and then the last ten percent gets used in just four countries like I say the countries that keep it as a store high-net-worth individuals that have keep gold as a store of wealth the last ten percent is used for financial security so I hope you've learned a little bit about gold today and some of the unique characteristics of this very unusual but beautiful and rare metal that's accepted as money by people all over the world I hope you learned a little bit more about it and if you want to go out and find your own goal and acquire your own gold by your own efforts then I wrote a book about it and it will help you to find gold wherever you are and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my book right now okay so I wanted to tell you a little bit more about my book I want it to be able to share the knowledge that I've gained about finding gold and and how to be successful and so I spent years literally writing this book Fistful of gold it's more than three hundred and fifty pages long and which is why I say it's an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about finding your own gold I've sold more than eight thousand copies and I've got a lot of really great feedback on it it just is the most complete book on the mark it it has information about finding gold that literally is not available in any other book that you're gonna find for prospectors because I took technical stuff from geologists and other mineral scientists and I've translated that into language that the average guy can understand you don't need a PhD to go out and find gold but the information that scientists have learned over recent decades can can be of a lot of help to people so it's in this book if you're interested about finding gold panning sluicing nugget detecting a dry washing the geology of gold deposits and how they form it's all in here and like I say it's more than 350 pages long so if you'll just go to the description underneath this video you can take a look I've got a link in there to take you to Amazon to the site where the book is sold and I think you'll you'll really enjoy it take a look at all the people who've commented on this and have really liked the book it has a very very high rating for a book and also I have a website my own free website that you can take a look at I've got all kinds of information on here about doing research and how to find gold a lot of good information stuff that basically couldn't fit into my book and so I put it on this website and I have a link also for that in the video description so take a look in the description and you can click on the link and it'll take you to my website and finally if you like this presentation I've got a lot more coming out here's a three and a half ounces of gold that I found a couple of years back in one area I've got a lot more of these videos coming on gold gemstones hardrock placer a lot of metal detecting there'll be lots of metal detecting stuff so if you really enjoyed this click the subscribe button and then take the notification bell off and YouTube will let you know when I publish new stuff and hit the like as well and please comment on these videos because I'm interested in what you have to say and I promise to answer any questions you have so if you are wondering about anything you're thinking maybe I didn't cover something thoroughly enough in a video then let me know and I'll be happy to try and help you out and give you whatever information you need so thanks a lot and I hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you again real soon

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 24,331

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Id: 1BOa8Ag8ZqI

Length: 38min 56sec (2336 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020