Gold has been mined for at least 5,000 years, a long time before a practical use could be found for the metal – primarily it was sought after because of its use in making jewelry and it never lost its golden luster. The luster is what attracted early man and men to this day, it shines brightly and because it does not react with other elements and compounds, especially water which creates “rust” or oxidation stains, it keeps its appearance for ages.
Gold is also soft and easily worked which lends it to being shaped into whatever decorative adornment the craftsman’s imagination can conceive – some of the most intricate designs of jewelry from ancient times have been uncovered, despite the thousands of years that may have elapsed since being formed, precisely because of these qualities which gold has.
Gold is also rare, which adds to the perceived value of the metal; if you were to gather all the gold that has been mined from the start of men seeking out this precious metal, right the way to the present day you would have a cube of gold measuring a little of 70 feet square – you could drop it in the average sized home! Most of the gold in circulation today has been mined since the turn of the 20th Century, even with all the hype of the California Gold Rushes in the late 19th Century.
As economies developed and financial concepts matured, particularly the invention and adoption of “money”, gold was one of the leading supports of the economic system of countries around the globe as they moved from agricultural and nomadic subsistence economies to industrial and manufacturing bases. Gold was used initially for minting coins with the sovereign or ruler of the country stamping their faces and marks upon the coinage to demonstrate a quality standard. The value of a coin was inherent in the value of the gold which it contained – in essence a dollar’s worth of gold went into creating a dollar gold coin.
As societies continued to develop, gold was used less and less in the actual coinage and instead, was used to provide the asset backing to the paper currency which was issued – paper currency is simply a “promise” by a country’s central bank or treasury department. This led to countries around the world buying gold bullion simply to store in a repository so they had the value of gold to back up the value of the currency they were issuing. The value of a currency wasn’t governed by the industry or financial base of a country but by how much gold they had stored. In the latter parts of the 20th Century this practice waned as economies grew and outstretched the gold that was available to back the currencies; this proved no obstacle to issuing more money however, as the link between gold and money was decoupled (Switzerland being the last country to do this in 1997).
Gold’s success stems initially from its appearance and malleability, but as society has developed it has played a far more crucial role in underpinning the development of modern society and economic development. Without gold, many of the jobs and industries we have today would simply never have developed and as gold was the spur for exploration, America would never have been discovered as it was but for man’s lust for this precious metal.
Author Resource:
Lawrence Reaves writes for the best online resource to sell gold or sell gold coins can be found at http://www.Refinity.com
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