How to make gold?

From the moment gold became a symbol of wealth, people have sought to take possession of it. Medieval alchemists tried to make this metal cheaper and more affordable. In the end, scientists learned how to turn one chemical element into another, but this does not mean that anyone can turn an aluminum spoon into gold. How to make gold and is it even possible? Let's try to figure it out.

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What is gold?

This metal has been known since antiquity. In Latin, gold is called aurum, and in the periodic system it is indicated by the symbol Au. Both the Slavic and Latin names mean “yellow”.

Masters making gold jewelry were attracted by their excellent physical and chemical properties:

• softness;
• plastic;
• relatively low chemical activity;
• availability in nature.

Important! Pure gold is a very soft metal, it is easy to machine it mechanically. It can take any form. Gold products at first mostly forged. From it you can forge sheets a fraction of a millimeter thick. But this metal melts at a rather high temperature - more than 1064 ° C. By itself, this element is quite volatile, it begins to evaporate even before boiling.

Jewelry is relatively rarely made of pure gold. As a rule, alloys are used:

• with copper;
• with silver;
• with platinum.

Important! Pure gold is often used in technology - for example, for the manufacture of radio components, microcircuits, etc. However, only 10% of the total amount of this metal goes into industry. Everything else is centralized stocks of chemically pure gold bullion. About half belong to the states, the rest to private owners of ingots and jewelry.

The main characteristics also include weight and density. In terms of density, gold ranks seventh among all metals. It is 19.32 g / cm³. Due to its high density, it is quite easy to mine this metal.

Gold is mined in several ways:

• flushing;
• amalgamation;
• cyanidation.

Washing is based on the fact that when washing sand, lighter fractions are washed off, and heavy gold particles remain at the bottom. Amalgamation - gold mining with mercury; during cyanidation, a reaction with cyanides occurs.

Important! With amalgamation and cyanidation, very toxic substances are used.

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According to the method of medieval alchemists

Medieval experimenters tried to create gold from lead. Let's try to understand how they did it and why they didn’t succeed. Of course, this method will not give an answer to the question of how gold is made, but it will help to understand the properties of various chemical elements.

Medieval alchemists adhered to the principle of “like reaches for like”. If they had an ingot of gold, a piece of lead should be attracted to it and eventually change their properties. An alchemist would need:

• gold bar weighing 1 kg;
• a lead ingot weighing 2 kg;
• a tool for cutting metal (a modern alchemist may well use a hacksaw).

The process then went something like this. To do something noble (for example, to receive a precious metal), a person must have pure thoughts and a pure heart.Therefore, the researcher prayed to those forces in which he believed, trying to purify himself and become worthy of his goal.

If you have already tried this, you can continue:

1. Place both bars on a table next to each other.
2. Imagine that before you are two absolutely identical materials, and noble ones.
3. You need to meditate so much that you yourself believe that lead is gold and stop distinguishing ingots.
4. Saw a piece of lead.
5. Put a piece of gold to the cut.
6. Imagine that the molecules of two ingots gradually merge, particles of lead turn into particles of gold.

You can’t believe that you will succeed? This is because you already know a lot about the Mendeleev’s periodic system, and about the properties of different metals, and about which substances react with gold, and with which - no, and what is the result. But in the Middle Ages, even the most enlightened people still did not know this, and if they had not tested their naive methods, there would have been no serious scientific discoveries.

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Nuclear chemistry

The baton from medieval scientists was taken over by researchers of the last century engaged in nuclear chemistry. And they learned how to get this metal from other chemical elements! The impossible became possible, but not for everyone. This process is expensive, dangerous and requires special equipment, so it also does not give an answer to the question of how to make gold with your own hands.

The method is based on the fact that in a nuclear reactor some chemical elements are converted into others. For example, the production of plutonium from enriched uranium is a fairly common business and has been used in almost all nuclear power plants for more than half a century. But other elements are capable of turning. For example, nickel can be made from iron, and chlorine can be made from sulfur.

American physicists are not joking

For the first time, American researchers managed to get gold by the “atomic” route. It happened in 1947. Twelve years before, another American, Arthur Dempster, found out that there is only one stable isotope in gold. And in early 1940, Harvard physicists A. Sherr and C. Bainbridge announced the receipt of artificial gold. They were able to disperse deuterons and direct them to a lithium target.

Thus, a flux of fast neutrons was produced, which, in turn, bombarded the core of mercury. As a result, gold isotopes were obtained, but they were extremely unstable, lived for several days, and finally turned back into mercury, moreover, radioactive.

Important! Only seven years later, an artificial micro-ingot was obtained, which is now in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The yield of the precious metal was very low - 35 μg out of 100 g of mercury.

Talk about isotopes

Of course, a successful American experiment does not at all indicate that you can take a can of mercury and turn it into gold using a magic wand and spells or even a makeshift nuclear reactor. Nuclear physicists do not work with ordinary substances, but with isotopes, that is, with radioactive, often unstable, variations.

Mercury has seven isotopes, three of which are relatively stable. The only stable gold isotope is Au-197. It can be obtained from mercury with the same index. Radioactive mercury emits beta rays, as a result, the molecule loses individual elements and in the end another substance is obtained.

This process:

• extremely labor intensive;
• very expensive.
• It is not so much practical as scientific.

Important! This method has another significant drawback. You can’t just take and fuse individual isotopes into an ingot. They still need to be freed from a mixture of nuclides and other isotopes.

Other substances

Gold can be made from other elements. True, even in an ideally equipped laboratory, success is not always possible:

• mainly isotopes are extremely unstable;
• substances can be even more expensive than gold (for example, platinum).

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Science fiction

In parallel with attempts to make gold from mercury, other experiments were going on. For example, in 1913, Frederick Soddy suggested that the precious metal can be obtained from thallium. He believed that medieval scholars were right and that lead can also be used. He also had the idea of ​​trying to turn mercury into gold - but at that time the experimental base was still rather weak.

Science fiction writers also dealt with this problem. In the late 1930s, Dauman proposed an option for producing yellow metal from bismuth in one of his novels. His heroes used powerful x-ray radiation as an instrument, and in general, science fiction was not so far from the truth. True, it was his heroes who made as much gold as they wanted, resulting in an economic crisis, as it was during the Great Geographical Discoveries, when flows of gold from South America just poured into Europe.

Important! However, science fiction novels still caused a certain resonance. Scientists drew attention to bismuth, but came to the conclusion that this metal does not have stable isotopes.

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Reverse process

If mercury can be turned into gold, is the reverse process also possible? Medieval scholars have not posed this problem. But they had neither such goals, nor knowledge. Frankly, the task of producing ultrapure mercury was not at that time, but now such a metal is needed. The answer was when ultra-precise measurement standards were needed.

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The experiments went unnoticed?

Of course, obtaining artificial gold cannot affect, for example, the precious metals market. But to say that gold isotopes have no practical value would be wrong. Such isotopes are used in medicine to treat certain forms of cancer.

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No radiation

Can gold be made from mercury without a nuclear reaction? Alchemists, including modern ones, believe that this is possible. In their opinion, it looks something like this:

1. Take the required amount of mercury.
2. Pour it into a refractory vessel.
3. Put the vessel on fire.
4. Boil mercury.
5. Throw powder into it - as much as another alchemist, your teacher, who determined the composition of the powder.
6. Next up is a small amount of what you’ve got, and throw that in 1000 ounces of mercury.
7. Mercury should turn into red powder.
8. Take some of this powder and throw in a thousand ounces of mercury again.
9. Do this until all the mercury turns to gold.

Important! Science does not know that someone succeeded and made gold by conducting such experiments. Mercury vapors are extremely toxic, so the end of the story can be quite bleak. At home, experimenting is clearly not worth it. But there are industrial methods for producing gold using mercury without any beta bombing.

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Amalgamation

This method is based on the fact that mercury can form alloys with different metals.

Option 1:

1. The rock containing gold is crushed.
2. All this is well wetted.
3. Humidified, fine-grained material is mixed with mercury.
4. The mixture is placed in a runner bowl, where further grinding takes place.
5. The resulting amalgam is recovered from the sludge by washing.
6. Mercury from amalgam is driven away - it can be reused.

Important! This is a very old way, it was known before our era. Most often it was used in South America after Spain got colonies there.

Option 2

External amalgamation method:

1. As in the first case, the gold breed is crushed.
2. Then the rock is passed through special enrichment locks - they are lined with copper sheets coated with a layer of mercury.

Important! These methods are rarely used now, mainly where there is a breed with a high gold content. Most often this is done in Africa.

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Cyanide

Gold tends to dissolve in hydrocyanic acid and solutions of its salts. This was used to develop the extraction method:

1. The rock is crushed.
2. It is treated with a weak solution of sodium cyanide (concentration from 0.03% to 0.3%).
3. Sodium cyanoaurate is formed.
4. The resulting substance is treated with zinc dust or ion exchange resin.

Initially, this method was used in large factories. Then he changed - instead of tanks, they began to use waterproof platforms where ore was poured and soaked in solutions of hydrocyanic acid salts. The cyanides seeped and took the gold atoms with them, and then all this went into the sorption columns, where gold was deposited.

Important! This method of producing gold is applicable only where there are no sulfides in the ore with which hydrocyanic acid salts react. If sulfides are present, the process is significantly complicated.

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Regeneration method

It is based on the fact that solutions of gold salts are treated with a 10% alkali solution:

1. The solution heats up.
2. Gold is deposited on an aluminum surface.

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Can I work with gold at home?

Gold turnover in many countries is closely monitored. Not as meticulous as, for example, the diamond or emerald market, but still. In fact, if you are not going to master the craft of a jeweler and get the appropriate license, you have the opportunity to work only with what you can absolutely legally buy in stores:

• golden powder;
• jewelry;
• radio parts.

Gold powder is used for the manufacture of arts and crafts products - you can make another piece of jewelry from broken earrings. As for radio components, there is very little gold there. To make something out of the “golden scrap”, it is best to contact a jewelry workshop. Gold melts heavily, and in the manufacture of jewelry, other metals are added to it, making it even more refractory.

Important! If you are lucky and you have found a gold bar, then it all depends on where exactly you are. In many countries, such findings must be reported to state authorities, otherwise serious troubles may arise. Of course, you can do something for yourself, but selling such an ingot or product from it will be problematic.

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Stock footage

As you can see, making gold at home is almost impossible, and often this process is fraught with great risk to your health. Therefore, we advise you to abandon attempts to quickly make money through the production of gold bullion at home. And if you really want to experiment and conduct scientific experiments, then it is better to do this in specialized laboratories. But for this you will have to study and study again in order to have the appropriate knowledge, capabilities, access and qualifications.