Some pretty amazing materials have been invented over the last 100 years, including Nylon, Teflon, long-chain polymers and advanced industrial ceramics. They are all remarkable, but they aren’t as amazing as gold. For many reasons, gold still reigns as the perhaps the astonishing material found on earth. Those are the same reasons that explain why gold will forever fascinate people and never decline in value - temporary price fluctuations aside, of course!

Image of gold price chart for blog post about Specialty Metals gold pool account. Credit: filmfoto/iStock.

Gold is Beautiful

Let’s start with the most obvious – and most compelling – reason. Humans have always found gold beautiful. It has captured the imagination of people for thousands of years, and it always will.

Gold is Rare

Per most estimates, all the gold in the world (except for the stuff that is still to be discovered or mined) amounts to only about 171,000 metric tons. And (you have probably read this before) if all that gold were made into one cube, it would measure only 67’ on each side. So the net is, you could put all the gold in the world in your back yard, on a nearby tennis court, or on a baseball diamond. Add that to the fact that gold is expensive and difficult to mine, and you can see why gold is scarce and why, generally speaking, its price will never decline.

Gold Doesn’t Tarnish or Oxidize

This is one of the most remarkable things about gold – you can polish up a chunk of it and leave it sitting on your bookshelf and even if you come back in a century, it will still look beautiful and shiny. Some other metals, including platinum, resist tarnish too. But gold’s unique combination of brilliant beauty and resistance to tarnish make it unique in all the world.

Gold Is Incredibly Malleable and Ductile

One ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire that is 1,250 miles long. (That’s not a typo.) That same ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet of gold leaf that measures about 100 square feet. In practical terms, those facts mean that gold is one of the most easily worked metals in the world, making it especially valued by skilled jewelers and artisans of all kinds.

Gold Can Be Melted and Reused

Because gold is so rare in nature, there is plenty of incentive to melt and reuse old items of gold scrap and jewelry. The high cost of mining gold is another reason why companies like ours, Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners, refine and recycle significant quantities of gold every year. So, if you have old gold scrap of any kind, contact us at 800-426-2344 and we’ll be happy to recycle your gold for top dollar.

Gold Is an Excellent Conductor of Electricity

If all the characteristics of gold described above were not enough, gold is also a great conductor of electrical current, which is another way of saying that gold offers very little resistance to electrical flow. That explains why gold, though ancient, is used so widely in a range of modern electrical devices that include cell phones, printed circuit boards of all kinds, and even advanced electrical components that are used in aerospace applications. Old yet modern, gold will keep its place as a cutting-edge material in the electronic devices of the future.

Gold Serves as a Natural Lubricant

In past posts on this blog, we have mentioned this amazing characteristic of gold, which is currently being used in thin layers placed between moving parts in space stations and other aerospace applications. If you squirted oil between two moving parts and sent them into the vacuum of space, that oil would disperse. Not so with thin layers of lubricating gold. It stays put and continues to reduce friction, even in a vacuum.

Those Are Only a Few Reasons...

...why gold is so amazing, rare and valuable. If you have gold materials of any kind that you would like to recycle for maximum return, give our precious metals recycling consultants a call at 800-426-2344. Today, as in the past, gold will amaze you not only with its beauty, but with its value too.

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Why Gold Will Never Go Down in Value