Authors: Alex Josey
The last wishes of the Chou brothers, to
donate their eyes and kidneys to hospitals, were not met. One report said that
the medical facilities at the hospital jail were inadequate. Another report
said none of the surgeons at the Outram Hospital Renal Unit was keen to perform
the operation. “For the transplants to be carried out the surgeons have to be
on stand-by during the entire execution and this, said the surgeons, would be a
very unsavoury and unpleasant task and they do not have the stomach to do it.”
The seven guilty men were hanged in Changi
Prison on 28 February 1975, together with another man, a Malay labourer,
sentenced to death for the murder of a one-armed man two years earlier. In the
death cells, each of the murderers finally lost his identity and, like the
labourer, became just another person to be hanged. Six of the condemned men
walked to the gallows three at a time. The two others followed. More than 200
relatives waited outside the heavily guarded jail to claim the bodies.
By coincidence, shortly after the seven men
were hanged (their bodies were still in Changi Jail), a Singapore Airlines
Boeing 747 flew into Singapore’s International Airport carrying $233 million in
gold bullion. The 1,700 gold bars had been bought by the Singapore Government
from the United States Federal Reserve Bank. They were taken under armed guard
to the Treasury vaults in Empress Place. Four months later, more gold bars,
worth $130 million, arrived. Just how much the Government of Singapore invested
in gold is a State secret.
WHAT IS THE ALLURE OF GOLD? What is
the magic of its attraction? Why do men fight and slave and murder for gold?
What makes men lust for gold? What is this substance that has wrought more
havoc and destruction in the world than mankind itself? Gold is malleable,
beautiful, treacherous and yet more enduring than life itself. You can beat it,
squeeze it, heat it, boil it ... you can hardly get rid of the stuff ... it is
gorgeous, desirable, all-powerful ...
The explorer, Christopher Columbus, said of
gold: “Gold is the most exquisite of all things … Whoever possesses gold can
acquire all that he desires in this world. Truly, for gold he can gain entrance
for his soul into paradise.”
Man has been recovering gold from the earth
for at least 7,000 years, yet for most of that period, gold was a useless metal
in terms of its contribution to material progress. From bronze and iron, the
early civilizations wrought tools and weapons which shaped the world, but gold
was too heavy, too soft to be of much practical use. The early civilizations
treasured gold as a symbol of the life-giving sun. The pre-Columbian Indians
called it ‘the sweat of the sun’. To the Egyptians, it was the gift of Ra, the
sun king. Gold became the prerogative of church and court.
Today, half the gold used by industry is
made into rings and slender chains, earrings, elegant watch cases and other
pieces of jewellery.
The next largest consumer of industrial gold
is the world’s mints. When in 650
bce
,
King Gyges of Lydia struck the first gold coins, he established gold as a
medium of exchange, an act which was to have far-reaching effects over the
centuries. The mints used 221 tonnes of gold in 1975, compared with 532 tonnes
used by the jewellery industry.
Gold has a role in manufacturing, in the
electronics industry, in the textile industry, in the building industry and in
space ... an ounce of gold (28 grams) can be beaten out to produce 100 square
feet (nine square metres) of foil. In 1975, some 65 tonnes of gold were used in
dentistry.
Gold’s physical properties, apart from its
value and malleability, are mechanical strength, resistance to wear and a low
coefficient of friction. Gold too has high thermal conductivity which is
important because it rapidly dissipates heat and, most important, in its
applications in the electric and electronic industry, it is an excellent
conductor. Equally varied are the uses of gold in engineering. Gold has been
described as ‘indispensable in space as on earth’ and its use as a heat shield
in spacecraft and in space-suits has received much attention. On earth, gold
has made modern buildings with their acres of glass fit to work in by
insulating people from solar radiation. Gold is used not only to protect people
from the sun but to collect solar energy by absorbing it and so economizing on
the earth’s diminishing energy resources. It is used by a wide variety of
manufacturers in many other different ways.
Many influential people throughout the world
advocate the return of gold to a central position in the currency system.
Gold, the dream of the pot of gold at the
end of the rainbow … the symbol of man’s hope and of man’s greed. It is neither
the rarest metal nor the most expensive (platinum is rarer and more costly than
gold), but gold has a mystique that has lasted through the ages. Why? Nobody
seems to know. Gold is easy to shape and polish, it does not rust, tarnish or
corrode … the attraction of gold goes back long before the birth of Christ. The
Egyptian King, Tutankhamen, was buried in a 1.8-metre solid gold coffin more
than 3,300 years ago. It weighed 1,111.3 kilograms.
Gold was partly responsible for the
exploration of the Americas. King Ferdinand of Spain told his conquistadors to
search for gold when he sent them to the New World in 1511. From 1492 to 1600,
more than 8 million troy ounces of gold (much of it mined by slaves or stolen)
came from South America. Today, South Africa and the Soviet Union are the
world’s biggest gold-miners, but during the 17th and 18th centuries, South
American mines produced up to 80 per cent of the world’s supply.
‘El Dorado’ means in Spanish, ‘The Golden’.
It was the name given to a fabulous city long believed to exist somewhere in
the interior of South America. Belief in the existence of this mythical city of
gold was based on the tales of a Spanish sailor, Martinez, set adrift in 1500
by his companions when exploring the Orinoco. Finding his way back to Spain, he
told how he had been taken by the Indians to a great inland lake with golden
sands, on which was a vast city roofed with gold. Numerous Spanish expeditions
set out to find it, and most of them came to grief on the Amazon. Also
searching for El Dorado was Sir Walter Raleigh. In his ill-fated expedition he
lost his son, his health and his fortune. Nevertheless many expeditions
followed. The last attempt to find the city of gold, and the ceremonial golden
treasures the Indians were believed to have thrown into a lake, was in 1965. It
failed, like all the others.
Even so, plenty of evidence exists that a
great deal of gold existed in this part of the world, and a primitive Indian
society in Columbia developed a high skill of technology in fashioning gold
objects. An Indian peasant found the El Dorado ceremonial gold raft in 1972
near Lake Pasca. It is now considered to be Columbia’s greatest national
treasure. It is on view in The Museum of Gold, which has a unique collection of
26,000 pieces of gold. An earlier raft, very similar in design, was discovered
at another lake in 1856. This raft has now vanished and may have been destroyed
in Germany during the Second World War. Some people believe it is still in East
Germany.
The discovery of gold in California and
Australia in the mid-19th century marked another expansion in production. More
gold was mined in the 25 years from 1850 to 1875 than had been mined in the
preceding 350 years.
Exploration and modern technology have
boosted production but gold remains a rare commodity. The amount mined in 1977
throughout the entire world was just under 2,000 tonnes. In contrast, the
United States alone that year produced more than 600 million tonnes of coal.
In the US, gold was discovered by accident
in a remote mill-race in Sacramento in California in 1848. The discovery
started the hysterical nineteenth-century gold rush. The mill-race was owned by
John Sutter. California was in the process of being bought from the wild Mexicans,
There were few white settlers. Twelve thousand people flooded into Sacramento
within a year. There were another 85,000 the next year. They came from America,
Australia, even China. It was reckoned that in the first seven years,
California yielded US$250 million worth of gold. One of the successful gold
miners was an Australian. He returned home and within a week struck gold at
Summer Hill Creek near Ophir. By 1854, more than 1.25 million seekers for gold
had reached Australia from Britain and other parts of the world. In the first
year of the Australian gold rush, about 20,400 kilograms of gold were gleaned
from New South Wales alone. This rate was to be surpassed by Victoria which
produced about 625,000 kilograms of gold in 10 years.
Gold was discovered in South Africa in 1853
at the height of the American and Australian gold rushes, by a veteran of both
California and New South Wales, but the news of the discovery was quashed by
the Boers, and the modest finds of gold were soon eclipsed when the first
diamonds were found. So the richest mother lode in the world—the 18,000 square
kilometres of the Rand goldfields—lay undisturbed for 20 years in a country
gripped by its own diamond rush.
Then, in 1886, George Harrison, an
Australian digger, stumbled on gold in Witwatersrand, and a new rush began.
In 1895, an American and two Indians found
gold in the Yukon River in Alaska. Although gold was plentiful in Alaska, it
was covered by a 4.5-metre blanket of frozen mud. Gold diggers found over 2,000
kilograms in 1899, and seven times as much the next year.
After 50 years of frenzied, often unskilled,
digging, a total of about six million kilograms of gold had been won in
America, Australia and South Africa. This was estimated to be more than 20 per
cent of all gold mined since 1500.
Gold (symbol Au, atomic number 79, atomic
weight 197.2) is a metallic element that has been known and valued from the
earliest time on account of its occurrence in the free state, the ease with
which it can be beaten into articles and ornaments, and its unalterability by
water or air. As the Roman poet, Pindar, wrote 2,000 years ago: ‘Gold is the
child of Zeus: neither moth nor rust can devoureth it.’
Gold is found almost always in the free
state, and sometimes in combination with silver, mercury and tellurium. It is
very widely distributed, and in fact there is scarcely a country or deposit in
the world which has not been found to contain gold. It occurs principally in
rock formations or in alluvial deposits.
Until recent years, the alluvial deposits
were the chief sources of gold. These ‘placers’ consist of an accumulation of
gravel, sand and clay mixed with particles of gold varying from minute grains
to nuggets of considerable size. In Europe, the most alluvial deposits are
those in the Urals; in Asia those of Siberia; in Africa those of the Rand. In
America, the Californian deposits were the cause of the gold rush in 1849 and
are now practically exhausted: the Klondike district in Yukon, Canada, also
attracted considerable but short-lived attention.
Australia contains the most famous alluvial
deposits: nuggets of considerable weight have been found in them. The largest
ever found, the Welcome nugget, was discovered in 1858 at Ballarat in Victoria.
It weighed 83 kilograms. Another nugget, the Blanch Barkly, was found in South
Australia. It weighed 66 kilograms. A gold nugget weighing 2.07 kilograms was
found by Russian gold miners in the Magadan gold fields in July 1976. Two men
found a nugget weighing over 6.3 kilograms in 1979, some 320 kilometres west of
Sydney, near the town of Orange.
Gold is a very heavy metal (sp. gr. 19.4).
It melts at 1067°C, and is volatile at the temperature of the electric arc. It
has a specific heat of 0.0316, is a good conductor of heat and electricity and
is quite unaffected by air and most reagents.
Gold is the most malleable and ductile of
metals and may be beaten out into leaves having the thickness of only 1/260,000
of an inch. Thus one grain of gold may be made to cover 56 square inches or
drawn into a wire 500 feet long. Or, in other words, an ounce of gold can be
beaten into a sheet covering an area of nine square metres. It can be drawn
into a wire that stretches for 32 kilometres. All the gold mined in the world
in the past 500 years would fit into a 20 metre cube.
Pure gold is 24 carats. 18-carat gold is
composed of 18 parts of gold and six parts of copper or silver.
There is gold in the oceans. The seas
contain six parts gold for every trillion parts of salt water.
So far, alchemists have failed to make their
own gold from base metals though not from want of trying over the centuries.
Experts hold the opinion that modern work on the structure of the atoms
indicates that the problem is by no means insoluble. In fact, there were
rumours in 1980 that Russian scientists had already discovered the secret.
Diodorus Siculus wrote of the problems of
gold mining in the first century BC: “Nature herself makes it clear that the
production of gold is laborious, the guarding of it difficult, the zest for it
very great.”
South African gold is extremely difficult to
mine. The reefs are severely faulted. They are mostly between one and two miles
underground and the gold ore is concentrated in very narrow bands, often only a
few inches wide, and sometimes as narrow as one inch. It is necessary to haul
and crush anything from two and a half to three tons of rock to extract an
ounce of gold. At the worst period, in 1950, it took five tons of rock to
extract an ounce of gold. The amount of water pumped through a single mine (and
there are 40 working mines) for hydraulic drilling and cooling is greater than
the amount used by a city of almost 1.25 million people.