Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Thoughts

I am so tempted to write about this bit of Nobel history for Terramagne.  However, I thought of some improvements:

1) Chop up the gold to make it dissolve much faster.

2) It's gold.  Hit it with a hammer until it turns into an ashtray or a coaster.  Or lumps, and put it in a box with a pack of cigarettes and a bar of soap.

3) Also if you adulterate it with silver, gold turns green; copper turns it pink.  Few people know this, making it an excellent disguise.  The right shade of pink gold looks a lot like copper.
Tags: history, networking, science
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  • 2 comments
fayanora

fayanora

December 27 2014, 11:06:41 UTC 6 years ago

As to #2, the Nazis would have found it that way anyway, given how they were looking for gold.
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

December 27 2014, 20:45:49 UTC 6 years ago

If you left it raw, they'd find a gold ashtray, which is not the proof that a Nobel prize is. You can beat gold out of shape in five minutes and into some other simple shape in another five. But if you painted it or coated it in lead, much less likely to identify it as gold. Also less likely is if you made mud out of cigarette ash, coated the item in that, and baked it for a few minutes. They'd see the ashtray but probably not scratch-test it.

Dissolving the gold is a terrific idea if you have enough time, and it worked. However, they were lucky in that regard -- they knew there was a ticking deadline but didn't know when it was. The advantage to beating gold is that it works very very fast.