GOLD

When Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere, his first question is supposed to have been, “Where is the gold?” From earliest times, gold has been the most desired metal and the symbol of wealth-and with good reason.

Gold is the color of the sun, and the ancients worshipped the sun. Since the gold was associated with kings and priests, too, gold was theirs to own and bestow.Then, there is the rarity of gold. Imagine a cube that is 18 yards or 54 feet on all sides, weighing 100,000 tons. That relatively small cube represents the total amount of gold that has been mined in the six thousand years since written history began.

It includes the gold bars in Fort Knox, the even larger number deep in the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Manhattan, the bars or ingots held by other banks around the world, the treasures in museums, the religious objects in countless churches, the inlays in millions of teeth, the jewelry owned by millions of people, the gold used in space andcomputer and other industry technology, coins, secret hoards-in fact, all gold already mined, regardless of whether it is solid gold, in alloys, in wires, or in foil.

Yet, the rarity of gold is not the only thing that makes it unique. *Gold is so ductile that 1 ounce can be drawn into a fine wire 50 miles long.

*Gold is so malleable that 1 ounce can be hammered into a sheet so thin that it could cover 700 square feet.
*Gold is so indestructible that jewelry buried in tombs 3,200 years before Christ and coins centuries old found in long-since rotted ships at the bottom of the ocean gleam like new.