Gold Facts

Pirates and sailors believed that piercing their ears with precious metals like gold and silver would improve their eyesight. This superstition persisted for centuries despite having no medical basis.

A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.

There are gold pills for sale that turn your poop into glittering gold.

One cubic foot of gold weighs more than 1,200 pounds!

One cubic mile of seawater contains about 25 tons of dissolved gold.

The streets of Victor, Colorado, once a gold rush town, are paved with low-grade gold.

An ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 50 miles long.

All the gold ever mined could be molded into a cube 60 feet high and 60 feet wide.

In 1799, a boy found a 17lb. rock in a creek in North Carolina and used it as a doorstop. It was actually gold.

In 2012, a British man named Wesley Carrington used a metal detector for the first time and found £100,000 worth of Roman gold within 20 minutes.

A couple that were out walking on their property in Sierra Nevada discovered a canister containing $10 million in gold coins.

'Qatar' is the world's most expensive bar of soap. Made with gold powder, diamond dust, olive oil, and organic honey, it costs around $2,800.

Indian housewives hold 11% of the World’s gold. That is more than the reserves of USA, IMF, Switzerland and Germany put together.

A retired gardener borrowed a metal detector in 1992 to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field. Instead, he uncovered 14,865 Roman coins and 200 pieces of ancient jewelry - the largest late Roman treasure hoard ever found in Britain, valued at £1.75 million. They found the hammer too. It's in the British Museum.

A medical student from Michigan solved a decade-long treasure hunt in 2020 - finding a bronze chest filled with gold nuggets, ancient coins, and jewels that art dealer Forrest Fenn had hidden in Wyoming around 2010. More than 350,000 people had searched for it. The chest sold at auction in 2022 for $1.3 million.

In 1324, Mansa Musa — ruler of the Mali Empire — made a pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan of 60,000 men and thousands of pounds of gold. When he stopped in Cairo, he gave away so much gold that he crashed the local economy. The price of gold didn't recover for twelve years. He is widely considered the wealthiest person who ever lived.

A California couple were walking their dog in February 2013 when the woman spotted a rusty tin can sticking out of the soil on their property. They dug it out - and found it packed with 19th-century gold coins. Eight canisters total, containing 1,427 Gold Rush-era coins dated 1847-1894. Face value: $27,980. Market value: $10 million.