The Disappearing Spoon: Chapter 13: Elements as Money Summary & Analysis

Ever since metals started being used to make currency, the issue of counterfeiting has been a major concern. In the Ancient Greek myth about Midas, the king asked a satyr to give him the power to turn everything he touched into gold. This blessing turned out to be a curse, in part because when Midas’s beloved daughter turned into a gold statue after he embraced her. Meanwhile, the real King Midas ruled over the part of Asia Minor containing the earliest foundries of brass, an alloy (mix) of copper and zinc. This provides a clue to where the real King Midas meets the Midas of myth. People may have seen the real Midas adorned with what they believed to be gold, when it was actually brass. 

The myth of El Dorado is another example of human culture’s fascination with gold. This myth foreshadowed the real-life gold rushes, wherein many were tricked by elements that resemble gold, but are actually worthless. One lucky man who did strike real gold was an Irishman named Paddy Hannan, who was riding through the Australian outback when he happened upon a spot in the desert where “gold was more plentiful than water.” Miners quickly rushed to the scene, where much of the rocks they found were tossed to one side, assumed to be worthless. However, chaos broke out when the miners realized the rocks they’d thought were useless was actually calaverite, a gold telluride. The spot soon became the biggest source of gold in the world and was named “The Golden Mile.” 

Nowadays producing counterfeit money is categorized as fraud, but in the past it was considered to be the highest possible type of crime: treason. Despite the enormous consequences of counterfeiting, people have still done it throughout history. While Isaac Newton was master of the Royal Mint of England, he enthusiastically devoted himself to going after counterfeiters (known then as “coiners”). A Mongol emperor was the first to start using paper money in the 1200s but this form of currency didn’t arrive in England until 1694. At the time, coins were easier to counterfeit than paper money (although now the reverse is true).

The path of orbit that an electron makes around an atomic nucleus is determined by which shell it is in. However, electrons can jump between shells, and when they do so they emit light, which in turn emerge in “bands of color.” (These are what Bunsen analyzed with the spectroscope.) Lanthanides emit light in a fluorescent manner, meaning they absorb high-energy light but emit it as low-energy. In the European Union, fluorescent dye is used as an effective anti-counterfeiting tool because it will look normal in ordinary light but a special laser will reveal whether it is fake. As this story shows, elements are just as important to making real currency as they have been to the history of counterfeiting.

During World War II, the Italian Jewish writer and chemist Primo Levi traded cerium with local workers while in a concentration camp in exchange for life-saving food. After surviving, he published a book named The Periodic Table. Metals are one of the most stable sources of value in human history. The person who made the most money from the periodic table was Charles Hall, an American chemist who was the first person to devise a way to separate aluminum from oxygen, which is how it is found throughout the earth’s crust. Many had tried and failed to do this before, but what made it all the more impressive is that Hall was only 23 at the time of his discovery.

The company Hall founded began selling aluminum at a cheaper and cheaper price, while Hall himself made a fortune. By the time of his death, his shares in his company were worth the equivalent of over half a billion dollars. Here Kean notes that he has been using the international spelling “aluminium” rather than the American “aluminum” throughout the book. This is the version used by the scientists who searched for the (at the time undiscovered) element in the 19th century and it is also the spelling initially used by Hall himself. However, when it came to advertising his products, Hall dropped the extra “i,” a move that might or might not have been deliberate.