Why Is Gold Valuable?

There are 118 known elements, and for several thousand years people who agreed on almost nothing else have been interviewing them for the same job: money. Gold keeps getting hired. It isn’t the charm, though it has plenty. Mostly, the other candidates kept leaking, rusting, exploding or killing the interviewer.

Gold is valuable because it is the only element that passes every test for money, and nobody can manufacture more of it. It doesn’t rust, it’s rare but not too rare, it melts in a charcoal fire, and it looks like nothing else on earth. On top of the chemistry sit a few thousand years of people agreeing that it’s worth having, and we’ll look that agreement in the eye before the end.

So treat it as a hiring problem. Here is the job, as it might have been nailed to a post in any marketplace of the ancient world:

• Position: money. Permanent.
• Pay: none. Benefits: may be buried in a jar in a field for several centuries.
• Must sit in a box for a lifetime and come out unchanged.
• Must be rare enough to be worth carrying, but common enough to go around.
• Must melt in an ordinary fire, so it can be stamped into coins.
• Must be easy to recognize and hard to fake.
• Must not explode. (This should not need saying. Wait until you meet the applicants.)

In 2011 the radio program Planet Money ran exactly this interview. It asked Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University, to walk the periodic table and cross off every element that would make bad money. Our walk follows his route. The jokes along the way are our own, and so are any mistakes.

Bring a red pen. Most of the table is about to go.

Why can’t a gas be money?

Start at the far right of the periodic table, with the noble gases: helium, neon, argon and their relatives. On paper they are dream candidates. They react with almost nothing and never corrode, which makes them, chemically, the most trustworthy elements in the universe.

The trouble is the jar. Your savings would be a sealed container of invisible gas, and as Planet Money put it, if you ever opened the jar, you would be broke. Paying for groceries would involve a valve. Every child’s birthday party, with its bunch of helium balloons, would be a run on the bank. One kid letting go of one string would be a recession.

The rest of the gases go with them. So do the two elements that are liquid at room temperature, mercury and bromine, because money that pours is money that ends up in the carpet, and in mercury’s case, in you. Cross them all off.

Why not the metals that explode?

Now go to the far left, to the alkali metals: lithium, sodium, potassium and the rest. They arrive shiny and soft, and for a moment they look like a promising start. Then someone offers them a glass of water. Drop a lump of sodium in a sink and it skates across the surface, fizzing and spitting, until it bursts into flame. Lithium, in the program’s words, can start a fire that burns through concrete walls.

Consider what that means for a currency. A wallet that bursts into flames in the rain. A savings account that has to be stored under oil. A bank that closes every spring with a sign on the door explaining that the vault is experiencing weather.

The letter more or less writes itself. (“Dear Sodium: Thank you for your interest in the position of Money. After careful consideration, and a small fire in the interview room, we have decided to move forward with other candidates. Please do not shake hands with the receptionist.”)

The chemist crossed off about 38 elements that either corrode or react on their own. That’s about a third of the table gone, and we haven’t reached the ones that kill you.

Why not the radioactive ones?

The bottom rows of the table are full of elements that are unstable by nature: they decay into other elements, giving off radiation as they go. Some, like einsteinium and promethium, exist mostly in laboratories, in tiny amounts, for short periods. The program’s verdict on einsteinium was blunt: carry some in your pocket and a year later you would be dead. Einsteinium came with glowing references. That was the problem.

This is not what you want in a store of value. Money that shrinks on its own is bad enough. Money that shrinks on its own and takes its owner with it is a pension plan nobody signs up for twice.

Cross off the bottom rows. What’s left is a modest strip of solid, stable metals in the middle of the table, and this is where the interviews get serious.

Why not iron, copper or aluminum?

The next candidates are the dependable, lunch-pail types, and they fail two lines of the listing at once. They corrode, and there is far too much of them.

Iron is the fourth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and it rusts. A fortune in iron would need a very large shed and a fresh coat of paint every summer. Copper is plentiful and turns green. Ask the Statue of Liberty. Both have been hired as coins, but only as small change, where nobody minds if the money is ordinary.

Aluminum deserves a longer look, because for a while it actually got the job. It’s the third most abundant element in the crust, but it is locked so tightly into rock that before the 1880s it was extraordinarily hard to extract. One of the few people who could do it was William Frishmuth, a German-born chemist in Philadelphia who had spent about 28 years and $53,000 working out a refining process. In 1884 he cast the finishing touch for the Washington Monument: an 8.9-inch, 100-ounce pyramid of solid aluminum, at $1.10 an ounce, the same as silver.

Before it went up, Frishmuth put it on display at Tiffany’s in New York, the jewelry store, without asking anybody, which according to the National Park Service prompted a series of urgent telegrams from Washington. This is real. Before it topped the Washington Monument, the top of the Washington Monument was in a jeweler’s window. We like to picture the telegrams getting shorter as Washington’s patience ran out: WHERE IS TOP OF MONUMENT. Then: WHY IS IT AT TIFFANY’S. Then just: WHY. On December 6, 1884, the cap went on, and on sunny days it can still sometimes be seen from the ground, “glowing like a small, white point.”

Fourteen months later, on February 23, 1886, a minister’s son in Oberlin, Ohio, named Charles Martin Hall ran an electric current through a clay crucible of hot, molten mineral salt with aluminum oxide dissolved in it. His laboratory, according to the IEEE’s engineering history archive, was a woodshed behind his parents’ house. He had swapped a coal furnace for a gasoline stove, and his batteries were so hungry that it took a pound of hand-cast zinc to make an ounce of aluminum. His sister Julia, who had also studied chemistry at Oberlin, worked in the shed with him. Out came aluminum, and once the method outgrew the woodshed it came cheaply and in quantity. Paul Héroult found the same method in France at almost the same time.

Within a generation aluminum was pots and pans, and later drink cans you crush without a second thought. The precious metal on top of the nation’s monument became the stuff of TV dinner trays. In July 1941 the monument’s tip itself was volunteered for an aluminum scrap drive. The proposal went nowhere, but it tells you how the career had gone: from the top of the monument to the top of the scrap pile.

That’s the clearest lesson on the whole table. Aluminum was scarce because of a technical problem, and technical problems get solved, sometimes by two siblings and a gasoline stove. Gold is scarce because there isn’t very much of it. No woodshed fixes that.

Why not platinum, or something rarer still?

By now we’re down to a handful of precious metals near the middle of the table, and the interviews come down to the fine print.

Some candidates are too rare. Osmium and iridium are so scarce that there would not be enough to make coins for a village, let alone an empire. Money has to be rare, but it also has to show up for work.

Rhodium and palladium have a simpler problem: nobody knew they existed until the early 1800s. They missed several thousand years of hiring by never sending in an application.

Platinum is the most painful near-miss. It is dense, beautiful and does not corrode, but it will not melt until about 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,768 degrees Celsius), a temperature no ancient furnace could reach. Gold gives up at about 1,950 Fahrenheit (1,064 Celsius): a charcoal fire, a sweating apprentice and a good pair of bellows will do it. A metal you can’t melt is a metal you can’t turn into coins, and coins were the job.

That leaves two finalists.

Why gold and not silver?

Silver came very close, and for long stretches of history it held a job of its own. Most of the world’s everyday coins were silver for centuries, while gold handled the large payments. Silver was the cashier. Gold was the vault.

Its weakness is that it tarnishes. Silver reacts with sulfur compounds in the air and slowly turns black, which is why somebody in every family gets handed a rag and the good spoons the night before Thanksgiving. It is also far more common than gold, which made it better for buying bread and worse for storing a fortune. (Our gold-silver ratio tool shows how many ounces of silver one ounce of gold buys today.)

So the last element standing is number 79. Gold. It stands at the front of the stage like the last kid at the spelling bee, who hasn’t noticed everyone else sat down.

What makes gold so special, chemically?

Gold is a noble metal, which in chemistry means it barely reacts with anything. Air doesn’t tarnish it. Water doesn’t rust it. Ordinary acids leave it alone. To dissolve gold you need aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, which is not something anyone keeps under the sink.

The practical result is that gold lasts. Gold objects pulled from tombs and shipwrecks come out looking much as they went in, while the iron beside them has turned to rust and the silver to a black crust. A gold coin buried in a field for a thousand years is, after a wipe on your sleeve, a gold coin, ready for its next shift.

It is also soft enough to hammer into leaf you can see light through, and its color is unlike any other metal’s, so it’s easy to recognize across a market and hard to fake. Now check it against the listing. Lasts a lifetime, rare but not too rare, melts in a charcoal fire, impossible to mistake, does not explode. Every box checked, and nobody had to train it.

Can’t scientists just make more gold?

They can, and it is the most expensive gold in history.

In 2025, the ALICE experiment at CERN reported that collisions in the Large Hadron Collider had turned lead into gold. Over the run from 2015 to 2018, about 86 billion gold nuclei were created. That sounds like a lot until you weigh it: 29 picograms, or 29 trillionths of a gram, and each nucleus lasted a tiny fraction of a second before breaking apart. CERN’s own summary noted that the total was trillions of times less than you would need for a piece of jewelry. At that rate, making enough gold for one 5-gram wedding ring would take about 690 billion years, roughly 50 times the age of the universe. Propose with a ring from the mall. CERN’s has a waiting list.

So the alchemists were right. It can be done. They were just off on the budget, by roughly one particle accelerator. Aluminum needed a woodshed and a gasoline stove to become common. Gold, given the world’s largest particle accelerator, four years and a small army of physicists, produced nothing anyone could see, and then even that fell apart.

The gold that actually exists comes out of mines, and slowly. Mines added about 1.7% to the world’s stock of gold in 2025. We weigh all of it, and look at who holds it, in How Much Gold Is There in the World?

Is gold only valuable because people believe it is?

Partly, yes, and it would be dishonest to skip this. Chemistry explains why gold got the job. It doesn’t set the salary. Only about 6.5% of gold demand in 2025 went into technology, according to the World Gold Council (322.8 of 4,999.4 tonnes). The rest was jewelry, bars, coins, funds and central banks, all ways of holding gold because other people value it.

So here is the case against, as fairly as we can put it. If the whole world decided tomorrow that gold was just a soft yellow metal, its price would fall a very long way. Gold has fallen hard before, and stayed down for years.

The answer is that the same is true of every form of money, including the paper in your wallet. Money is always a shared agreement. The difference is what the agreement rests on. A paper currency rests on the promise of an institution that can issue more of it. Gold rests on a lump of element 79 that nobody can issue at all. An agreement is easier to keep when nobody can add to the pile, the way a poker night stays friendly right up until somebody learns the dealer prints his own chips.

Did every country use gold coins?

Nearly every major one did, and it’s the most persuasive fact on the page. Countries that agreed on almost nothing else (not language, not religion, not which side of the road to drive on) all hired the same element. Britain’s sovereign has been struck since 1817. Switzerland had the Vreneli and France the 20-franc Napoleon. Germany had the 20-mark piece, Austria the ducat and the 100 corona, and the Netherlands the 10 gulden. Mexico had the 50-peso Centenario, the United States the double eagle, and South Africa, from 1967, the Krugerrand.

Now read the names stamped on those coins. The French franc, the German mark, the Dutch gulden and the Austrian corona have all been retired, replaced by currencies with other names. Every one of those coins still contains exactly the gold it was struck with. The currencies were let go. The gold kept its job.

Our coin calculator knows the gold content of these and dozens of other coins, country by country, and will tell you what the metal in one is worth today.

So, why is gold valuable?

Because when you cross off everything that floats away, catches fire, kills you, rusts, turns green, can be mass-produced in a woodshed, can’t be found or can’t be melted, there is one square left on the table.

Empires have risen and fallen around that square. Currencies have been born, printed, reprinted and retired. Every few generations a new applicant turns up for the job, usually made of paper and a promise, and gets the corner office for a while. Square 79 has never once been asked to reapply.

Sources

• The periodic-table elimination, including the roughly 38 reactive elements: NPR Planet Money, “A Chemist Explains Why Gold Beat Out Lithium, Osmium, Einsteinium…”, February 15, 2011.
• The Washington Monument’s aluminum apex, its price and the 1886 smelting process: National Park Service, “The Point of the Matter”.
• Lead turned into gold at the Large Hadron Collider: ALICE Collaboration, CERN, May 8, 2025.
• 2025 technology demand and total demand: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, full year 2025.
• Melting points (gold 1,064°C, platinum 1,768°C), abundance in the Earth’s crust and the behavior of the noble gases, alkali metals, silver and aqua regia are standard chemistry reference values.

Figures read October 3, 2026. Added October 25, 2026, our own arithmetic: 5 grams ÷ 29 picograms ≈ 172 billion of CERN’s four-year runs, about 690 billion years, roughly 50 times the universe’s age of about 13.8 billion years.

Questions people actually ask

Why is gold valuable?

Gold is valuable because it is the one element that suits being money: it does not rust or tarnish, it is rare but not too rare, it is soft enough to coin and melts at a temperature ancient furnaces could reach, and nobody can manufacture more of it. Its price also rests on long-standing human agreement that it is worth holding.

Why was gold used as money instead of other metals?

Because the alternatives each fail a test. Gases escape, alkali metals react with water, radioactive elements decay, iron rusts, copper and aluminum are too common, osmium is too rare, platinum melts at about 1,768°C, beyond ancient furnaces, and silver tarnishes. Gold is the element left standing.

Why doesn't gold rust or tarnish?

Gold is a noble metal: it barely reacts with oxygen, water, sulfur or ordinary acids, so it does not rust, tarnish or corrode. Dissolving it takes aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids. That is why ancient gold objects come out of the ground looking much as they went in.

Why is gold more valuable than silver?

Gold is much rarer than silver and does not tarnish, while silver slowly blackens as it reacts with sulfur in the air. Silver also has large industrial uses, so it behaves partly like an industrial metal. Our gold-silver ratio tool shows how many ounces of silver one ounce of gold buys today.

Can scientists make gold?

Yes, but not usefully. In 2025 CERN's ALICE experiment reported that lead had been turned into about 86 billion gold nuclei in Large Hadron Collider runs between 2015 and 2018. They weighed a total of 29 picograms, trillions of times less than a piece of jewelry, and each lasted a tiny fraction of a second.

Is gold only valuable because people believe it is?

Partly. Only about 6.5% of gold demand in 2025 was for technology, according to the World Gold Council; the rest was jewelry, investment and central banks, which all depend on other people valuing it. Its chemistry explains why it was chosen as money, but not its price, and that price can fall a long way.

What is gold used for besides jewelry and investment?

Mostly electronics. Gold's resistance to corrosion and good conductivity make it useful for connectors and circuit boards. Technology accounted for 322.8 tonnes of gold demand in 2025, about 270 of it in electronics, according to the World Gold Council. Dentistry and other uses make up the rest.

What is gold's atomic number and symbol?

Gold is element 79 on the periodic table, and its chemical symbol is Au, from aurum, the Latin word for gold. It sits among the transition metals, beside platinum, with silver and copper above it in the same column.

Why was aluminum once more valuable than gold?

Aluminum was not more valuable than gold, but it was once a showpiece metal priced like silver: the 100-ounce aluminum cap placed on the Washington Monument in 1884 cost $1.10 an ounce, according to the National Park Service. In 1886 a cheap electrical smelting process was discovered, and aluminum became an everyday metal.

Why doesn't platinum get used as money like gold?

Platinum does not corrode, but it melts at about 1,768°C (roughly 3,200°F), far beyond what ancient furnaces could reach, so it could not be cast into coins. Gold melts at about 1,064°C, within reach of a charcoal fire. Platinum was also little known to most early civilizations.

Why is there aluminum on top of the Washington Monument?

When the monument was finished in December 1884, aluminum was a rare showpiece metal costing $1.10 an ounce, the same as silver, according to the National Park Service. The 100-ounce aluminum pyramid was cast by William Frishmuth of Philadelphia. In 1886 a cheap electrical method of making aluminum was discovered, and the metal soon became ordinary.