The Expanding Uses of Gold

Last week, Peter Schiff defended the intrinsic value of gold by briefly explaining how many uses it has beyond bullion investment. Many people have no idea how integral gold is to products they rely upon every day, not to mention exciting technologies of the future.

People who argue that gold is becoming less useful in the modern world simply don’t understand the basic fact that the applications of gold are expanding every year, not shrinking. Either that, or they expect the human race to abruptly curtail its exploration of space, stop making high-end electronics, and find a more stable element for use in medicine. On top of that, gold detractors must assume that the age-old association of gold with prestige, success, and wealth is going to suddenly vanish from the earth.

So what makes gold so valuable outside of its monetary value? Gold has remarkable properties that make it indispensable in all sorts of industries:

• Gold doesn’t corrode.
• Gold conducts electricity exceptionally well.
• Gold is very malleable and ductile, allowing it to be worked extremely thin and into complex contours.
• Gold catalyzes chemical reactions without being consumed.

Let’s review the wide world of gold applications that you may not have known existed…

Electronics

By far, the most vital current use of gold is in electronics. Because gold does not tarnish and is an excellent conductor, it is used in nearly every device that has electrical connections that cannot afford to fail. These include microprocessors found in computers, cell phones, automobiles, GPS units, and any other piece of technology used in a variety of conditions. The device you’re reading this on right now likely has about fifty cents worth of gold in it.

Medicine

Gold is used to treat some medical conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and lagophthalmos. It is even being developed for use in treatment of certain types of cancers.

More importantly, Gold’s inherent stability and unique optical properties make it essential to modern diagnostic testing. Nano-gold is used in diagnostic tests of malaria, HIV-AIDS, hepatitis, sleeping sickness, and syphilis in remote developing countries throughout the world. According to the World Gold Council:

Gold nanoparticles are at the heart of the hundreds of millions of Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) that are used globally every year. This well established, and critically important, technology has changed the face of disease diagnosis in the developing world over the last decade.

For example, malaria RDTs work by applying a single drop of blood to a test strip. Gold nanoparticles drive a colour change on the strip if malaria is present. The tests are simple, reliable and robust; they can be used anywhere in the world without the need for expensive equipment or complex supply chains.”

The World Gold Council has an excellent short video explaining how important these diagnostic tests are to health workers across the globe:

Dentistry, Lubricants, Green Energy, and More

Here are just a handful of the thousands of other applications of gold:

• Dentistry – Since gold is inert and very malleable, it has been used in dentistry for ages. Gold is one of the longest-lasting options for dental crowns, making its higher expense worthwhile. Gold’s use in dentistry has been growing.
• Glassmaking – Gold is used to reflect heat and radiation in expensive glass panelling on climate-controlled office buildings, as well as on the visors of astronaut’s helmets.
• Aerospace Lubricant – Gold is an essential mechanical lubricant for every spacecraft, thanks to its low shear strength. It can withstand intense solar radiation that traditional organic lubricants cannot.

• Green Technology – Gold is already used in catalytic converters to clean vehicle emissions, but it is also being used to improve the efficiency of solar cells and to create better fuel cell catalysts.
• Gilding and Gold Leaf – Gold is the most malleable of any metal, making it a beautiful corrosion-resistant covering for buildings.
• Invisibility Cloaks?! – Some recent experiments with nano gold by scientists in Australia have uncovered bizarre optical properties of a new material they call plasmene. Read more here.

Gold Is Hard to Replace

You can read a summary of all of gold’s applications in this thorough article from Geology.com, which makes a very important final point:

Gold is too expensive to use by chance. Instead it is used deliberately and only when less expensive substitutes can not be identified. As a result, once a use is found for gold it is rarely abandoned for another metal. This means that the number of uses for gold have been increasing over time.

Most of the ways that gold is used today have been developed only during the last two or three decades. This trend will likely continue. As our society requires more sophisticated and reliable materials our uses for gold will increase. This combination of growing demand, few substitutes and limited supply will cause the value and importance of gold to increase steadily over time. It is truly a metal of the future.”

Not only is gold unlikely to be replaced in many of the applications listed above, but it also isn’t recovered from these uses. You cannot recycle the gold in medical diagnostic tests, and very few efforts are made to reclaim the small amounts of gold used in the millions of cell phones and computers that are thrown out every year. That is gold that is essentially “lost” to the world, buried in a dump somewhere.

Don’t Forget Jewelry and Investment

Meanwhile, of course, gold remains essential in jewelry and investment. As Peter Schiff pointed out last week: do you really expect people to suddenly stop wanting jewelry made of gold? What precious, non-tarnishing material will they replace it with?

Of course, we strongly urge people to invest in gold for its number one use that has not gone out of fashion for thousands of years: as the original form of money. Gold is one of the best long-term stores of value in nearly every civilization on earth.

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