It was in 1848, that James W. Marshall first found traces of gold in the water of the American River while building a sawmill for Captain John Sutter. He bit the metal and tested it in many ways and confirmed that it was indeed gold. He tried to keep it a secret, but word spread quickly, triggering the California Gold Rush of 1849.

It is hard to believe, but gold is a very rare substance consisting of only five ten-millionths of the Earth’s outer layer. Gold is a metal, a good conductor of heat and electricity, and is solid at room temperature. It is a malleable and ductile element, making it very useful for use in jewelry and electronics. As gold is soft, it is also used for filling cavities in teeth and as gold teeth. It is beaten into sheets less than one-tenth of a millimeter thick for use in lettering on honor rolls in school or for putting gold in picture frames and ornaments. Comparing its weight with water, it is over nineteen times heavier than water and twice as heavy as lead. Gold is a metal that doesn’t tarnish or corrode and is found in nature as pure gold; there is no need for smelting or refining gold from its ore for its usage.

As gold is very reflective, it is used to protect spacecraft and satellites from solar radiation and in industrial and medical lasers for focusing light energy. The purity of gold is measured using the term carat, which is based on a total of twenty-four parts. Pure gold is known as twenty-four-carat gold, while eighteen-carat gold has eighteen parts gold, and the other six parts are of another metal like silver and copper.

Gold is bought and sold practically every day in the world in the form of gold bars, gold coins, and gold jewelry. The gold price is fluctuates greatly and changes according to the demands of the buyers. The gold price is always listed with different prices on the newspaper, as different markets of the world have different prices.