Precious metals, including gold, silver, and platinum, are valued for their scarcity as well as for their unique properties, such as luster, non-reactivity, and malleability. Because of their desirable qualities, these precious metals have been mined for thousands of years. Today, they are most commonly used in jewelry, as coinage, in works of art, or purely for investment purposes.
Since gold does not tarnish or form alloys readily, it was one of the first metals to be discovered and recognized. It has been used as decoration and currency for more than 8,000 years, when the Egyptians discovered it in exposed veins with quartz. Today, however, gold is usually mined as an ore, a combination of many minerals that include small amounts of gold. Because gold is so valuable, mining companies can process ore with as little as 0.015 ounces of gold per ton of rock and still make a profit.
Gold ore is extracted from underground mines and from open-pit mines. The gold is leached from the ore with a dilute cyanide solution and passed through activated carbon, which selectively absorbs the gold. It is often refined through electrolysis, which separates impurities by passing an electric charge through the gold ions.
Like gold, silver is often found in conjunction with other metals. Today, most of the world’s silver is produced as a by-product when refining other metals, including gold, copper, and lead. But since modern methods for separating silver from other metals were not available to ancient civilizations, silver was probably first mined in its natural condition. There is evidence that native silver was mined in ancient Greece and used as currency.
Although gold and silver have always been deemed valuable, platinum, an exceedingly rare metal was not always seen as precious. Platinum was first discovered in the 16th century in the country of Columbia, which was then part of the Spanish Empire. The Spanish viewed this metal as a nuisance since it was associated with gold, and it made gold difficult to recover. The name of this metal is derived from the Spanish word for silver, plata, because of its close resemblance to silver.
Native platinum is a mixture of six metals: platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium. Like the other metals, platinum ore is recovered from both open-pit and underground mines. After the ore is blasted out of the ground, it is crushed and mixed with water, then pumped through air to form a “froth flotation.” Platinum group metals adhere to the bubbles and are selectively removed and then further refined.
Gold and silver are units of measure of value, are a storehouse of value, and are a ways and means of developing a valuable designation of goods and services within the biblical economic system first established by man on this earth. These metals remain so today. The market price of gold and silver are directly effected by the movement of the inflation rate in our modern world economy. As the spending value of our American dollars rises and/or falls, the inflation rate moves either up or down in direct proportion to the change in spending power of our U.S. dollar. As the spending power or value of the dollar falls, the price of gold or silver rises.
As far as investments are concerned, precious metals, particularly gold or silver, are a storehouse of value because their value always keeps their spending power at bay with the inflation rates. Seventy years ago gold was worth approximately $50 per ounce and that amount of money would purchase one very fine men’s suit of clothes. Today with skyrocketing taxes, interest, inflation, and rising labor and raw materials costs, one ounce of gold is worth approximately $1,300 ($4200 in 2026). And that amount of money will still purchase one very fine men’s suit of clothes. Therefore proving without question that the value of gold itself has not changed, but its relative purchasing power has many fold increased.
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