13- Elements as Money
Elements and money have always been intermingled, especially metallic elements. From Midas, who turned everything he touched into "gold", which was really just gold-hued brass that shined brighter than the Greeks' bronzes and so grew into myths of magic, to the Irish Patrick Hannan who was tricked into starting the fool's fool's gold rush in 1893 only to discover that the miners were discarding the actually valuable tellurium which is one of the very few elements that combines with gold. The miners soon tore apart the town they had built to get at the telluride-infused bricks. In 540 BC was the creation of a real currency system by the Lydian king Croesus who separated electrum into silver and gold coins. But a real currency system brings those who want to create their own money through counterfeiting. Isaac Newton even played a role in bringing in the wrongdoers in the 1600s. After that came paper currency with a whole new level of counterfeiting. The government needed to rival it so they used europium dyes which can emit fluorescent colors but with a receiver that absorbs the light causing europium electrons to stir and jump to higher energy levels emitting the light but dampened. This allows officials to pick out the real money under certain lights thus combatting the counterfeiters. Metals markets are always some of the most stable and long term sources of wealth. In 1886 Charles Hall discovered a way to separate aluminium (the most valuable substance at that time) from oxygen by running an electrical current through a liquid with dissolved aluminium which no one previously had figured out to do. He created an aluminum empire and made millions on the metal we use so commonly today.
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