Reminds me of my favorite story from the Manhattan project: The project needed massive amounts of wire for all the equipment, but copper was in short supply for the war effort. They ended up working out a deal with the Treasury Department to use silver instead, since it was an even better conductor & apparently more available at the time. Part of the deal involved making sure not to lose any silver & IIRC they managed to not only return all the borrowed silver, they even found some extra to return by tearing up the floors in all the mints, warehouses & workshops, to incinerate & reclaim the precious metal, just like in the article!
Another fun Manhattan fact: They needed a code name for plutonium, so they called it "copper", but what was a poor scientist or engineer who needed to use actual copper to do? The official code name for copper was "Honest-to-God copper".
I am intrigued at how much thought went into "copper". Was the thinking that everyone's eyes would glaze over at such a common material? My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft.
Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.
My dad’s relative (uncle I think?) ran the team that fabricated the detonators for the bombs. They weren’t told what the purpose was when they built them. They found out what the purpose was when they were used.
> My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft
Worth noting (unless someone else already did) that the UK program that technically started before the Manhattan Project was called 'Tube Alloys'.
And almost all of that for bulk uses like shell casings and electrical wiring - vast supply chains which no competent enemy agent would waste time looking into.
If the Axis had been dropping 1000+ tons of bombs on American industry every day, then maybe that would have been rational.
Similar if the Axis had large-scale resistance forces operating in America, able to sustain at-scale acts of industrial sabotage.
But the Axis already knew that America had a huge copper industry. With no way to affect that industry, at scale - long lists of American copper mines, refining facilities, factories, etc. were no more valuable to the Axis than collections of apple pie recipes.
The bearing plants didn't have much of a long term impact if I recall...
The oil campaign OTOH, worked out well.
I'd guess actually going after stuff like wire/brass casing production, while it could have an impact, the 'ROI' is likely lower than more important logistics meta-targets (i.e. oil and gas production and transport infra/equip) and those are far easier to 're-boot-strap', one can theoretically draw copper wire from their garage with a reasonable base starting piece and draw jig/rig.
Also, like bearings, it's easier to 'surplus'. Surplus Oil sitting in a field or penetrable location? Obvious easy pickings. Stockpiled wire? I mean you could but frankly even if you burned/melted all the wires someone can just collect it and re-make wire. It's not like oil where the resource gets completely destroyed in the process.
There wasn't much of a Nazi spy presence in the US much less effective saboteur operations. One of the few people convicted for espionage had their conviction overturned because the information they passed was publicly available. The US was never under much direct threat, there were a smattering of attacks and raids on the West Coast but those didn't amount to much. Extreme distance was a better shield than any secrecy or military might, it's part of why the post war years were so good and continued for decades afterwards, the US was completely untouched and the rest of the (then) modern world was bombed to absolute smithereens.
Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...
There is a story to go with that story. The colonel responsible for the negotiations with the Treasury would later recall:
> He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied, "6000 tons."
> "How many troy ounces is that?" he asked. In fact, I did not know how to convert troy ounces to tons, and neither did he. A little impatient, I responded, "I don't know how many troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6000 tons - that is a definite quantity. What difference does it matter how we express the quantity?"
> He replied rather indignantly, "Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces."
To be perfectly fair, it was a little strange for the metric system to have a "ton" unit in the first place. Much like a foot or a cup, it's one of those units the metric system is trying to replace, but rather than use megagrams or something else perfectly sensible within the system they already created, they added to the confusion by defining yet another "ton" close enough to the historical units of the same name.
it's because "megagram" and "milligram" are a hassle. With the added bonus of mm/MM being used to abbreviate millions, I'm personally very grateful for tonnes.
>The SI comprises a coherent system of units of measurement starting with seven base units, which are the second (symbol s, the unit of time), metre (m, length), kilogram (kg, mass), ampere (A, electric current), kelvin (K, thermodynamic temperature), mole (mol, amount of substance), and candela (cd, luminous intensity).
It means if you are using SI units "The kilogram is defined by setting the Planck constant h to 6.62607015×10−34 J⋅s (J = kg⋅m2⋅s−2), given the definitions of the metre and the second."
and gram is some random word you made up, with no definition under SI.
The gram is indeed defined by SI to be 1/1000th of a kilogram, it's not a random word I made up.
There is no logical difference between the definition you gave, and an alternative definition that says "the gram is defined by setting the Planck constant h to 6.62607015×10−31 J⋅s (J = g⋅m2⋅s−2), given the definitions of the metre and the second", and then defining 1 kg = 1000 g. Which is why I'm asking what this distinction actually means, if anything.
It meant something that feels more real when the kilogram was defined as the mass of a physical reference kilogram object in a vault in Paris, but that changed a few years ago.
There's the metric tonne 1000kg, the US short ton 2000lbs and the US long ton 2240lbs(1016kg) also known as imperial ton. I started calling the metric tonne a megagram because I got tired of trying to figure out if it was short, long or metric I was dealing with
we also often encounter a "f*ck ton" or even a "metric f*ck ton". these are usually informal units related to the number of things (especially annoying things) rather than strictly weight.
Directly related to recapture of gold -- and related to the Manhattan Project by Farm Hall [0] too -- is the tale of German objector Max von Laue's Nobel Prize medal, which was dissolved during WWII and recast out of solution afterward [1]
I did my jewellery trade in Australia (hence the correct spelling for me). We used to keep all our emery paper, old polishing wheels etc and send them off ever few years to be burnt & refined.
When the building we were in got renovated some enterprising guys in another workshop ripped up their floor boards and their neighbouring empty suites and got all the precious metals out of the gaps between the floorboards.
The building was 11 stories and was predominantly filled with small jewellery workshops with 2-5 people per business. And a lot of adjacent businesses (trade supplies, stone merchants etc).
Wandering off topic here, but fans of Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) may remember Emil Minty as The Feral Kid. He only had a few other roles as a child actor, then went on to become a professional jeweler. According to one podcast, he was already fashioning necklaces out of the tabs from discarded cans on set. In the end, a far healthier career choice than many other child actors of the same era.
A friend of mine had an art studio at the Nicholas Building, and I got to speak with a jeweller who told me that he still did a lot of bespoke work in wedding rings, especially for tradies who would otherwise wear down store-bought rings because they were solid gold and therefore softer. I don't remember the details, but he specialised in harder alloys that are nevertheless mostly gold, and therefore "good as gold" for a wedding ring.
> In March, 2022 video creator Klesh, who sells the paydirt he recovers from various areas, ...
Person, who makes money off people believing they can find treasure, makes video about how easy it is to find treasure. "Oh btw you can buy these utils for 25$ in my store."
Media literacy says : trust level 2/10, most probably lies and marketing
Saw it in Karachi last year: a street containing exclusively gold workshops was blocked for traffic Sunday morning, guarded officially by the police, while the staff hired by the co-op swept every inch. Apparently this is a weekly routine.
I'm wondering how these gemstones even make their way on the street. Are jewelry workshops really so messy and flippant with this product that it presumably gets caught up on people and just falls off their clothes when they leave from work? Is it from crappy stone settings falling off immediately on leaving the stores? Seems so strange to me how such a valuable product ends up dispersed in the environment like this.
Some jewelers are dealing with things of great enough value that some gold dust or small stones doesn’t matter. Most jewelry value is not in the gold or gems, it’s in the eye of the beholder so to speak. So losing the actual ring is a much bigger loss than the gold/gem value. However, a guy on the street that isn’t dealing in six figure goods, places great value in that small gold amount.
Most people would be amazed at how little, when not in a shop under bright lights, jewelry is actually worth. Let’s just say they aren’t selling gold, they are selling emotions and hype. And many customers get extremely angry when they go to resell and find out how little it’s worth. You’ll be lucky to get a tenth of what you paid for the stones.
Source; my wife ran the biggest gold buying store in northern LA county for a few years.
I second this, jewelry has very little value on the 2nd hand market.
Gold, Silver etc have a daily published value, and you can expect a number close to that (allowing for margin). But "precious stones" are really not all that precious, or rare.
When selling (to a dealer) you discover the margins they make- often upwards of 90% (as my father discovered selling jewelry he inherited.) To be fair, crafting takes significant labor and most old jewelry has to be melted down and recrafted.
None of this negates the significance of one person giving another jewelry. That adds substantial sentimental value which is what makes them valuable at all.
(It does make me smile though when movies use uncut diamonds as some sort of compact currency...)
So, resale market on stones is trash. What is to stop an intrepid jeweler from purchasing grandma's/ex-spouse's/whatever's precious jewelry for 10 cents on the dollar, and reselling it back into circulation as "new"? Maybe with a perfunctory shaving off a face to make a "new" item. Or is this already regularly done (as I would assume)?
That's exactly the point. It's what they do do. If you take 2nd hand jewelry to a jeweler you get about 10 cents on the dollar.
Some gets resold as is (there's a (limited) market for vintage jewelry) but most is reworked. And of course that reworking takes significant time and skill.
I don't know if it's still a thing or not, but my grandpa was telling me you can get decent jewelry from pawn shops pretty cheap if you find out how often they sell stuff to metal buyers, because metal buyers only pay around the melt price regardless of what its made of, so if you offer anywhere close to that for rings and necklaces and such, they'll often sell them to you for that.
Fashion. I had my great grandmothers rings appraised for probate and got the "these are nice heirlooms, utterly worthless for resale though, the stones are just an okay clarity and the cut is very out of fashion these days. Keep them as nice rememberances." They must have said the same thing thousands of times.
Yes that is regularly done. The jewelry buyers take them out and sell them in lots for very low cost to just about anyone willing to pay, those buyers then recycle the stones into settings or back into stores. The buyers are buying on pure wholesale value, whereas the end jeweler is selling for sentimental value.
Right – if spot price per oz is $2,418.95 and say hypothetically I am sourcing it for $1700/oz there seems to be a reasonable amount of margin there if you can find a buyer for it.
Anyone offering a discount of over 2500 basis points to participate in what might be one of the most accessible markets across the world isn’t offering actual value, they’ve just found a good mark.
It is a global market, why in the day of the internet, would someone cut you a 30% margin? There might be some hassle crossing international borders, but gold is not generally illegal where there is an outsized risk in moving it.
The margins mentioned are about in line with most “gold buyers” that have store fronts. 70% of spot is a decent starting point for “salvage” gold.
If it’s in any form but rounds or bars, it’ll need to be melted down which has a cost. So it can be made into a form that can be resold closer to spot value.
The margin are actually even better if you melt them down. it’s really hard to buy physical gold at spot, single ounces/grams go for a few points higher.
Testing tools, and a lot of knowledge. Knowing what it is and where it’s made informs a lot. Once in a while you’ll get someone that is scamming and had stuff made with extra thick plating. Most pieces they will cut in half, grind a bit off, drill into it, etc. to do an acid test to determine gold content, then weigh it.
After a while she just kind of knew what to look out for. How people presented the goods, how they acted, etc.
The most shocking part to me, was how many 80s-90s celebs would bring in gold to sell. I guess times get rough.
I just posted an Ask HN. Would love to learn more about gold selling, in general, as I have a contact that is capable of sourcing me gold from Burkina Faso.
Unless you have a lot, you probably won’t get close to spot price. You might be able to find some local artisans that will pay better for small amounts then the big houses will. Gold in stamped form has the greatest value. Nuggets or mined gold, some buyers are afraid of and won’t pay until it’s melted.
They are just generally gross, a lot of them aren’t cleaned(which can also smell), apparently they explode when heated, it’s hard to gauge the purity and weight of the gold until you remove the tooth. Lots of issues.
> Are jewelry workshops really so messy and flippant with this product that it presumably gets caught up on people and just falls off their clothes when they leave from work?
Boots, not clothes. Diamonds are so sharp that they easily get lodged in rubber soles. And then fall out when you walk.
Most of these businesses in the district are tiny, family-owned businesses, so there's a huge amount of implicit trust there.
But also, these tiny stones really aren't worth much. What you're asking is like Home Depot making sure to account for every single nut & bolt so none are stolen or lost. It would cost far more in time & labor then what you'd get back in return.
And the small diamonds are still pretty cheap. He said about $100 per carat of small diamonds. It's not surprising that they're more casual with this inventory.
It's not such a valuable product. It only supports one low-paying full-time job, and who knows how long before the streets have been cleaned out of past accumulation.
> Over six days, he says, he collected enough gold for two sales totaling $819 on 47th Street.
I wonder how much precious metal such as gold and semiprecious metal such as gallium and indium essentially disappears forever in the thousands of tons of electronic waste every year. Does anyone know the percentages recovered/lost?
Right, some recovery does occur—gold from edge/contact connectors etc. but I'd venture it's only a small fraction of what is used annually. And what about LEDs and transistors? I wonder if anyone ever bothers to recover the gallium and indium from them or whether the amount used isn't worth the effort.
There's discussion about mining landfills to recover these kinds of materials. When you rememeber we had to dig it all out of the ground, taking it from a dump seems pretty convenient!
It mostly ends up in landfill. At some point we may be resource poor, and but energy rich and we'll use Plasma mass separation to separate each element out and reuse the valuable ones. Until then it's safely stored there.
No doubt most valuable elements do end up in landfill and most will ultimately be recovered, but we still need to have a good handle of what's actually lost or doesn't make it there, and or how much leaches out before recovery. (Here we don't seem to have decent figures, if anyone knows of any authoritative references please post them.)
Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).
Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.
That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.
For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).
No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.
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† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.
I watch this channel a lot. He has a few where he is refining electronic waste. He usually says that is not really worth it due to the time it takes him to do it and small amounts he gets and can get easily lost in the different stages of extraction. Most of the stuff he does is estate sales and melting down that.
I love this guy's channel! It's interesting, unpretentious, and he has such a wealth of chemical and metallurgical knowledge. The reactions and processes he shows are amazing.
> 10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day.
It would be about $2.75 per day, an insignificant amount, but it's much worse than that because you earn it all at once at the end of the ten-year period. So you're making (almost) $2.75 a day toward the end of the period, and a lot less than that toward the beginning.
Really though, it's more a sort of diligence bonus on top of the regular earnings he makes from his teeth manufacturing business. Looked at that way, it's pretty impressive quickly obtain an otherwise lost 10-15K per decade as opposed to just losing money on carpet removal once a decade. And all of it for, what? a few hours of work?
Yeah, it's partly a tradeoff for convenience. The carpet helps capture dust which makes everything more breathable in the lab as well. I'm sure bigger labs have more sophisticated facilities, but he's just one guy in his attic.
Carpet is probably the best thing for it, since the dust will work its way down in and stay there instead of sticking to your shoes and winding up all over the city.
Because the work is remarkably intricate. It requires you to get real close and personal with the work, usually with magnification. It requires complete and unimpeded dexterity of your fingers, so bulky gloves are absolutely not an option.
Depending on the work, it may also require frequent trips to the hearth for torch work. You really don't want to use an oxy/propane torch in a sealed glovebox.
In short, it's too much hassle and makes the work more difficult and much slower.
More modern jewelry manufacturers are moving towards this. There are laser welders with glove boxes and microscopes that are auto shielding, also cnc milling machines in completely enclosed environments where the lubricants that are sprayed on the milling ends are filtered for metal.
I was a jeweler for a couple years and the common practice was to have carpet and a sticky trap at the door. The carpet was torn up every few years and used to throw a company vacation.
They work with sulphuric acid, oxy/acetylene/propane torches.
Some processes give off cyanide fumes.
Ultrasonic baths with ammonia based solutions to clean polishing compounds off etc.
You need outside air ventilation.
There is lots of mechanical suction for things like polishing to capture the waste material for post processing.
Most will wear a leather apron for heat / burn protection and capturing fine dust/dirt from polishing compounds. I suppose you could destroy that eventually in a giant smelter.
> Hockley Mint has also upgraded its windows so that blinds are now encased between panes of glass — their fabric panels were a magnet for precious metal dust — and it also has an on-site laundry to process workers’ clothes.
Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!
Piece of advice I’ve given people having jewellery resized for years, is if you are having something resized down then the jeweller should be paying you. A surprising number of people forget the majority of most jewellery value is the raw material.
A surprising number of people forget the majority of most jewellery value is the raw material.
Scrap value, yes, purchase price, no :)
The quick sanity test is to ask why big name jewelers can sell the same style ring at all sizes for the same price, despite perhaps 25% difference in mass. The majority of the retail sales price is not the precious metal value.
I found it interesting that CNC machines aimed at precious metal processing have an optional access control system for swarf/dust collection bins- presumably so that the technicians operating the machine don't steal the "waste" material.
My colleague told me a story just last week about his father's old job at Kodak working in silver reclamation. Same story as this article, they chuck everything into the furnace. They go so far as to filter the wastewater from employee showers.
Baird & Co. do the same: "“At the end of the year all of the filters are collected together and burned,” Baird says. “Everything is ‘deep cleaned’ and burned, all of the filters and all of the doormats both inside the refinery and throughout the office.” Last year the company retrieved £15,000 worth of gold from the deep clean."
That's what they're charging to collect it at the end, not necessarily what the actual value is, although the value is low enough that they just collect all their scraps once or twice a year and sell them in a lot instead of messing with each individual piece per client otherwise.
I'll pay you $5 for gold teeth and make a tidy profit. This article from 2019[1] said $40-92 per crown. Multiply by 1.6 based on the way gold has appreciated since 2019[2] and that's $65-147 or so per tooth.
But you also have the cost of man hours, marketing that you buy gold, finding a smelter that will take teeth, or do it yourself. That’s not all profit, plus you don’t know the gold weight until you remove it from the tooth. Which is risk. Plus it’s possibly a biohazard.
These people buy millions per day in gold, I’m sure if it was profitable they wouldn’t turn it away.
You can try it though, go to all the gold stores in your area and tell them you’ll buy all the teeth they bring in.
More and more graveyards are being fenced off and secured for this reason sadly. Plus generations ago some opted to be buried with their wedding rings and such. I know some smaller family ones in my area of central Washington have been robbed.
There was a story about the diamond district in New York City:
A homeless man would go and brush the sidewalks at night. The story is that there was so much gold and diamond dust on the clothes of the people working in that area that it would fall off of their clothes and accumulate on the sidewalks.
Generally Gold (aurium) is not bioreactive, it's hardly reactive at all hence it's lustre in the wild since it doesn't tarnish or bond easily. Goldschlager has gold flake in it for human consumption. It's generally considered safe to consume for this reason. The quantity to make an LD50 of inhaled gold would be considerable I imagine, but have no data.
In the north east, in spring, we’d use magnets to collect iron filings in the street from the snow plows. It was just a thing we’d do, no financial interest. We’d keep our haul in 35mm film canisters (as was the style at the time!)
