Why we go for gold

After taking James Bond hostage, Auric Goldfinger does what all Bond villains do when in a position of power — he spills the beans. ‘Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love,’ he tells him. ‘I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness… I ask you, is there any other substance that so rewards its owner?’

You don’t have to be a criminal mastermind to understand what Goldfinger means. The hunger for gold is ancient and shows no signs of abating. The metal’s enduring value is dictated above all by scarcity: it makes up just one 500,000,000th of the Earth’s crust. We could fit all the gold ever mined into a cube with sides of only 22 metres.

Gold was created billions of years ago by nuclear explosions inside or between stars. Some deposits have loitered at the Earth’s core since its formation; others were smashed into the planet’s surface by asteroids. It ended up buried beneath mountains, hidden under seas and scattered along waterways around the world. By current estimates, about 50,000 tonnes (worth more than £2 billion) is yet to be found.

Almost twice as dense as lead, a standard bar of gold weighs about 12kg. Gold, though heavy, is miraculously agile. An ounce of it can be drawn into a wire five miles long, or beaten into a sheet a hundred times thinner than paper. Unlike most materials, it doesn’t corrode, rust or disintegrate. This makes it endlessly recyclable: it’s not impossible that you’re wearing gold which once belonged to King Solomon or Cleopatra.

Many ancient societies believed the metal was divine. The Egyptians called it ‘the flesh of the gods’ and the Inca called it the ‘sweat’ or ‘tears’ of the sun.