When madmen go mad

A man’s wife commits suicide and he then goes on to marry a young, attractive but incompatible woman who drives him into the ground both mentally and financially. Add to this the outcome of a failing World War I effort and you might get the beginnings of a man who’s losing his marbles.

Which is great news for science, because it might be that only people who are on their way to becoming a fully fledged Bedlamite are daring/insane enough to try and probe further into some of the most far fetched theories.

To illustrate this, we can discuss the commonly accepted science that oceans are made up not just of plain H2O water, but also include a vast array of other materials such as diluted salts, minerals and metal elements.

“Metal elements?” you say? “Gold is a metal element isn’t it?”

Yes indeed it is. An unverified source reads that the world’s oceans contain about six milligrams of gold per tonne of water. Which appears, on the surface, to be quite believable. Given the vast amount of water in the world’s oceans it would seem that six milligrams of gold per tonne of water equates to infinite wealth to anyone who can master a method to filter this gold out.

However, only a person of most unsound mind or driven by extreme greed (i.e. the desire to quickly pay off Germany’s World War I debts to the sum of 132 million gold Deutschmarks) would attempt such a gigantic and risk laden task.

Enter Fritz Haber. The renowned chemist who’d so far, via synthesis of fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere, saved the world from starvation (and later fueled Germany’s war efforts.) After his earlier successes, poor old Fritz seemed to have lost his mind and believed it would be magnificent if he could somehow use a chemical, or electrochemical, method to achieve this lofty goal to bring unfathomed amounts of gold back to Germany.

Good news for Fritz: there was actually a technique in existence for this which was known by Babylonians as ‘cupellation.’ In cupellation, lead sulfide is used to precipitate the gold from the water, and the resulting mix of lead and gold can be purified by burning off the lead.

Fantastic. One would think. Until it is tried on a sizable scale. Fritz and his team took to the seas to try exactly this. After five years of failures, Fritz finally gave up in 1927 and concluded that 1) after five years, he had still not managed to make the plan feasible and 2) the data where he got the original idea from was most likely to be incorrect.

Unfortunately, he did not even bother to publish most of the data he collected during the time. I guess the world could sure do with some new data to carry on this lofty challenge. Much respect to Fritz Haber too. We might be needing a new such thinker very soon (to be covered in later blog posts).

The madness: Believing that something exists without solid proof?

The act: Spending millions of somebody else’s dollars to try and prove it.

The legacy: It is still unproven as to whether this problem can be solved. In theory it can. What do you think?

Is anyone crazy enough to continue? The challenge is there folks. Just remember your economics teachings when you are rapidly bringing more gold into the world.

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