The Tide of Gold

Gold from the ocean? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the basic idea behind the accumulation of oceanic gold and the fascinating historical hoax based on the notion. Plus, where does gold come from and how will deep sea gold mining endanger thermal vent ecosystems? Find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
On a train coming from Washington. The worthy Minister had
reposed himself in his birth when in a burst of light,
the Lord appeared to him and gave into his keeping
the secret of how gold could be taken from the sea.
Mr Joern, again having the mystery direct from heaven, was
not one to flaunt it in the faces of the
uninspired scientists, but kept it locked in his own heart,

(00:35):
as all such revelations should be welcome to stot to
Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey are

(00:56):
you welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind? My name
is Robert Lamb and time Joe McCormick. And that opening
reading was from the Hartford Current, from an article from
January seventeenth, ninety six called Dredging Gold from Seawater. And
I'm really excited about this episode. We're gonna be talking
about a great, a fantastic historical gold swindle. But before
we get into the historical details, I've got a question

(01:19):
that I want to think about. This might frame our
consideration of this historical episode. Uh. You know how sometimes
you see people passing around an article online about some
apparently miraculous new technology that really sounds too good to
be true. For example, the one that easily comes to
my mind is the various proposed reactionless drives that would

(01:41):
somehow supposedly move a spacecraft without any propellant or exhaust,
apparently in violation of the law of conservation of momentum. Now,
whenever one of these things makes the rounds, I see
exasperated skeptics responding with, you know, the standard line, if
something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Now.

(02:01):
Of course, I totally agree with their skepticism about these
particular technologies, reactionless drives and so forth, But I want
to ask it like step back and ask a broader question,
which is, how do you actually know when something is
too good to be true? If if previously unexplored frontiers
of science are involved in the case of something like

(02:21):
a reactionless drive, actual physicists and aerospace engineers and people
like that are probably in a good position to swap
the idea down based on years of familiarity with that
particular problem space and the solutions available within it um.
And of course you know their their knowledge of the
general laws of physics and trying to push against those
laws throughout a career. But if you're just a regular

(02:44):
person without any particular expertise, and somebody comes to you
with a claim about some you know, some new technological capability.
How do you know when it's too good to be true,
especially when the mechanisms that supposedly make possible lie underneath
the shroud of sub microscopic chemistry or like invisible fields

(03:06):
and forces in physics. I mean, the short answer would
be like why, or the counter question would be why
are you coming to me with this? You know, if
of the you know, if you have some sort of
zero gravity um uh technique or you know, whatever the
thing happens to be um Like, why why are you

(03:28):
coming to me about it? Why are you trying to
sell me a product that has to do with it
instead of capitalizing on it yourself. Yeah. I think that's
a very good point about noticing when these these types
of technologies or claims are either being sold to you.
I mean, there's definitely a red flag if somebody's like
trying to get your money or trying to get an investment.

(03:50):
It's another thing if there if you're just being told
about them and sort of asked to buy in intellectually.
But even then there is something that there is an
important different between somebody who takes a claim directly to
say the popular press on the internet versus hashing it
out in in say journals, where experts would be the
people arguing about it. Yeah, um, I guess a lot

(04:13):
of times it implies that there is a lack of
expertise involved, that this is not a like someone who
is a professional in their field and there they're claiming
to have solved a professional level problem. Um. I think.
I think zero gravity, if I remember correctly, is one
of these that you see where a lot of amateur,
um individuals, I think they have they have solved it,

(04:36):
and they end up making like the same mistakes that
other people have made in the past, or mistake the
you know, the same phenomena as as zero gravity, and
they'll then submit it to NASA. I think, sorry, do
you mean like anti gravity? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah,
like a like a zero G anti gravity type of technology.

(04:57):
I'm not as familiar with those, but yeah, that seems
like that would obviously fit right in with the kind
of thing I'm thinking about. But like, you can understand
how the average person could be easily confused here when
thinking about the cutting edge of of technology, and uh,
you know, especially dealing with microscopic or sub microscopic realms,
because you can make a list of plenty of examples

(05:18):
of real technology that rely on principles of physics and
chemistry and biology that are invisible to everyday life, but
once they were discovered, they unlocked vast and what really
would be almost magical seeming power and wealth when they
were first harnessed. You know, you you can think of
examples like nuclear power, microprocessors, antibiotics, and to a person

(05:40):
who didn't understand the underlying science and couldn't see why
it is that these things worked, all of these ideas
might have sounded too good to be true. And I
think it's this kind of ambiguity that makes the story
we're going to talk about today especially interesting, because today
I want to start off by talking about a fascinating
historical hoax and swindle that took place in New England

(06:04):
near the turn of the twentieth century. Now, Robert, I know, um,
you spent part of your life in Eastern Canada, didn't you.
Did you ever live? Was it in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia?
It was, well, it was Newfoundland, Oh, Newfoundland. Sorry, I
said that wrong. No, no, you you said you said
it the same way that that people who um who
are not of Newfoundland have never lived there often referred

(06:27):
to it Newfoundland but not in Newfoundland. Yeah, but yeah, yeah,
I lived there as a child for a few years. Well,
it's up towards that part of the continent that we're
going to travel. So if you if you look at
a map and you try to find the easternmost settlement
on the United States mainland, what you'll have to do
is you'll follow the east coast up the edge of

(06:49):
Maine to a point of the US border with Canada.
And this part of Maine is just across a body
of water called the Bay of Fundy, and it's across
the Bay of Fundy from Nova Scotia. Uh So, the
easternmost human settlement before you hit Canada is a little
coastal town called Lubeck that's spelled lub e C. And

(07:11):
today Lubec has a population of something like twelve hundred
people or so. It's between twelve hundred and hundred last
count I saw, and historically it's it's been kind of
a fishing town. It got much of its livelihood from
the sea pulling in fish, clams and lobster, stuff like that.
But the ocean around Lubec and the Bay of Funding
generally is unusual. I was reading from a article by

(07:35):
Joyce kryshak in Uh in a magazine about Maine called
Down East, and she's writing about the the the ocean
in this area. She writes, quote, it's the roiling tide,
the heartbeat of the ocean which pounds harder here that
makes Lubec feel at once isolated and enchanted in a
tangle of islands, channels and ragged bays. The incoming tide

(07:57):
clashes against a submerged mountain and the outflow of the St.
Croix River. It's that's spelled like c r O I X.
I don't know if that's croy or crawl locally, But
she goes on creating chaotic currents, fevered swells, and unusual
phenomena like whirlpools and water spouts. Uh. And so part
of what makes the sea around the back so unusual

(08:20):
is that the whole Bay of Fundy has an enormous
tidal range. Now, the Bay of Fundy is again this
large body of water between mainland New Brunswick and Nova Scotia,
and it has some of the greatest title variation of
anywhere in the world. There places deeper towards the head
of the bay where the difference between high tide and

(08:41):
low tide is close to sixteen meters or more than
fifty feet, which is just unbelievable, and especially if you
look up pictures of this, it's astonishing to see, like
when the sea retreats, how much land is revealed. But anyway,
I was wondering what causes this huge tidle variation, and
I was reading about it in a short article by

(09:01):
a project called Exploring Our Fluid Earth, which is hosted
by the University of Hawaii website, and they give a
couple of reasons for this huge tidal range. The first
is geography, so they say that the bay, you know,
they point out that the bay is sort of V shaped,
with the wide part of the mouth and the narrow
part of the head, and this means as the tide

(09:22):
flows into the bay from the mouth toward the head,
it gets more and more compressed as it goes. So
try to imagine a wave of water flowing into a
trough that gets narrower and narrower along its length, where
would the compressed water go well as to go vertical
as to go up. But the second reason for the
title range is that because of the shape of the bay,

(09:43):
that the water in the bay forms a standing wave.
And the short version of the way this works is
that there are there are two different frequencies controlling the
waves in the bay. One is the bay's natural resonant frequency,
which is the period across which the water tends to
slash back and forth within the bay itself, and then
the other is the broader tidal frequency, which is the

(10:04):
period across which the ocean at large retreats and advances
uh against the shore and then the bay of funding.
These periods are almost exactly the same length, about twelve
and a half hours, so they pile on one another
to make these massive differences between high and low tide. Again,
maybe around six meters or twenty ft near the mouth

(10:25):
of the bay and up to around sixteen meters or
more than fifty feet near the head. All of this
to say, I think it's the kind of place where
if you were a visitor there, you might imagine that
someone could work miracles from the sea. There's there's a
strong kind of deep ones energy. Yeah, we're talking it
just really violent seas at times. And uh and and

(10:45):
certainly yeah, you look at these pictures of the tide
differential and it's it's staggering. It looks almost if you
didn't know what you're looking at, you would think it, um,
you know, there's something apocalyptic has occurred here. Yeah. Uh yeah.
They're like great photos of say a marina with docks
and boats, and then that that at high tide the
boats will be afloat. But then when the c retreats,

(11:05):
all the boats are just sort of sitting in the sediment.
But anyway, so to the town of Lubeck, into this
strange land of lobsters and other worldly tides. In the
year of eighteen ninety seven there came a couple of
business partners with a really interesting geological scam for the ages.
Their claim was they were going to turn the ocean

(11:28):
into gold. Now I want to mention a book here
because this was one of my major sources. It's a
book edited by a scholar named Ronald Pescha, called The
Great Gold Swindle of Lubeck, Maine from Arcadia Publishing. Most
of the text of this book is actually a series
of articles written by a journalist or a local writer
from Lubeck named Kerry C. Bangs for the Lubeck Herald

(11:51):
between nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty one, and then
these articles were edited and supplemented by Ronald pescha Um. Unfortunately,
as this book makes clear, a lot of the history
here is laced through with conflicting accounts from different sources.
A lot of the original local reporting from the Lubec
Herald in the eighteen nineties is lost, and so it's

(12:14):
only known through Bangs secondary retelling in the nineteen forties.
So this is a story where not all of the
details are are solidly established and agreed upon. But we'll
do our best, I think to to keep to the
likeliest broad strokes. So these two guys who arrived in
Lubec in eight They were Charles Fisher, who was a
native of Martha's Vineyard who had previously been a floor

(12:36):
walker in a Brooklyn department store. And the other was
Reverend Prescott Ford Journe, again also originally from Martha's Vineyard,
but he became a Baptist minister. He was educated at
Brown University and he had preached at churches from New
England to Florida, and he was reportedly given to somewhat
utopian thinking, especially after reading Edward Bellamy's influential utopian novel

(13:00):
Looking Backward, Robert for you, I've included a picture of
Journey in here. I was trying to think for a
while what he looks like, and I realized, to me,
he looks like the brother in Napoleon Dynamite. Do you
remember Kip? Oh, yeah, I do. I have to to say,
when I looked at him, my guy kind of a
William Sanderson vibe, you know, Oh yeah, I can see that,

(13:22):
or at least he looks like that would be my
first casting choice. If I could pick, you know, any
actor from any any era and sort of they can
choose what age they they are in the casting, I'd
probably go with William Sanderson. So he got a little
bit of a JF. Sebastian kind of thing going on. Yeah,
from Blade Runner, probably his most famous role, but he
he's been a ton of things. He was in Deadwood,
he was in True Blood, but older listeners may also

(13:45):
remember him from New Heart, the old sitcom which he
was one of the trio Larry Darrell and Darrell right, Yes,
flanked by his brother Darrell and his other brothers Darrell. Yes.
So these two newcomers to Luke back Journe again and Fisher.
They least an old gristmill in North Lubec that, in
its days of grinding grain had been powered by the tide.

(14:07):
And I got into this. I didn't really know anything
about it beforehand, but tidal mills themselves are pretty interesting subject.
They essentially work on the principle of water wheel, except
instead of using natural continuous water flow like in a
river or creek to power the wheel, they accumulate water
into a controlled pond or reservoir during high tide and

(14:29):
then release that water through a gate to drive the wheel.
Well that's interesting, Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But so
so this mill in North Lubec used to be used
to grind grain, and they took it over and it
would become the first plant of what Journagin and Fisher
would call the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. Uh. Now, the

(14:50):
purchase of this property in Lubec was not the beginning
of the scam. Jernagin and Fisher had already scammed some
investors by staging Demons stations for a number of potential
investors further south in New England, and the basic scenario
for these demonstrations went like this. The Reverend Journegan would
invite the investors to gather on a dock or a

(15:12):
seaside shed to watch as he prepared this device that
he was calling the accumulator, and it was some kind
of box into which mercury and sometimes other chemicals were inserted.
I've read it described in some places as lead lined,
in other places as zinc lined, but apparently you had
to put mercury into it. And in order to to

(15:35):
assure his investors, he allowed them to supply their own chemicals.
So it's like a bring your own mercury party. So
they show up with the quicksilver, put it into the box,
and then he would apparently apply an electrical current to
the box via a battery and then lower it down
into the sea, where at least what he claimed was
that the seawater could sluice in and that something about

(15:56):
the way this box worked would accumulate old content from
the sea water itself. It would be extracted by the mercury,
and then I believe the idea was that it would
form an amalgam with the mercury, and then the box
would be retrieved some hours later, maybe in the morning
or something, and voila, there was actually gold inside. And

(16:17):
so some of these early investors they were astonished and
they were like, Okay, I'm convinced. Take my money, you know,
I want to stake in your company now. Before we
pursued the hoax any further and talk about how it worked,
I think it would be worth asking the question where
on Earth did the underlying scientific premise here come from?
Where where did he get this idea of extracting gold

(16:39):
from sea water? Well, it turns out that this actually
wasn't without scientific precedent, and maybe we should take a
quick break and then when we come back we can
talk about the idea of of gold and solution throughout
the oceans. Thank alright, we're back. We're talking about the
claim that one can simply turned to seawater, collected, accumulated,

(17:03):
and produced gold. Right now, we're focused in this episode
on on a hoax and swindle in in New England history,
but there is actually some scientific basis to the idea
that gold could be extracted from seawater and for a
quick history of the awareness of this fact, the idea
that gold and other precious metals could at least potentially
be extracted from the ocean. I found a good overview

(17:24):
in a paper by a historian named Brett JA. Stubbs,
published in the journal Australasian Historical Archaeology in two thousand eight,
and the paper is called Delightfully Sunbeams from Cucumbers an
early twentieth century gold from seawater extraction scheme in northern
New South Wales. So Stubbs is primarily covering a different

(17:45):
gold from the ocean plot that took place in Australia
in the early nineteen hundreds, but it's introductory section has
a lot of good stuff here, and the title actually
comes that the sunbeams from cucumbers comes from a passage
in the paper where Stubbs mentioned the there was a
judge named Justice Darling. I think he's referring to Baron
Charles Darling of England, who at one point compare the

(18:07):
quest to extract gold from seawater to a scheme and
Guiliver's Travels, where a character spends eight years developing a
process to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Now I can only
assume that the part of the idea with getting gold
out of saltwater probably stems from the reality of panning
gold from mountain streams. Um. Again getting into the idea

(18:30):
that perhaps if if you're not super aware of how
that process is working, you might well extrapol a well,
if there's you can get gold out of a stream,
then look how much ocean there is, there's got to
be even more gold in there. Um. But that doesn't
hold up when you really look at how panning for
gold works. And um, and I feel like a lot
of a lot of movies and TV, you know, you'll

(18:51):
have panning for Gold and it's not really you don't
really get a good sense of what's going on. H
But I did find that the Cohen Brothers in the
film The Ballot of Buster Scrugs, the sequence about the
goal about the prospector titled All Gold Canyon, was actually
pretty informative. You know. It does a nice overview of
just how it basically works. You've seen this, right, Joe

(19:13):
Is where Tom Waits plays the prospector. I have to
admit I actually haven't finished the movie yet. I started
watching it one day, and I loved it. But it's
it's one of those happens all too often now in
my life where I start a movie that I like
and I don't finish it, not for any reason of disinterest. Well,
I encourage you to press on, certainly for this this
this particular segment. Uh, it's an anthology film for anyone

(19:36):
who's not familiar with that takes place in the Old West.
So in this one, we meet a gold prospector and
he's out there panning for gold and uh and basically, uh,
you know, I'm not gonna spoil any of the plot,
but it does a pretty good job of showing you
that the planning is generally not a lucrative enterprise in
and of itself, but it's a way to search for
gold deposits in nearby rock that that can be mined.

(19:58):
So you find some some gold us showing up in
this mountain stream, well then you can use that to
try and figure out where in this mountainous area you
might find a proper vein of gold that you can
then dig for. But you know, that's one thing, But
what would the oceanic version of this b right, I mean,
the fluid dynamics of the situation are far more complicated.

(20:18):
The sea itself is far vaster. Um. It's you know,
when you start looking at the facts involved, Uh, there's
far from a one to one here, right, And so
the idea of extracting gold from seawater is actually based
in more of like the misconception version of of panning
for gold, where you're not looking for a vein of

(20:40):
gold to exploit, but you are trying to take advantage
of the fact that there is actually gold in the
water itself. It's dissolved in there. There's these little tiny
molecules of gold throughout the oceans. Um. So, going back
to Brett JA. Stubbs paper, beginning in the second half
of the nineteenth century, there were a number of can
mists and geologists that started to speculate about this. They

(21:02):
started to say, you know what, I think that you
probably can extract precious metals of all kinds from the sea.
One early example is in the year eighteen sixty six,
in a speech to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, the American chemist Henry Wortz suggested that all
of the water in the world's oceans quote may contain

(21:24):
more than two hundred and fifty million times more gold
than the total present wealth of mankind in this metal.
And this was, in Stubbs words, despite its presence in
concentrations that were so small as to be back to words, quote,
beyond the limits of our present modes of chemical detection,
so words couldn't find it yet, but just reasoned, based

(21:46):
on some other principles of geology and chemistry, that there's
probably a huge amount of precious metal just existing in
solution throughout the ocean. And Stubbs claims that the first
attempts to actually measure the concentration of gold and see
water we're probably carried out by the English chemist Edwards Sanstat,
who was known for developing techniques in the eighteen sixties

(22:08):
for the production of purified magnesium. But Stubbs writes, quote
Sanstat experimented with samples of seawater from the coast of
the Isle of Man and concluded that they contained gold,
but in a proportion certainly less than one grain in
the ton, and a grain here is is a unit
of measure that is equivalent to about sixty five milligrams,

(22:30):
so there's not a lot of it in there. Continuing
with Stubbs, he went as far as to suggest, however,
that one of his methods might be practically applied to
the exploitation of the golden seawater, which might be received
at high water in large tanks and emptied at low water.
Sanstat emphasized in eighteen ninety two that the amount of

(22:50):
golden sea water was quote far less than one grain
per ton. But basically he's proposing that, well, it might
be possible to have some sort of like passive system
in place that would gradually extract this low quantity of
gold from the ocean, right, I mean there's a paradox involved, right,
So there there were other researchers that soon agreed with Sanstad,

(23:13):
and they emphasized this paradox. In eighteen ninety four, there
was a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney
named Archibald liver Sage who started running experiments and concluded
that the density of gold and the ocean was somewhere
between half a grain and one grain per ton of water.
And remember a grain is about sixty five milligrams. So
Liversedge noted the irony that while the amount of gold

(23:36):
contained in the whole of the ocean was just enormous,
I mean, far more gold than humans have access to now.
It was so spread out and so dilute that the
process of capturing it and isolating it would probably cost
more than the resulting gold was worth. And several other
researchers in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds repeated

(23:57):
these experiments, sometimes finding even lower are concentrations of gold
than Liver's Edge. But it is clear, at least from
from this research that there is gold floating in solution
throughout the oceans, and if there were a cheap and
efficient way to get it out, you could accessed vast
amounts of riches. But that's a big if. And Stubbs
notes that in the eight nineties there were many patents

(24:20):
for processes to extract gold from seawater. However, he notes
that he could only find records of two gold from
seawater extraction schemes that were actually put into practice on
a commercial scale, and both of them failed. One was
at Hailing Island in southern England, and the other one
was the main focus of stubbs paper, at Broken Head

(24:40):
in New South Wales, Australia. I think they were both
uh they both began in nineteen o four, and these,
in contrast to the plot by Journe again and and Fisher,
these were not hoaxes. They were genuine attempts to extract
the gold by chemical means, but they were never able
to turn a profit, though they were seen as very
attract to endeavors to a lot of educated people. Apparently

(25:02):
no less a figure than the Nobel Prize winning Scottish
chemist Sir William Ramsay, who was he was instrumental in
the discovery and isolation of the noble gases. I think
that's what he got his Nobel Prize for um. He
was convinced that the plant on Haling Island, the one
in southern England, was going to be a success, but
within less than two years of its founding, the company

(25:23):
operating it had folded and the scheme in New South
Wales involved It involved sort of what san Stat was saying,
the extraction of sea water up to a reservoir where
it was treated on the way to the reservoir with
lime and iron ox side, and then it was allowed
to settle into a sludge while the water was drawn
off at the top, and then the sludge was to

(25:45):
be treated with cyanide to extract the gold, and apparently
the Australian plants ceased operation very soon after it started,
possibly due to storm damage, but there's no evidence that
it ever would have been able to turn a profit.
But anyway, this whole brings me back to that interesting
comparison by Judge Darling the idea of sunbeams from cucumbers,

(26:05):
because a similar impracticality is actually involved. Cucumbers actually are
in a sense made out of sunbeams. Right The sunlight
feeds energy into the plant, which is used to manufacture
chemical energy in the form of sugars and other tissues.
And the same energy that came from the sun is
actually still locked up inside the flesh of the cucumber,

(26:26):
but in a different form, and it would take a
very lossy conversion process to turn that chemical energy back
into light. And as Stubs recounts that other chemists in
the early twentieth century examined the same problem trying to
get precious metals, mainly gold, out of sea water, and
they could never find a way to make the process
of getting the gold out cost effective. You could get

(26:48):
the gold out, but the process was so expensive and
so inefficient that the gold it produced was never enough
to to cause you to break even. Uh. And to
quote from Stubbs quote, the Nobel Prize in chemist Fritz Haber,
who later developed his own method for extracting gold from seawater,
came to the conclusion that the quantities were so small

(27:08):
and the expense so great that the process could never
be made profitable. Yeah. Fritz Haber, by the way, gave
us the haber Bosch process, a method he used in
industry to synthesize ammonia from nydrogen gas and hydrogen gas.
He's also sometimes referred to as the father of chemical
warfare for his work on weaponized chlorine gas. Yeah. Apparently

(27:29):
a lot of his interest in extracting gold from seawater,
back before he realized that it couldn't turn a profit,
was was related to making money to help Germany payback
its war debt from World War One. So back to
the Lubeck hoax. So where did Joern again get his
idea to extract gold from seawater? Remember, some sources alleged

(27:51):
that the idea came to him in a dream or
a heavenly vision. I think he claimed that at some point,
and that's the quote I read at the top of
the episode from the Hartford Current. But he but others
alleged that this was not a dream, It did not
come in a vision that the journey and basically read
about the research of Edward Sonstadt and then he thought, hey,

(28:12):
what if I could do that? And it's also worth
pointing out where this scheme occurs in history. So this
is going to be in the mid to late eighteen nineties,
which is concurrent with the Klondike gold Rush in Alaska
and the Yukon territory, So gold fever was in the air.
But in the words of Carrie Bangs quote, it did

(28:32):
indeed seem less arduous to get the gold from the
water than from the Alaskan fields. And as someone later
pointed out, it was even more easy to pick the
gold from the pockets of stockholders than from either of
these places. That's a that's a solid inside and a
solid burn there. So, beginning in October of eighteen nine seven,
Journegin and Fisher operated their business in North Lubec, eventually

(28:57):
leasing multiple locations for plants. So plants in quotes here
you should hear me say. And they hired over a
hundred workers. They gathered money from lots of eager investors
throughout New York, Massachusetts. In Connecticut, apparently they authored a
prospectus about how they planned to extract money from the
ocean that was somewhat successful in getting investors. And at

(29:19):
these plants they operated these so called accumulators that supposedly
worked on the same principal journe again had demonstrated before,
but with different specifications. To quote from Bangs again in
a January twentie nine article describing them, quote these boxes
were made in part of copper and containing a battery, mercury,
and unknown chemicals. It is recorded that one of the

(29:42):
first accumulators that was used for demonstration purposes was lined
with lead and was not much larger than a plate.
The lead lining proved to be a bad idea, as
the mercury could easily eat its way through this metal.
Now we alluded to the fact earlier that journe again,
unlike some of these other people who filed for patents,
Journegan did not want to share his method. He he

(30:04):
kept secret whatever his method for getting the gold out
of the sea water was, and with hindsight the reason
for that is obvious. Bangs reports that by February there
were about a hundred of these accumulators operating under the
wharf at the plant location, and more were on the way.
Exactly how often these accumulators were checked for gold, and

(30:27):
how the gold got into them when it was found,
or or where the gold came from in general, is
still a matter of some dispute, but a number of
sources from the Times say that for a lot of
these demonstrations there was a sleight of hand involving pre
purchased gold, either above water or below, and especially with
like the earlier demonstrations that had taken place beforehand with

(30:49):
some of the first investors. The idea is that while
Joern again was up on the dock doing his show,
lowering the accumulator and and entertaining the possible investors his part,
Charles Fisher was allegedly a skilled diver in possession of
a diving suit yeah and it has been widely suggested
that during at least some of these early demonstrations, Fisher

(31:12):
would sneak underwater via a guideline to the side of
the accumulator in his diving suit and then salt the
box or boxes with gold or silver. And then later
once they had actually established these plants and they had
the accumulators working in the mill pond reservoir. At this point,
I think it's more murky whether Fisher would actually need

(31:34):
to go underwater to sault them, or whether you could
just produce the gold, you know, generally at the plant
later and say it came out of the accumulators. It's
not exactly clear what always was happening there, but they
did have gold, and it appeared this gold was just
bought like it was sourced from jewelry and other stuff,
and and then collected on the factory premises as if

(31:56):
it had come out of the accumulators. And then the
production of this gold from the accumulator supposedly was used
to prove to more investors that they should give even
more money. Now, apparently the local press was very optimistic
and positive about Journe again and Fisher and the project
as a whole. I found a page hosted by the
main Memory network that quotes a Lubeck Herold article from saying, quote,

(32:20):
the presence of these people is not only desirable for
the amount of money that they will bring into the town,
but we should welcome them for their social qualities. The
officers of the company or earnest Christian gentleman, and many
of their employees are Christians. We wish them all the
success in their undertaking, and hope that they will take
millions of dollars from the old pass him a quote bay,

(32:41):
and we believe they will. With quantities of gold in
the salt water, there is little need of a trip
to Alaska. So again the idea of like Klondike sort
of being in the back of everybody's mind. And and
I wonder in what way that may actually make a
hoax or or a scam like this more appealing if
there's like if it's appealing to something that you could

(33:02):
get in another way, but it would be much harder. Again,
it comes back to too good to be true. It's
the shortcut. It's there they're selling. They're selling the shortcut here,
which of course doesn't pan out. Yeah, so there is
a question of why did Jurnagan choose Lubeck for the
side of the plants or Journagin and Fisher together, I
guess well. Jurnagan claimed that it had to do with

(33:24):
things like that extremely high title range, that we were
talking about earlier in the episode, but I've also read
speculated that he was basically just trying to get out
of range of easy investigation by his investors and stakeholders,
who were mostly further south in New England. And it's
worth noting that, unlike several other inventors of the eighteen nineties,

(33:45):
again Jurnagin did not patent his process. He did not
take out a patent on whatever he was doing to
supposedly extract gold from the ocean. Instead, he kept it
entirely secret, and again it's now obvious why so. The
scam went on for a while, but eventually in the
summer of eighteen so the year following, when they arrived
in Lubeck, after they had gathered by some estimates, around

(34:07):
a million dollars in total from investors, but just before
the scheme was fully exposed and they were caught, Journ
again and Fisher skip town, taking their investors money with them.
And even worse than that, there were hundreds of workers
who had been attracted to Lubeck to work for the
company who were suddenly just left out of work. Apparently,
Journ again fled to Europe with his family claiming that

(34:30):
he himself had been duped by Fisher. That seems kind
of unlikely. Uh, Fisher just disappeared entirely, and Journagin eventually
returned some of the money that he stole. He returned
some of it to to his investors. Reportedly, they made
about thirty six cents on the dollar back from their investment,
and Journegan went on to become a school teacher in
the Philippines. But I'm still thinking about the question I

(34:53):
opened with that you brought up just a second ago.
You know, It's it's one thing when someone is selling
you on a recognizable absurd to d like a pyramid
scheme or magic beings or whatever. But in a way,
developing scientific frontiers can make a magic being type swindle
seem more possible because they emphasize the unarguable fact that

(35:16):
we don't always really know what's possible. You know, it
wasn't just that a bunch of gullible investors from New
York and New England got taken in by a free
money scam. Remember that I mentioned earlier from the Stubs paper.
The Nobel Prize winning chemists Sir William Ramsey was at
least for a time inclined to believe that a gold
from the sea experiment at Hailing Island in southern England

(35:37):
could be leveraged into a profitable enterprise. Now, of course,
further testing would prove this wasn't the case. But how
exactly would people have known that this would never work
at this point in history, you know, chemistry and mineral extraction.
I feel like that they must have seemed like a
kind of vast, untapped wilderness of infinite possibility. Yeah, yeah,

(35:58):
and and again I come back to the idea that
it it feels so much like a technological amplification of
gold panning. And if gold panning is possible without modern technology,
then you know, might the same sort of thing be
possible on a grander scale in the sea given advances
in technology. I mean, I feel like the same sort
of uh, you know, basic line of thinking you know,

(36:18):
easily applies to things today or could apply to, uh,
to technology today. Yeah, if if you don't understand the
underlying principles, chemistry looks like magic. I mean, just to
remind you again, like the cyanide extraction process for gold
that probably would in some sense work, It just wouldn't
work well enough to to make a profit. But anyway,

(36:38):
maybe we should take another break and then when we
come back we can talk more about the geology, chemistry,
and ideology of gold. Thank alright, we're back. So, uh,
I think we've touched on this a little bit on
the show before, but I was thinking about the idea
of where gold actually comes from. You know, thinking about
gold existing dissolve throughout the oceans makes you wonder about

(37:02):
questions like this because gold is a relatively rare element
compared to the commonplaces of you know, hydrogen, oxygen, and
iron and all that. But obviously veins of it can
be found in Earth's crust and in the ocean as well.
So where does gold actually come from? Well, the atomic
origin of gold, like what makes the gold atoms. There's
still some uncertainty here, but the evidence indicates that gold

(37:25):
is produced an extremely violent stellar phenomena. Possibly it was,
it used to be thought through something known as the
r process of a supernova, you know, this rapid neutron capture.
More recently, I've seen uh studies suggesting it's probably more
likely through the collision of neutron stars. So think about
that next time you're just looking at a piece of

(37:46):
gold leaf for gold. Yeah, you're you're drinking the you know,
the gold leaf liquor or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah,
it didn't. Didn't you ever know people who drank that stuff?
I did. I knew someone who drank it exclusively. Yeah, wow, exclusively.
That's I mean the I'm not saying they drank it
only like it was their only liquid, but I think

(38:07):
it was like the only there was there. It was
their go to alcohol, um, which I mean, it's sparkly,
it's going it kind of under. It's a perfect example
of gold fascination. Like, like so much of our fascination
with gold is based on the fact that it it
looks neat, even if it doesn't actually contribute to the um,

(38:28):
you know, effectiveness of a tool or a weapon, etcetera.
It's really only when you get into, you know, more
into the modern technological world where you find gold is
having a lot more function as opposed to just pure
you know, shiny lure. Right right, Uh, well, you know
what now that I'm sort of questioning because I was
about to say, you know, like gold is so amazing

(38:49):
because it comes from the collision of neutron stars probably
or whatever it is. It comes from very violent stellar
phenomena that are at levels of magnitude and power that
you can't even comprehend. But on the other hand, I mean,
tons of elements are like that, and in fact, the
the actual atomic origin of all elements is mind boggling
when you think about it. It's just that, like, this

(39:09):
is mind boggling in this particular way. But gold is
metal that looks like the Sun, and therefore it gets
it gets a privileged status, I guess so. But then
there's another question actually beyond that. So okay that obviously,
you know, many heavy elements that are dispersed throughout the
galaxy are created by violent stellar phenomenon supernovae or or

(39:30):
the collision of neutron stars things like that. But then
how does it get to Earth? So this is really
interesting there. And there again this is another area where
we don't have all the answers, and they're you know,
some competing hypothesis uh to consider here. But the late
Veneer hypothesis argues that gold and other specific materials were
added to the Earth's crust roughly three point eight billion

(39:52):
years ago via a bombardment of iridium rich meteorites known
as chondrites. So this is the idea merged in the
early nineteen seventies following analysis of lunar rocks and the
lack of gold and iridium in uh the lunar mantle.
They found they found it on a lunar surface. However,

(40:12):
and we have we have to remember that the surface
of the Moon is ancient lunar highland rocks returned by
Apollo sixteen or roughly four billion years old. A rock
from Apollo seventeen was found to be four point five
billion years old. To put all of that in perspective,
the Solar system itself is thought to be roughly uh
four point uh five sixty eight billion years old, So

(40:36):
some of these lunar rocks are as old as our
solar system itself basically. And you can also look at
the cratering. More craters mean geologically older surfaces. Fewer craters
as with Earth indicates a geologically younger surface, right, because
the Earth is geologically active, so it's constantly repaving its
own surface in a way that the Moon is not. Correct. Yeah,

(40:58):
So the hypothesis here is that this golden bombardment um
was churned up and incorporated into the Earth's mantle, while
it only impacted the surface layer of the Moon. Interesting.
So in a sense, if you follow that hypothesis, you
could say, okay, well that means gold is kind of alien.
You know, it's from another world. It's it's it's extraterrestrial. Um.

(41:22):
But but then we have some some other ideas out
there as well. For instance, there's the rival magma ocean hypothesis,
which argues that the gold was here all along. And
here's how William Kramer explained it in the BBC News
article does gold come from outer space? From quote all
the gold and Earth's crust or the overwhelming majority of
it was here on Earth all along? Most of it

(41:44):
certainly alloyed with iron and migrated to the Earth's core,
but a significant proportion, perhaps point two, dissolved into a
seven hundred kilometer deep magma ocean within the Earth's outer mantle.
Later the gold was brought back up to the crust
by volcanic action. This is the stuff we wear around
our necks and on our fingers today. WHOA Okay, So

(42:05):
it's either so if one of these hypotheses is correct,
it's either from a bombardment from space or an eruption
of volcanoes basically, But then again, it's it's kind of
like everything is due to violence in space, right if
you go back far enough in terms of the history
of our planet, etcetera. So you know, it's it's ultimately

(42:26):
we're dealing with with processes and events on a scale
so far beyond the you know, the limits of a
human lifetime and human experience that it's all, uh, it's
all the machinations of the gods. Right, there are no
bundane atoms. All atoms are beautiful, yeah, but they're not
all equally valuable. So people did continue the search for

(42:47):
gold in the ocean after the examples we've already talked about.
One of the questions I was wondering about, is, okay,
have have modern methods changed our picture at all of
whether there is really gold in the ocean like worse
On stat and the other nineteenth century chemists correct, is
the really gold dissolved in the ocean? And the answer
is yes, But modern methods revealed that there's probably even

(43:10):
less of it than previously estimated. According to some materials
I was reading by the n O a A, there
there is gold in sea water, but it's actually difficult
to measure exactly how much, and it does seem to
vary in different parts of the ocean. But but they
linked to one study using modern methods that was published
in nineteen ninety by K. Kennison, Faulkner and J. M.

(43:32):
Edmond called Golden Seawater in the journal Earth and Planetary
Science Letters, and these authors found quote, the measured concentrations
of gold in the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific are within
a factor of two to three of recently reported values
in Pacific waters and nearly three orders of magnitude less
than reported in the literature prior to nineteen eight, indicating

(43:56):
contamination problems with the earlier data. And apparently, uh there
are places that have more gold in the water than
other places. They point out Mediterranean deep waters apparently have
higher concentrations, as do fluids surrounding hydrothermal vents, which is interesting.
But the n O a. A. Summarizes the findings of
this paper to say that there is quote only about

(44:19):
one gram of gold for every one hundred million metric
tons of ocean water in the Atlantic and North Pacific,
So that's a lot of water you'd have to turn
through to get a gram of gold. Yeah, you need
to take a lot of patients, right, and a lot
of energy. I mean, ultimately your power bill would be
way more than you could sell the gold. For just

(44:41):
one more historical instance, I came across of of people
trying to turn gold or claiming that they would be
able to to turn the ocean into gold. There was
an article in The New York Times in um on
March twenty seven, nineteen thirty four, by William L. Lawrence
called Tapping Ocean's gold treasure predicted as coming in decade,

(45:02):
which I think is a particularly awful title. I don't
know how he could have phrased something that bad. That's
it's like four layers of passive voice or something. Um.
But so here's a brief sketch of the article. What
was then the Ethel Dow Chemical Company, which was a
joint venture of the Ethel Company in the Dow Chemical Company.

(45:24):
They successfully deployed a plant near Wilmington, North Carolina, which
was able to extract bro mean from seawater, and based
on the principles that were in operation at this plant,
a couple of prominent chemists predicted at the nineteen thirty
four Annual convention of the American Chemical Society that within
the next ten years they would be able to extract quote,

(45:45):
the three quadrillion dollar treasure in pure gold known to
exist in very dilute form in the waters of the
Seven Seas, very quadrillion dollar treasure that I can you
imagine that as like an actual official business plan where

(46:08):
they're like and and then we know over the next
you know, a few years, we're gonna make three quadrillion dollars.
Our valuation of our company is elevenies zillion dollars. Oh
that's great, but interesting historical coincidence here. Who were the
chemists who made this prediction. Well, so two of them

(46:28):
were dal Chemical guys, Willard H. Dow and Leroy C. Stewart,
but both of dal Chemical. But the other one who
made this prediction at this meeting in was none other
than Thomas Midgeley, who was at the time VP of
the Ethel Corporation and who was a brilliant chemists, no doubt,
but who is now probably more famous for developing two

(46:50):
major technologies, leaded gasoline and chlora flora carbon's. That's both
quite a quite a resume. Uh so, Yeah, Actually, the
name of the company Midgeley was president of at the
time that the Ethel Company was the brand name for
tetra Ethel lead gasoline, which midgually developed as an anti

(47:12):
knocking agent. So the idea was that the additive, the
the added lead content, would make the gasoline burn more evenly. Unfortunately,
the burning of leaded gasoline just blankets the environment and lead,
which which is just a bad thing to do in
every imaginable way. Then, on top of that, he also
developed free on, which probably would have seemed more harmless

(47:34):
at the time. This was the first of the commercial CFCs,
and this was in the search for a non toxic refrigerant.
Of course, free on was very successful until the CFC
started to get into the upper atmosphere, and then they
began to eat away at the planets ozone layer. So
I was reading the words of an environmental historian named J. R.
McNeil in a two thousand and one book where he writes,

(47:56):
quote Midgely, the same research chemists who figured out that
lead would enhance engine performance had more impact on the
atmosphere than any single other organism in Earth history. So yeah,
so he's one of the guys saying three quadrillion dollars
or whatever. Um. But anyway, so these guys the the

(48:17):
American Chemical Society meeting in thirty four, we're arguing, Look,
you know, it used to be impossible to profitably extract
bromine from seawater, but now we've climbed that hill. So
other substances like gold and silver and radium, they're just
next in line. We just need to refine our methods.
But of course it never happened. But this makes sense, right.
It's like, as technology continues to advance, we kind of

(48:40):
keep making the same mistakes, right, We keep coming back
to far fetched ideas from the past and asking yourselves, well,
is it time? Is it now? Yeah? I guess so.
I mean, others keep bringing this idea up basically every decade.
It seems like I never saw this personally, but I
was reading that. Apparently there was a guy on that
TV show shar arc Tank. I was reading about this

(49:02):
in an Atlas Obscura article about getting gold from seawater
by Eric Grundhauser, and he mentioned so on the show
Shark Tank. There's a guy who proposed a clean energy
device that he just claimed as a byproduct would refine
gold from the ocean. And I do not think he
won the prize money or whatever. But there's another way

(49:22):
in which people are still, in a practical sense looking
to the oceans for mineral wealth and precious metals, because
while it might not actually be economically practical to capture
gold and other precious metals from the seawater itself, the
ocean does contain accessible mineral riches in other ways, Like
what about the idea of ocean floor mining. Yeah, and

(49:45):
indeed there is a high potential for sea floor mining,
at least in the future. This is an again another
area where the technology is not quite there to the
point where it would be, um, you know, actually profitable
to go after it. But technology can ttinues to advance,
as does um you know that the demand for some
of these substances. But yeah, particularly gold and other metals. Um. However,

(50:09):
the practice comes with severe risks for deep sea ecosystems
that were either beginning only beginning to understand, or in
many cases are still shrouded in mystery or just unknown
to us. I have to refer back to we've talked
about the moon in this episode, and we've talked about
the deep ocean. Uh, as we've pointed out before, you know,
we ultimately know more about the surface details of the

(50:30):
Moon than we know about the depths of Earth's own ocean.
You know, I specifically remember in our conversation with Diva
aim On here on the show The Marine Biologists Too.
That was a great episode, I thought, But she she
was warning specifically about the potential dangers of deep sea
mining to underwater ecosystems. Yeah, because a lot of it

(50:51):
revolves around hydrothermal events, which we already mentioned in passing
in the episode here. Now, if you've watched your share
of nature documentaries, which I imagine a lot of our
listeners have, you've likely seen footage, incredible footage of these
amazing places where chimney shaped black smokers, you know, boil
the sea water and around which entire ecosystems of strange

(51:13):
creatures thrive in the darkness, including the so called hof crab,
which are you know it actually not crabs. Their their
deep sea squat lobsters. But they're they're very weird looking.
The whole environment is weird looking. It's it's it's this
alien seeming world that has actually helped us better imagine
how life might thrive in a truly alien environment, perhaps

(51:33):
in a dark or hidden ocean somewhere. Yeah, Like if
we were ever to discover that there were life on
say Jupiter's moon Europa. Uh, understanding life around hydrothermal vents
on Earth might be a good guide to understand what's
possible on another moon or planetary body like that. Yeah. So,
so these these sites are are very impressive, and they're

(51:54):
a great there's a great deal of scientific interest and
what's going on there. But these vent sites also produce
massive sulfide deposits rich in metals or sea floor massive
sulfide deposits are sms. So here high pressure, superheated fluids
escape through cracks and they mix with the cold sea
water and when this happens, minerals form and fall to

(52:17):
the sea floor. And these include high concentrations of copper, gold, silver, zinc,
and lead. Now on Earth's surface we have massive sulfide
deposits due to volcanic action, and these are major sources
of copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold on the surface. Uh.
But so these sites would would seem to offer the
same riches and uh, again, the technology is not quite

(52:40):
bare to the point where we could actually go after
these resources in a way that would be profitable, like
completely putting aside any environmental concerns, Like it just hasn't
crossed that threshold yet, but there's a lot of concern
that it is about to. And sites in the Pacific
are of our our special interests because they've been proven
to produce high concentrations of the desired metals, plus their

(53:02):
shallower than other sites and therefore easier to potentially reach
and harvest, like these are going to be the first
places that people go after. Also, these sites are generally
under under the domain of Pacific nations, where there may
there might not be sufficient governance or management in place
yet for such endeavors. I mean that on top of

(53:22):
just the relative newness of the entire prospect of deep
sea mining. So there are organizations involved in efforts to
protect these areas or in other cases like see that
any mining efforts there are done in a way that
doesn't just decimate the environment. You mentioned our interview with
deep c biologist and ocean advocate Diva amon Uh, and

(53:43):
she specifically pointed out the work of the Deep Sea
Conservation Coalition, which everyone can learn about at Save the
High Seas dot org. They point out that these minerals
have thus far proven too difficult to reach, too expensive,
and the technology to do it effectively regardless of environmental
concerns isn't quite there yet. But the concern here again

(54:05):
is that the technology will get there. Major players are
already involved with their eyes on the deep seabed mining
riches and quote it's only very recently, as technological advancement
has been matched by escalating commodity prices in demand that
the highly speculative practice has begun to be considered economically
viable by some companies. So work needs to be done

(54:26):
now to protect these environments, you know, to make sure
that that there there are laws in place, um, that
there's some sort of governance there and it's not just
a free for all um. Again, I highly recommend visiting
Save the High Seas dot org to learn more and
also consider checking out our chat with Diva Amon from
last year. Yeah. Absolutely, that was a good one. And
I actually have one more uh thing that that came

(54:48):
up in the research I'd like to to to bring
out here. Briefly. We've we've spoken about all these different
ways of like trying to coax the gold out of
its hiding place, right, how to trick it out of
the ocean or out of the the deep sea floor,
et cetera, or even out of the streams and the mountains.
So there's a There's an additional idea that they came

(55:09):
across here called phyto mining, and basically the premise here
is that some plants have the ability to absorb minerals
through their roots and concentrate metals such as nickel, uh cadmium,
and zinc. These plants are hyper accumulators. Uh. Now, there
are no gold hyper accumulators because gold doesn't dissolve in

(55:31):
water all that easily, but it can seemingly be forced
to do so. So there's this technique that was proposed
by Chris Anderson, environmental geochemist at Massi University in New Zealand,
and his idea was to plant fast growing leafy plants
like mustard plants on soil containing gold, such as soil
found near gold mines, that sort of thing. When the

(55:53):
plants reach their full height, you treat the soil to
make the gold more soluble. Then the plant will abser
orb the gold up into its biomass, and then you
harvest it. Huh. Interesting. Now, the harvesting apparently is more
difficult than it sounds, because you can't just burn the
plant and then like get picked the gold out of

(56:14):
the ash, because gold is gonna gonna escape in the
smoke via the ash, So that instead you'd have to
use a chemical process involving like strong acids. And the
problem is that these might be too environmentally risky in
and of themselves. Uh. Anderson's idea is that perhaps you
could use this alongside the just the basic absorption of

(56:34):
soul contaminants, so you would be planting u these plants
manipulating the soil in a way so that they're removing
soil containments and as a byproduct, removing gold as well.
That's interesting. I don't think I've ever even heard of
this possibility. This is this is brand new to me. Yeah,
I mean, it doesn't look like there's been a ton
of work on it, but there has. There are some

(56:55):
other um papers about it out there, and some of
them are I was looking at another one as well
that seemed to frame it as a more like environmentally
stable solution. But um, but but I don't know the
other source I was looking at was saying that, you know,
you have to consider these acids that are used to
treat the soil. So uh So, I don't know what

(57:17):
I'm saying. I guess is it it's it's perfect for
someone to scam people right now, right. Yes, So if
you want to become the next Reverend Prescott forward Journe again,
you just need to come up with a good story
about a vision of plants that you had while asleep
in a train car. And then you find a suitable
small town and you say, I'm going to make mustard

(57:37):
greens into gold. Yeah, I can see it now. I
think it would make for a great um. I don't know,
it could be a great plot element in the story
for sure. Yeah, there's a there's actually there's a Live
Science article about this title. There's Gold and then Our
Plants by a Lindsay Kunkle And this was from well,

(58:00):
I'm immediately thinking of Pipper. Oh yeah, yeah, from Final Sacrifice. Yes,
the Final Sacrifice famously um riffed on Mystery Science Theater
three thousand. So anyway, I don't know about gold from plants,
or certainly I don't know about about finding the Lost

(58:21):
City of Zeos. Uh. Here uh in Canada. But but
certainly I think we have explored the possibility of finding
hidden gold in the ocean. Um technically yes, but with
some with some definite asterisk is technically yes, practically no.

(58:44):
If somebody comes to you with a with a get
rich quick scheme about it, you should uh, you should
have a chemist friend look into it first. Exactly all right, Uh, well,
we'll go in close the episode out right there, But
we'd love to hear from everyone about this topic. Uh.
Certainly if you have any connection to some of the
parts of the world that we discussed here, and if

(59:04):
you want to support the show, you can find us
wherever you get your podcast and wherever that happens to be.
Just makes your rate, review and subscribe huge, Thanks as
always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind

(59:25):
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(59:46):
bl blah bla bladio no f