Reading Time: 2 minutes
- Currency to be money must be durable, significantly rare (but not too rare), portable (can be carried around), and divisible (can be cut into smaller denominations).
- The periodic table has 118 elements; everything physical in the known universe is made of these elements or a combination of these elements (e.g., water (H2O) is made of 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom).
- Except for gold & silver, no other element could be used for money (except for copper at a lower scale) for a long time; from the analysis of all 118 elements, it emerges that nature had it decided for our ancestors.
- 16 elements – Hydrogen (#1) and 15 on the right side of the periodic table (masked in red in the periodic table) are non-metals, i.e., they can’t be melted, hammered into sheets, or cut into coins; 10 of these are gases, while 4 are liquid.
- 11 elements (masked black) are reactive and either dissolve or explode in water/air; e.g., Rb (#37) & Cs (#55) catch fire when they come in contact with oxygen/water, so they must be stored in kerosene.
- 34 elements (green) are radioactive and likely to cause cancer.
- Seven elements (masked maroon) are either semi-metals or behave confused, i.e., they possess some properties of metals and some non-metals.
- Four elements (masked pink) – copper, lead, indium, and iron – don’t make it because they rust or corrode, while copper was still used in some cases.
- Refining Aluminium (#13) was complex, and when refined with primitive tools, it became too weak; Titanium & Zirconium, on the other hand, were too hard to smelt with primitive equipment.
- 17 elements (masked orange) are called rare-earths, though they were never as rare as gold.
- The problem with the rare-earths was that they shared such similar properties that they couldn’t be told apart from each other till proper testing was available in the 18th century
- Bismuth (#83), though not a rare-earth, had a similar problem (it could not be distinguished from Lead and Tin).
- Mercury (Hg #80) is liquid, Gallium (#31), Thallium (#81) & Cadmium (#48) are so soft they could be cut with a knife, while Tin (#50) becomes crumbly at 13-degree celsius or less.
- 8 elements (masked navy) are significantly brittle and hence couldn’t be hammered beyond a certain point without them breaking (hence didn’t meet divisibility criterion).
- Once the shortlisting by elimination is done, we are left with 8 noble metals and four other metals masked by yellow circles; all of these are rare and meet the other criteria as well.
- But only silver & gold are available in sufficient quantities to cater to the requirement of money supply; the rest are either too rare or have very high melting-points.
- Very high melting points mean very high costs for melting and shaping, thus making the criterion of divisibility difficult to achieve.
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