The Tide of Gold

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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

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,

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 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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. 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 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 dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. Bl bl bl bl bl bl blah bla bladio no f