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likely others tried it before the first
surviving documented attempt of someone
trying to turn something into gold in a
relatively scientific fashion occurred
around 300 AD
the protis I intestine question was a
Greek o Egyptian named Zaza mosque
during his lifetime it's thought he
wrote nearly 30 books about alchemy but
most of them they've been lost to
history what we do know is that his work
focused mainly on the use of vapors
specifically sulfur vapors which caused
some things to turn yellow for example
he found that when mixed with liquid
mercury the resulting substance becomes
a yellow solid but it wasn't gold from
there for 2,000 years scientists like
Isaac Newton Roger Bacon Robert ball and
yabby ribbon hyoeun all tried their hand
at making golds now all fails but they
did give the world's numerous other
advancements as a result of their work
as science historian Lawrence Princip
noted in 2014 they were amazingly good
experimentalists this all brings us more
modern times and one of the most
distinguished scientists of the 20th
century that you've probably never heard
of that's Glenn T Seaborg Seaborg was
far from being a no-name chemist with a
crazy vision of turning lead into gold
when he decided to make the attempt in
1980 for example in 1941 he led the team
that first discovered produced and
isolated the element plutonium this led
to the United States pursuing a program
to make plutonium for use in their
atomic bomb project which later morphed
into the top-secret Manhattan Project
which Seaborg also worked on he strongly
lobbied for doing a public demonstration
of a nuclear explosion to show Japan
rather than actually using the bomb
against them all in all during his
lifetime he helped discover ten elements
for creating them in a lab which
ultimately saw him receive a Nobel Prize
in Chemistry in 1951 he also discovered
or helps isolate well over a hundred
isotopes most notably iodine-131 which
if you haven't known someone with
certain thyroid diseases including some
types of thyroid cancer they may well
still be alive or have had their life
extended thanks to this substance along
the way he became the chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission advising and
working for US presidents Kennedy
Johnson and Nixon during his time in
that role he's successfully lobbied for
the nuclear test ban treaty prohibiting
the testing of nuclear devices in the
atmosphere or under the sea he also
strongly advocated for increased funding
for science education in schools better
science curriculum and increased funding
in pure scientific research he's also
the only chemist in history to have an
element named after him while he was
still living and that seaborgium all
right so this all brings us to creating
gold in 1980 Seaborg and a group of
other scientists used a particle
accelerator to propel beams of carbon
and neon nuclei at nearly light speed
and two foils of the heavy metal bismuth
you know the stuff you find in
relatively large quantities in
pepto-bismol it's also used for shotgun
pellets as well as a variety of other
applications so why did they use bismuth
rather than the originally plans let
well that's simply because it's easier
to isolate gold from bismuth than it is
from lead however producing gold from
lead would have been more difficult as
for the results when they were rifling
through the carnage that was the result
of the high-speed collision between neon
carbon and bismuth the physicists
discovered that they had successfully
made several isotopes of gold of course
none of this was economic in the
slightest according to Seaborg it would
cost more than one quadrillion dollars
per ounce to produce gold by this
experiments the going rate for gold in
1980 was about five hundred and ninety
dollars an ounce
so regardless of cost finally after at
least a couple of thousand years of
effort by some of the finest minds in
history a human have finally created
gold from something else now I can't
probably see that brilliant they're
gonna teach you how to turn something
into gold but they can help you learn a
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