A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.

February 5, 2010

True - gold can be rolled thin enough to be translucent, so thin that it is used as a filter on the helmets of astronauts. According to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), a little gold goes a long way:

Gold is malleable, so it can be flattened into extremely thin sheets. […] Gold leafing—also known as gilding—is an ancient technique. Traditional artisans beat raw gold between pieces of leather until it was almost too thin to be seen. One ounce of gold may be hammered thin enough to cover more than 9 square meters (96.9 square feet) of a surface. The gold leaf may be only 0.18 microns (seven millionths of an inch) thick; a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.

So let’s go with the what the AMNH says: 1 troy ounce of gold can be hammered to cover 96.9 square feet. A regulation tennis court, from baseline to baseline including the alleys is 78 feet x 36 feet or 2808 square feet. This would require roughly 28.9 troy ounces of gold, which is 898.89 grams of gold. A 1000 gram ingot of gold from Harrods measures in at: 115.0 millimeters x 52.0 millimeters x 9.0 millimeters (4.5 inches x 2.04 inches x 0.35 inches) well within the dimensions of the only matchbox I could find (a 250 count of large kitchen matches at roughly: 5.5 inches x 3 inches x 1.5 inches). Interestingly enough, this is one of the Top 10 myths that the Mythbusters won’t tackle citing the cost of gold; which, as of this writing, the needed amount of gold would cost around $30,769.00 USD. We have seen this myth written as “matchbook” and not “matchbox” that would have to be a pretty wide matchbook, and certainly it would be plausible to find a matchbook to fit the aforementioned necessary dimensions.

original claim: @OMGFacts; sources: wikipedia, Harrods, American Museum of Natural History

12:03am | URL: http://omgfactcheck.tumblr.com/post/371802581/a-lump-of-pure-gold-the-size-of-a-matchbox-can-be

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