This 18th Century Gold Rush Changed How the World Pans for Gold | National Geographic

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

Gold is the most powerful metal on earth, and Russia is one of the world's leading suppliers of it. It all began in 1745 when a peasant named Tiara Fade Markov, while looking for crystal, found something else: a tiny gold speck inside a piece of quartz. His discovery changed the history of Russia and the world.

Three years after Markov found the first gold, mines like these popped up all over this region. It was grueling work to get an ounce of gold; miners had to cut, grind, and wash more than 7 tons of raw ore. For the next 66 years, this was the only way to extract gold in Russia until Leo Bruce Nielsen made a revolutionary discovery.

A son of a gold miner, Verse Nielsen discovered that gold flecks also existed in the sediment of local riverbeds. He then developed an ingenious panning technique based on a simple principle: Gold is heavier than rock and sand, and if washed properly, it will sink to the bottom of a pan. By 1816, only two years later, half of all gold in Russia was obtained using Persson's method.

Because it was now accessible to everyone, people from all over Russia flocked here to get rich quick, and so the Russian gold rush began. It wasn't long before Persson's method caught on around the world. In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, and Russian teams even came out to teach the Americans how to pan for it.

So you could say that without the Russian gold rush, the American gold rush might never have happened. [Music]

Learn coding from scratch with Khanmigo

Worked example: Rewriting definite integral as limit of Riemann sum | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

View All

Insurance terminology | Insurance | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy

Now let’s talk about some of the words you’re likely to hear if you’re dealing with insurance. So the first one is a premium, or an insurance premium, and that’s really just what you’re paying in order to get the insurance. So if you pay, let’s say, 200 …

How to Finally Defeat Procrastination and Stop Wasting Time

Let’s be honest, you’re probably procrastinating while watching this video. And because of this, I’m going to keep this as practical and concise as possible. In life, you’re often deciding whether to approach or avoid something. You’re always making a jou…

15 Habits That Help You Balance Life Better

Alexer, have you ever in your life, in this year or even in this week, felt truly balanced? Have you ever felt like you did everything you wanted to do, hit your goals, were present with people in your life, and nailed your work? It’s a great feeling, but…

Limits of combined functions: piecewise functions | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We are asked to find these three different limits. I encourage you, like always, to pause this video and try to do it yourself before we do it together. So when you do this first one, you might just try to find the limit as x approaches negative 2 of f o…

Mapping shapes | Performing transformations | High school geometry | Khan Academy

We’re told that triangles. Let’s see, we have triangle PQR and triangle ABC are congruent. The side length of each square on the grid is one unit, so each of these is one unit. Which of the following sequences of transformations maps triangle PQR onto tri…

Ray Dalio on the Keys to Success

What are some of the keys to success? And beyond success, fulfilling success to a fulfilled life that you’ve seen in your experience? Well, I think you have to define what success is for yourself. I don’t think it’s the accoutrements of, um, necessarily …

This 18th Century Gold Rush Changed How the World Pans for Gold | National Geographic

More Articles