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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tommaso who wrote (87613)	10/12/2007 1:39:04 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

My chem professor said that a Nobel winner in chemistry (from Poland I think) put his gold Nobel medal in a flask of aqua regia to make it dissolve. He was careful to mark the flask in his laboratory as dangerous, poison, acid!!, aqua regia, burns! or whatever so the Nazis would not smash it when they got there. After the war, he reclaimed his acid, added some chemical to cause the gold to precipitate out (from it's ionic state), took the gold back to the Nobel committee which then recast his medal. Not sure if the story was true, but certainly possible. Edit, from Wiki: When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation presented new medals to Laue and Franck.[3] en.wikipedia.org