South African gold mine salt shaker smuggling
Appears in 1 lecture.
Appearances across the corpus
Chem-lab worker filled his lunch salt shaker with gold chloride (white crystalline, looks like sodium chloride), carried out ~1 ounce of gold per day. Used as the punchline of the gold-theft sequence and to motivate aqua-regia gold chemistry. ## Figures referenced
My favorite story comes out of South Africa. One guy was working in one of the gold mines in South Africa in a chem lab, and he would bring in a hard-boiled egg with his lunch and a little salt shaker for lunch. But when he went home, he actually disposed of the salt and filled it up with gold chloride — a white salt that looks like sodium chloride. He was carrying out about an ounce of gold a day. People are ingenious — now they steal gold in their lunches.