Concepts of Value: Alchemy and Economics
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Economic concepts of value are derived from scarcity. Gold is scarce so it is precious. Seawater contains vast quantities of dissolved gold, perhaps as much as $10 trillion (US) worth, though in dilute concentrations. Recent evidence suggests that much of the earths continental gold deposits have biological origins. Certain bacteria are believed to have been involved in the precipitation of gold out of dilute hydrothermal solutions. A possible avenue for commercially viable gold recovery from seawater might involve such a bacterium, or a specifically engineered microbe. Aluminum was once very scarce and precious.
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Concepts of Value: Alchemy and Economics
- 1. Concepts of Value and Money and Disruptive Technology Alchemy and Economics
- 2. Concepts • Value • Exchange • Money • Precious Metals • Paper Money • Gold Standard • Disruptive Technologies
- 3. Value • Precious Metals have always been a store of value • Gold • Sliver • Abstraction of Value
- 4. Basis of Currency • Gold Doubloons • Silver Certificates • Fort Knox • Pound Sterling • Bi metal Standard
- 5. Gold Standard • William McKinley ran for president on the basis of the gold standard.
- 6. Going off Gold Standard • 1971 • Nixon Shock • Floating Currencies • Exchange Rates • Inflation • As a consequence of the costs of the Vietnam War, US needed to print more money than gold reserves could accommodate.
- 7. Intrinsic Value in Precious Metals • Utility? • Gold: incorruptible; doesn’t rust or oxidize • Philosophical meaning of value: permanence like the stars. • Rare
- 8. Alchemy • Get Rich quick • Turn base metals into Gold • Fore runner to chemistry
- 9. Famous people who were practicing alchemists or influenced by alchemical texts • Isaac Newton – Hinge point • Plato • Shakespeare • Leonardo Da Vinci • Rumi • John Milton
- 10. Isaac Newton • Physics – Universal Gravitation – Laws of motion • Calculus • Optics – Prism: separation of white light into rainbow spectrum – Reflecting Telescope
- 11. Isaac Newton • As Master of the Mint in 1717 in the "Law of Queen Anne" Newton moved the Pound Sterling de facto from the silver standard to the gold standard by setting the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and the silver penny in favor of gold.
- 12. Alchemical Processes • Purification • Reduction • Conversion • Proto - Chemistry
- 13. Alchemists to Chemists • Western alchemy is recognized as a protoscience that contributed to the development of modern chemistry and medicine • Francis Bacon • Linus Pauling
- 14. Rare = Precious = Valuable • Aluminum • Discovered in 1800s • So rare that the pyramid on to of the Washington Monument is covered in Aluminum leaf. • December 1884 • Laus Deo
- 15. Pyramidion on top of Washington Monument • Made of Aluminum • Inscriptions • Orientation to Sun • Meaning and Significance • Obelisk
- 16. Disruption of Value King of Siam visits King of France Napoleon III Ubiquitous Kitchen Wrap
- 17. Real Alchemy • Invention of Process to extract Aluminum using electricity • Charles Martin Hall • Lab experiment • Scale up • Need lots of electricity • Enabling technology
- 18. Edison and DC • Direct Current was the first distributed electricity • New York City had the first electric lights and power distribution • JP Morgan financed Edison’s electric operations • Consolidated Edison became General Electric
- 20. Tesla
- 21. Mad Scentist
- 22. Tesla and Twain • Twain spent a lot of time visiting Tesla’s lab in New York City. • These two men came to be friends—essentially, as mutual fanboys. • A bromance.
- 23. Invention of AC • Nickolai Tesla • Harness the power of Niagra Falls • Generators • Electric Motors • Distrbution – Transformers
- 24. Creative Destruction • Competing Systems: – Direct Current – Alternating Current • War of the Currents • Edison electrocuted dogs to “prove” the danger of AC
- 25. George Westinghouse • American entrepreneur and engineer who invented the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry. • Westinghouse/Edison Rivalry
- 26. Electrification of the World Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse built the first hydro-electric power plant in Niagara Falls and started the electrification of the world. Adam's Power Station (Power House No. 3), the only remains of the old Niagara Falls Power Plant.
- 27. Harnessing Nature’s Power The first use of Niagara Falls Power Company electricity was by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company (later to be renamed Aluminum Company of America), which used an electrolytic process invented by Charles M. Hall. The company was founded in Pittsburgh in 1886 but transferred operations to Niagara Falls during this period because of the prospect of cheap and reliable electrical power.
- 28. Charles Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) American inventor, music enthusiast, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron.
- 29. U.S. patent #400,666 Hall's method of processing the metal ore was to pass an electric current through a non- metallic conductor (molten sodium fluoride compound was used) to separate the very conductive aluminum. In 1889, Charles Martin Hull was awarded U.S. patent #400,666 for his process.
- 30. Oberlin College's most prominent benefactor: Aluminum Statue
- 31. ALCOA In 1888, together with financier Alfred E. Hunt, Charles Martin Hall founded the Pittsburgh Reduction Company now know as the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA). By 1914, Charles Martin Hall had brought the cost of aluminum down to 18 cents a pound and it was no longer considered a precious metal.
- 32. Value of Aluminum • Over 1000 uses • Value as scrap
- 33. Gold from Sea Water Seawater contains vast quantities of dissolved gold, perhaps as much as $10 trillion (US) worth, though in dilute concentrations. Recent evidence suggests that much of the earths continental gold deposits have biological origins. Certain bacteria are believed to have been involved in the precipitation of gold out of dilute hydrothermal solutions. A possible avenue for commercially viable gold recovery from seawater might involve such a bacterium, or a specifically engineered microbe.
- 34. Could we return to Gold Standard? • Exchange Rates • Credit Rating of Treasury Debt Erodes • Hyper inflation • Nostalgia for underlying hard concrete value to money
- 35. Bitcoin • A move in the opposite direction toward transcendent unregulated immaterial notion of value representation. • Blockchain
- 36. Concepts of Value and Money and Disruptive Technology Alchemy and Economics
Editor's Notes
- Gold certificates were used as paper currency in the United States from 1882 to 1933. These certificates were freely convertible into gold coins.
- Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base metals into the noble metals gold or silver, as well as an elixir of life conferring youth and immortality. Western alchemy is recognized as a protoscience that contributed to the development of modern chemistry and medicine. Alchemists developed a framework of theory, terminology, experimental process and basic laboratory techniques that is still recognizable today. But alchemy differs from modern science in the inclusion of Hermetic principles and practices related to mythology, religion, and spirituality.
- Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727])[1] was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."[7] His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution. The Principia is generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever written, due, independently, to the specific physical laws the work successfully described, and for the style of the work, which assisted in setting standards for scientific publication down to the present time. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope[8] and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalised binomial theorem, developed Newton's method for approximating the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series. Newton's work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals.[9] Newton, although an unorthodox Christian, was deeply religious, and wrote more on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics. Newton secretly rejected Trinitarianism, and feared being accused of refusing holy orders.[10]
- Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, somewhat treading on the toes of Lord Lucas, Governor of the Tower (and securing the job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch for Edmond Halley). Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.[54][55] These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously, retiring from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercising his power to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters. As Master of the Mint in 1717 in the "Law of Queen Anne" Newton moved the Pound Sterling de facto from the silver standard to the gold standard by setting the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and the silver penny in favour of gold. This caused silver sterling coin to be melted and shipped out of Britain. Newton was made President of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis Britannica, which Newton had used in his studies.[56] Personal coat of arms of Sir Isaac Newton[57] In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge. The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the Parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.[58] Newton was the second scientist to be knighted, after Sir Francis Bacon.
- The discovery of aluminum is a perfect example of a once-scarce resource that became suddenly cheap and plentiful, thanks to advances in technology. This kind of disruptive innovation is becoming more commonplace, which means the world will soon be enjoying abundance on a scale never seen before in human history, predict Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their new book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in Italy in the year AD 23. He was a naval and army commander in the early Roman Empire, later an author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, best known for his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven volume encyclopedia describing, well, everything there was to describe. His opus includes a book on cosmology, another on farming, a third on magic. It took him four volumes to cover world geography, nine for flora and fauna, and another nine for medicine. In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius. The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.” This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold. Aluminum’s rarity comes down to chemistry. Technically, behind oxygen and silicon, it’s the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3 percent of the weight of the world. Today it’s cheap, ubiquitous, and used with a throwaway mind-set, but—as Napoléon’s banquet demonstrates—this wasn’t always the case. Because of aluminum’s high affinity for oxygen, it never appears in nature as a pure metal. Instead it’s found tightly bound as oxides and silicates in a claylike material called bauxite. While bauxite is 52 percent aluminum, separating out the pure metal ore was a complex and difficult task. But between 1825 and 1845, Hans Christian Oersted and Frederick Wohler discovered that heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and then distilling away the mercury left a residue of pure aluminum. In 1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville created the first commercial process for extraction, driving down the price by 90 percent. Yet the metal was still costly and in short supply. It was the creation of a new breakthrough technology known as electrolysis, discovered independently and almost simultaneously in 1886 by American chemist Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul Héroult, that changed everything. The Hall-Héroult process, as it is now known, uses electricity to liberate aluminum from bauxite. Suddenly everyone on the planet had access to ridiculous amounts of cheap, light, pliable metal. Save the beheading, there’s nothing too unusual in this story. History’s littered with tales of once rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual. Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.
- "The evolution of electric power from the discovery of Faraday in 1831 to the initial great installation of the Tesla polyphase system in 1896 is undoubtedly the most tremendous event in all engineering history" -Dr. Charles F. Scott, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Yale University and former President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
- Charles began his education at home, and was taught to read at an early age by his mother. At the age of six, he was using his father's 1840's college chemistry book as a reader[1]. At age 8, he entered public school, and progressed rapidly. His family moved to Oberlin, Ohio in 1873. He spent three years at Oberlin High School, and a year at Oberlin Academy in preparation for college. During this time he demonstrated his aptitude for chemistry and invention, carrrying out experiments in the kitchen and the woodshed attached to his house. In 1880, at the age of 16, he enrolled in Oberlin College. Oberlin College, the first co-educational college in the United States, was founded in Oberlin in 1833 to be "the gathering point in a community devoted to high thinking and plain living"[2]. Hall was encouraged in his scientific experiments, with ideas and materials from Professor Frank Fanning Jewett (1844–1926). Jewett received his undergraduate and some graduate training from Yale University. From 1873 - 1875, he studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Here he met Friedrich Wöhler, and obtained a sample of aluminum metal. Upon returning to the United States, he spent a year assisting Wolcott Gibbs at Harvard University, then spent a further four years as Professor of Chemistry at the Imperial University of Tokyo in Japan. In 1880, he became the professor of chemistry and minerology at Oberlin College. The Jewett home is preserved in Oberlin as the Oberlin Heritage Center. The center features an exhibit called Aluminum: The Oberlin Connection, which includes a re-creation of Hall's 1886 woodshed experiment. The Hall House is also preserved in Oberlin, although the woodshed was demolished long ago. In his second term, Hall attended, with considerable interest, Professor Jewett's lecture on aluminum; it was here that Jewett displayed the sample of aluminum he had obtained from Wöhler, and remarked, "if anyone should invent a process by which aluminum could be made on a commercial scale, not only would he be a benefactor to the world, but would also be able to lay up for himself a great fortune[2]". Hall was determined that he would be the first. [edit] Discovery His initial experiments in finding an aluminum reduction process were in 1881; he attempted, unsuccessfully, to produce aluminum from clay by smelting with carbon in contact with charcoal and potassium chlorate. He next attempted to improve the electrolytic methods previously established by investigating cheaper methods to produce aluminum chloride, again unsuccessfully. In his senior year, he attempted to electrolyse aluminum fluoride in water solution, but was unable to produce aluminum at the cathode. In 1884, after setting up a homemade coal-fired furnace and bellows in a shed behind the family home, he again tried to find a catalyst that would allow him to reduce aluminum with carbon at high temperatures: "I tried mixtures of alumina and carbon with barium salts, with cryolite, and with carbonate of sodium, hoping to get a double reaction by which the final result would be aluminum. I remember buying some metallic sodium and trying to reduce cryolite, but obtained very poor results. I made some aluminum sulphide but found it very unpromising as a source of aluminum then as it has been ever since."[2]. He had to fabricate most of his apparatus and prepare his chemicals, and was assisted by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall (see Craig 1986, CIM Bulletin). The basic invention involves passing an electric current through a bath of alumina dissolved in cryolite, which results in a puddle of aluminum forming in the bottom of the retort. On July 9, 1886, Hall filed for his first patent. This process was also discovered at nearly the same time by the Frenchman Paul Héroult, and it has come to be known as the Hall-Héroult process. (Asimov 1982, p. 933) After failing to find financial backing at home, Hall went to Pittsburgh where he made contact with the noted metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt. They formed the Reduction Company of Pittsburgh which opened the first large-scale aluminum production plants. The Reduction Company later became the Aluminum Company of America, then Alcoa. Hall was a major stockholder, and became wealthy. The Hall-Héroult process eventually resulted in reducing the price of aluminum by a factor of 200, making it affordable for many practical uses. By 1900, annual production reached about 8 thousand tons. Today, more aluminum is produced than all other non-ferrous metals combined. Hall is considered the originator of the American spelling of aluminum. According to Oberlin College, he misspelled it on a handbill publicizing his aluminum refinement process. The process was so revolutionary, and brought the metal to such prominence, that Americans have spelled aluminum with one "i" since. In the United Kingdom and other countries using British spelling, only aluminium is used. The spelling in virtually all other languages is analogous to the -ium ending. Hall continued his research and development for the rest of his life and was granted 22 US patents, most on aluminum production. He served on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees. He was vice-president of the Alcoa until his death in 1914 in Daytona, Florida. He died unmarried and childless and was buried in Westwood Cemetery in Oberlin. Hall left the vast majority of his fortune to charity. His generosity contributed to the establishment of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, a leading foundation dedicated to advancing higher education in Asia in the humanities and social sciences.[3]