by John Browne
34. Bernstein, The Power of Gold, p. 279.
35. http://goldsheetlinks.com/production.htm
36. Sebastião Salgado, Workers (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), p. 19.
37. Serra Pelada is due to be reopened by a large mining company in 2013, but operated by heavy machinery rather than by hand.
38. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (London: Macmillan, 1984, originally published in 1931), pp. 183–4.
39. Our obsession with the Egyptian gold in Tutankhamun’s tomb, for example, led us to overlook historically and archaeologically more significant discoveries.
SILVER
1. An account of the conquistadors’ search for the silver mountain can be found in Enrique de Gandía’s Historia crítica de los mitos de la conquista Americana (Buenos Aires: 1929), pp.145–96.
2. In Ayamá language: ‘Pachacamac janac pachapac guaccaichan’. Waldemar Lindgren & J. G. Creveling, ‘The Ores of Potosí, Bolivia’, Economic Geology, May 1928, Vol. 23, No. 3, p. 234.
3. In Capoche’s Relación general de la Villa Imperial de Potosí. Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí 1545-1650 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), p. 3.
4. Lewis Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 28.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. On one occasion Don Quixote de la Mancha quotes his servant, Sancho Panza, as using the saying.
7. Lewis Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 30.
8. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain, p. 45. Indeed, the name of the forced-labour system, the mita, came from the pre-Conquest days under Inca rule. For the yanaconas, the free-floaters in Inca society who were previously attached to nobles and military leaders, the new arrangement could even have been beneficial. In the early years, over 7,000 yanaconas worked at mining or ore smelting in Potosí, many of them serving Gonzalo Pizarro. After providing two marks of silver a week they were allowed to keep anything else they produced; some became quite rich.
9. As the scale of mining at Potosí increased, Spaniards scoured the countryside for new workers, drawing the mita from an ever-greater distance. Those from the lower regions couldn’t survive the cold harsh climate of Potosí and many died en route.
10. Dominican monk Santo Tomas’s 1550 report to the Council of the Indies. Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí, p. 25.
11. Each year, Luis Capoche wrote, fifty miners died in hospital ‘swallowed alive’ by the ‘wild beast’ that was Potosí. Combined with those who died outright in the mines, it is probable that a few hundred miners died each year as a result of mining accidents. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain, p. 145.
12. Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí, p. 25.
13. Many of the Bohemian silver mines were abandoned because of flooding or the persistence of ‘noxious air’ in the shafts. These problems were eased by the development of drainage and ventilation technologies, but were not effectively solved until the invention of the coal-powered steam pumps in the eighteenth century.
14. The modern ‘dollar’ can be traced back to the ‘thaler’ from Joachimsthal.
15. Agricola, De re metallica, p. xxv.
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Ibid., p. 5.
18. Agricola wrote that the miner must understand ‘Philosophy’, ‘Astronomy’ and ‘Arithmetical Science’ if he is to find veins, determine their direction and whether they can be mined profitably. Philosophy in its medieval meaning encompassed the natural sciences, while astronomy, it was generally believed, enabled you to determine the direction of veins. Agricola, De re metallica, p. 4.
19. Ibid., p. 36. People flocked to the Freiberg mines, as they would to Joachimsthal 350 years later. The nearby village of Christiandorf, grew suddenly and haphazardly, becoming known as Sachstadt, ‘the town of the Saxons’. Otto financed the building of new town walls and gave 3,000 marks of silver to the nearby monastery. He also purchased huge swathes of land and stored in his treasury more than 30,000 marks of silver, later seized by the Bohemians in 1189.
20. Most of these silver sources were first discovered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as traders and colonisers searched central Europe for ore veins. The region had been left relatively untouched, as it lay beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Later discoveries on the border of Bohemia and Moravia kept increasing Europe’s silver supply. In 1298 a vast silver reserve was found in Bohemia, producing over 20 tonnes of silver a year for the first forty years. But as the flow of silver from Europe’s mines dried up, silver continued to move out of Europe along trade routes to the East. When people realised silver was disappearing, they began to hoard what little they had and in doing so created the Great Bullion Famine of the fifteenth century.
21. Agricola, De re metallica, p. 217. Although Agricola accepted the general belief in demons and gnomes, he was, in all other respects, very sceptical regarding the supernatural. The divining rod was, at the time, widely used as a tool for finding veins. On considering the merits of the arguments for the divining rod’s use, Agricola concludes that a miner, ‘since we think he ought to be a good and serious man, should not make use of an enchanted twig’. Ibid., p. 41.
22. Ibid., p. 18.
23. During this period, the Delian League, a voluntary alliance of Greek states, was essentially turned into an Athenian Empire. Most members of the Athenian league donated to a central treasury, the funds of which were used to increase the size of the formidable Athenian fleet further and to finance the Athenian building programme, not least the magnificent Parthenon dedicated to Athena.
24. Xenophon, A Discourse Upon Improving the Revenue of the State of Athens.
25. The Spartans fought against Athens in the Peloponnesian War, beginning in 431 BC. To fund the war, producing armaments and paying soldiers, the minting of Owls accelerated on a huge scale. Heavy borrowings were made from the treasuries created on the Acropolis as a wartime security.
26. Alcibiades, the defecting Athenian general, had explained to the Spartans that the occupation would cut off the Athenians from their homes, farmland and the silver mines of Laurium. Some 20,000 slaves deserted the area, many from Laurium’s silver mines, removing one of Athens’ dominant sources of revenue.
27. An international ratio between the value of gold and silver emerged at around 15.5 to 1, but in the 1870s this ratio began suddenly to rise upwards. Gold became untied from silver and established itself as the dominant element of value. Just as sudden changes in the ratio of the price of oil to the price of gas can indicate a fundamental change in how we produce and consume these energy sources, the sudden change in the ratio of gold to silver was indicative of a shift in the international monetary system and of human perceptions of the relative value of these two metals.
28. When a photon of silver strikes photographic paper, an electron may be released. This electron can then turn a positively charged silver ion into a neutral atom of silver. The silver atom is unstable, but if enough photons strike simultaneously then many silver ions are turned into silver atoms, forming a stable ‘latent image’ site. The overall latent image that is formed can then be developed later on to reveal the photograph.
29. The darkening of silver salts by the sun was first noted in 1614 by Angelo Sal: ‘When you expose powdered silver nitrate to the sun, it turns as black as ink.’ However it was unclear if this was due to the heat or the light emitted from the sun. Helmut Gernsheim, The Origins of Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 19.
30. ‘An account of a method of copying paintings upon glass, and of making profiles, by the agency of light upon nitrate of silver. Invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq. With observations by H. Davy’, Journals of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1802, Vol. 1, pp. 170–74.
31. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844), p. 6.
32. Fox Talbot, ‘Some Account of the Art of Photog
enic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil’, read to the Royal Society on 31 January 1839.
33. Daguerre had developed these methods in a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce created the world’s first permanent photograph in 1826 using the light sensitivity of bitumen. He was also the first to write down the concept of photography in 1829: ‘heliography consisted of spontaneously reproducing the image received in the camera obscura by the action of light, with all the graduations from black to white’. And in 1858 Nicéphore’s cousin Niépce de Saint-Victor observed the effect of uranium on photographic plates, forty years before Becquerel. He did not, however, understand the significance.
34. He discovered that a combination of silver nitrate, acetic acid and gallic acid (gallo nitrate) would create a latent image on the paper which could be developed later on by recoating the image with gallic acid. Today film photographs are developed using a ‘reducing agent’ which acts to turn silver ions into silver metal. This reaction happens more quickly around the silver atoms formed in the latent image, and so by controlling the developing time an image is produced.
35. ‘Calo’ from greek kalos, meaning beautiful, good and useful.
36. The spread of the calo type was hindered by restrictive patents enforced by Fox Talbot in contrast to the daguerrotype which, sponsored by Arago, was an object of national pride and so given to the world. To make others aware and convince them of the importance of his discovery, Fox Talbot published his photographic work, The Pencil of Nature, in six parts between 1844 and 1846. Photography was an alien concept at the time, and Fox Talbot had to explain to readers how the plates were created ‘by mere action of Light upon sensitive paper’ and how ‘groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures as would require, since the camera depicts them all at once’. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Plate XIV.
37. Eastman chose ‘Kodak’ because he wanted a name that was distinctive, that couldn’t be misspelled easily and that was easy to pronounce in most languages.
38. Brian Coe, George Eastman and the Early Photographers (London: Priory Press, 1973), p. 56.
39. History of Kodak: George Eastman, www.kodak.com
40. The box was only 8 centimetres high and 16 centimetres long. The lens was chosen so that everything further than a metre away from the camera was in focus.
41. In The Kodak Primer, Eastman wrote: ‘The principle of the Kodak system is the separation of the work that any person whomsoever can do in [making] a photograph, from the work that only an expert can do … We furnish anybody, man, woman, or child, who has sufficient intelligence to point a box straight and press a button … with an instrument which altogether removes from the practice of photography the necessity for exceptional facilities, or, in fact any special knowledge of the art.’ Michael Frizot, A New History of Photography (Milan: Konemann, 1998), p. 238.
42. Coe, George Eastman and the Early Photographers, p. 67.
43. ‘Saigon Execution 1968’, Eddie Adams, Associated Press. Sebastião Salgado, Migrations, (New York: Aperture, 2000), p. 209. ‘Auschwitz Children’, Photographer Unknown. Getty. Queen Elizabeth II: Portraits by Cecil Beaton (London: V&A Publishing, 2011).
44. Frizot, A New History of Photography, p. 591.
45. ‘The Acknowledged Master of the Moment’, Washington Post, 5 August 2004. In 1952 Cartier-Bresson published a book of his photographs entitled The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952).
46. ‘Eulogy: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan’, Time, 27 July 1998.
47. Salgado, Migrations. p. 14.
48. BP had earlier, and unsuccessfully, applied for the Block 65 concession.
49. Sarir was the only producing oilfield owned by BP and Bunker until the nationalisation in 1971.
50. In 1979, Bunker was sued by BP in the UK for development costs owed under their joint operating agreement. BP was awarded $15,575,823 and £8,922,060. Bunker did not pay these sums. Bunker was later declared bankrupt in 1988, after a US Court ordered him and his brother William Herbert Hunt to pay $130 million in back taxes, fines and interest to the Internal Revenue Service, following their attempt to corner the global silver market.
51. In an interview with financial journal Barron’s in April 1974. Harry Hurt III, Texas Rich (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981), p. 320.
52. Bunker had a passion for racehorse breeding. He was well known on the international racing circuit, amassing horses as he would later amass silver.
53. Hurt, Texas Rich, p. 325.
54. Bunker had two brothers, William Herbert Hunt and Lamar Hunt, also an elder sister, Margaret. Herbert Hunt was the brighter of the brothers who, unlike Bunker, succeeded in gaining a degree in geology. Lamar was a sports entrepreneur, making millions from World Championship Tennis.
55. Jerome Smith, Silver Profits in the Seventies (Vancouver: ERC Publishing, 1972), p. 31. Smith also pointed to the growing industrial use of silver in electronics and the reliance of the photography industry, most notably Eastman Kodak, on silver halide films. Like gold, silver is a very good conductor of electricity, so much so that during the Second World War, the Manhattan Project borrowed 13,500 tonnes of silver (worth more than $300 million) from the US Treasury. Copper was in short supply during the war and so they wanted to use silver instead to build giant electromagnetic coils used in the enrichment of uranium.
56. Evidence to a congressional committee in 1980. Stephen Fay, The Great Silver Bubble (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), pp. 29–30.
57. The Hunts believed that the US government might try and expropriate their hoard of silver and so moved it abroad. Their concerns were not unjustified; in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt had made the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates illegal, requiring all but a small amount of gold to be delivered to the Treasury in return for a fixed price that undervalued gold.
58. Hurt, Texas Rich, p. 409. The Hunts later pursued a lawsuit against Comex, the trading market, for changing the rules in the middle of the ‘game’.
59. If sold ignoring tax consequences.
60. Except for liquidation orders.
61. Hurt, Texas Rich, p. 410.
62. Ibid., p. 416.
63. All the Hunts’ main assets (energy, real estate and precious metals) had grown rapidly during the seventies. Before the crash they had assets worth $12 to 14 billion. Even after the crash they still had assets of around $8 to 10 billion and even if the price of silver dropped to zero they would have $6 to 7 billion left. They were not ruined, merely less wealthy.
64. Ibid., p. 420.
65. The ‘sweat of the sun’ and the ‘tears of the moon’ were Incan names for gold and silver.
URANIUM
1. The hypocentre is the point on the ground above which a bomb is detonated. In Hiroshima this point was 680 metres above ground.
2. In this section, I focus on Hiroshima as the first instance of uranium’s destructive use as a city-destroying bomb. Nagasaki is the only other city to feel the full force of an atomic weapon; it was the US’s target for the second (plutonium) bomb dropped three days later on 9 August 1945.
3. In May 1974, NHK Hiroshima radio station called for listeners to send in their own drawings of the event. More than 2,000 drawings were collected. Another call in 2000 elicited a further 1,338 drawings. Now the collection consists of over 3,600 pictures drawn by 1,200 sufferers.
4. ‘Weakly Writhing’ by Tomomi Yamashina, who was sixteen at the time of the bomb and standing 3,600 metres from the hypocentre in front of the Hiroshima First Army Hospital. She was seventy-two at the time of drawing in 2002 after a call for more pictures. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, A-bomb Drawings by Survivors (Hiroshima: The City of Hiroshima, 2007), p. 82.
5. George Shultz is an American economist, statesman and businessman. He served as the US Secretary of Labor from 1969 to 1970, as the US Secretary of the Treasury from 1972 to
1974, and as the US Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989.
6. The context of the Second World War gives insights into why the bomb was dropped. The detonation of the bomb and subsequent Japanese surrender brought the Second Word War to a sudden end. The atomic bomb created a certainty in an uncertain war. It was thought that the alternative, a US-led land invasion of Japan, would result in a far greater number of casualties: ‘It was a question of saving hundreds of thousands of American lives,’ US President Truman later told a TV audience. But those lives lost and those saved are incomparable; the event itself is an act of inhumanity regardless of the context. Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 303.
7. Although Pierre ultimately died after being struck by a horse-drawn carriage, Marie died from aplastic anaemia as a consequence of radiation exposure.
8. E. Rutherford, ‘Nuclear Constitution of Atoms’, Proc. Roy. Soc, A97, 374, 1920.
9. James Chadwick, ‘Possible Existence of a Neutron’, Nature, p. 312 (27 February 1932). Following his discovery of the neutron, Chadwick also went to work on the Manhattan Project.
10. Otto Hahn led the team that split uranium using neutrons. He was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Meitner should have been jointly awarded it.
11. Protons and neutrons are held together in the nucleus by the strong force, one of four fundamental forces in nature. The other three are the familiar gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the more obscure weak force.
12. Otto Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 116. Frisch was later among the first to hold the initial samples of U-235 produced in the Manhattan Project. ‘I had the urge to take one, as a paperweight, I told myself. A piece of the first uranium-235 metal ever made. It would have been a wonderful memento, a talking point in times to come.’ Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 64.
13. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, ‘Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: a New Type of Nuclear Reaction’, Nature, Vol. 143, No. 3615, p. 239 (11 February 1939). Otto Frisch, ‘Physical Evidence for the Division of Heavy Nuclei under Neutron Bombardment’, Nature, Vol. 143. No. 3616, p. 276 (18 February 1939).