The GENIUS Who Saved Nobel Prizes from the Nazis (Using Chemistry)
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- Опубліковано 19 кві 2024
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#science #chemistry #history #aquaregia
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I like the story of Herman Mark, who was greatly concerned about his ancestry because his father had been Jewish (though he converted before Herman was born). The Nazis confiscated his passport, but he paid a bribe equivalent to a year's salary to get it back. He also converted all his assets into platinum in the form of wire, bent it into coathangers, hung clothes on them and put them in his car, then strapped a Nazi flag onto the radiator and drove across the border into Switzerland.
What makes this even more impressive is that it was done at the institute of theoretical physics, not the institute of chemistry ;)
It's a great story although to be fair it's almost impossible to do enough academically to complete a PhD in theoretical physics and then win a Nobel prize without having enough general chemistry knowledge or practical experience to know about aqua regia.
What I find impressive is what kind of heritage would make a man so obsessed with two shiny coins, that he'd go through this elaborate money laundering scheme.
To avoid the taxation by a force that's only going to be bailed out to USA and Argentina anyway, with piles and piles of the stuff "still missing". Try to ionize THAT acid.
Sheldon Cooper explains this. Chemistry is a subset of physics. If you know physics, you know EVERYTHING.
Well, the alternative would had been creating a quantum wormhole to safely send and store the medals in the sixteenth dimension. But they were a bit in a rush to develop all the needed math.
Chemistry is something everyone should know, good thing it's taught for like 7 years of grade school.
That 's cool, while watching this video the picture at 5:35 jumped out at me. I realized quickly, "That's my photo! Small world!" That's pure gold precipitate extracted from a solution of chloroauric acid.
Wow, small world indeed! I appreciate your great work 🙂
I’m not seeing it ,,, 🤔
@@aerthman The picture of chloroauric acid in the video,that orange looking powder was photographed by the person
@@bewinwilsonmathews1892 thank you… I was looking for a person.
That’s cool 😎!!!
This has always been one of my favorite stories from History/Chemistry because it's quite satisfying to just outsmart Nazis.
Us: "Why is a Nazi getting a Nobel prize bad?"
Them: "Because it just is, okay???"
@Gordy-io8sb ?? isnt it because the Nazis were actively destroying works done by Jewish scientists?
@@Gordy-io8sb Cause they would steal it? Politics aside, would *you* just give a random solider your solid golden medal that's also the most prestigious award within academia??
You can also argue that it could be used to fund the war effort - however small of a drop it may be, if it wasn't important then there wouldn't be a ban on it leaving the country in the first place
Yet another example of the Danes (and their friends) stepping up to give the Nazis what-for without them even knowing they'd been had.
There's a song about another one: Fred Small, "Denmark 1943" ua-cam.com/video/Nf69cITTjCg/v-deo.htmlsi=OSWuzsaPkS8SipY_
As explained in the video, finding it would have implicated multiple people responsible for smuggling it out to begin with and put their lives in danger.
Somewhere, somebody is selling this " Luxury Drain Cleaner " that has gold in it for a million dollars
To the people who think they could’ve just hid it: the Nazis were literally invading Denmark as they were thinking how to hide the medals, so like others said, hiding it underground isn’t a idea as they could be found easily by checking loose dirt and using metal detectors. Hiding it in some secret area also wouldn’t work due to metal detectors and since the Nazis occupied the area for quite some time, the Nazis could’ve found it if they spent enough time fucking around. Essentially, dissolving the gold into liquid and hide it in plain sight had a higher chance of protecting it considering they only had around 6 hours or so to hide them.
More likely the science guys just wanted to do science things and have a story they can tell later.
@@chasejones8302 how about you try to hide 2 pieces of gold when the Nazis are coming to your area in 6 hours and you have to hide it well enough so that the Nazis can’t find it for a few years.
@@chasejones8302 "having a story"? Yea they've been suddenly invaded, I think that takes care of that.
The German Army did not have metal detectors.; they had bayonets.
Metal detectors can only pick up ferrous metals, of which gold is not.
One amazing thing about this is that those two new metals are gonna be mixed with the two original binding the two scientist together for eternity (or untill the metals are broken down again)
Separate flask maybe?
Or they just recast it into 2 different medals
@@ignatoseg4664providing they didn’t use separate flasks then even if they recast the medals they will still contain good from the other medal
Fun fact: In Russian it's called Czar's vodka
* Tsar' / Царь
@@Cjnw "czar" is an accepted variant spelling of "tsar", it dates back to when ц was romanised as cz (which I personally don't like as it might get confused with Polish cz which makes a ch sound.). I personally prefer "tsar", but "czar" is correct.
Aqua regia means royal water after all
Makes sense to why
WARNING: Do NOT get this mixed up with the Czar’s actual vodka. Trust me.
I heard about this in a chemistry past paper. My exam board likes to get some obscure example to make an excuse for a complicated balancing equation. This one was painful in the mock to do but It does work well.
What a brilliant story. No waffle, straight concise facts and historical detail. I liked how you explained how the gold from the Nobel Prize Medals was hidden and how it was restored back. Very informative.
IIRC, the version of this story that I read was that the medals were each put into solution in their own bottle and each bottle was labelled with the contents in latin. They weren’t sending scientists to search for medals so the Germans wouldn’t have known what it meant and they would have had to read the latin label of every bottle in the building even if they had known what had been done. Genius.
Knowing Latin was widespread in Germany at this time as it belonged to the curriculum of 'Gymnasiums' (high schools). So most German officers would have been able to read these labels in contrast to American officers..
@@gottfriedheumesser1994 I had high school classmates that were studying latin in the 80s. Latin used to be a cliche high school subject in the US. I will agree with anyone who says our education system is circling the drain today, but in the 40s it was probably pretty good.
That said, regardless of your ancestry if you didn't know what "aqua regia" was you probably wouldn't think twice about just one container of liquid in a laboratory filled with chemicals.
@@stickyfox In the 1960s, I had Latin for six years and 5 hours a week. Regardless of your ancestry (?) I know what it means. I don't need classmates as Latin was compulsory.
1:05 They gathered for the meeting in Denmark and finished in Germany /s
The entire invasion onyl took 6 hours, so they really had to be quick with their actions.
As far as I know, the mechanism of Au dissolutin in Aqua regia includes oxidatuon of gold not by HNO3, but by Cl2: HCl+HNO3 -> NOCl; NOCl -> NO + Cl2.
That’s my understanding. The oldest method of producing the material is to add salt and nitric acid. Surprisingly the gold processing facilities in the mountains of Colorado were actually using Cl2 from gas cylinders. 🤔 You kind of forget, as long ago as that mining was done it was one of the most sophisticated chemical operations of its time.
It so happens I'm doing an Oxford Uni course on the 12th century renaissance which briefly includes alchemy and the use of aqua regia, resulting in an effect known as "rubedo", or reddening, which must refer to the color of that solution. I'd like to know more about what those alchemists thought they'd achieved, however far off the right track they were.
Love this use of chemistry! Thanks again for doing another great video and your simple way of explaining everything 🙌🏼
I've actually used Aqua Regia to dissolve stainless steel to analyze its components. I remember the professor telling us that it would dissolve gold. This story would make a profound impression on high school students being taught equilibrium phenomena.
👏 Great video! It's one of my favourite chemistry stories, since I used aqua regia quite often during my PhD work on gold nanoparticles. It turns such a pretty shade of orange 😊
de Hevesy deserved a 2nd Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this.
* Dissolves other scientists' noble price medals
* Leaves to win his own nobel prize
* Refuses to elaborate
Sigma move
Interestingly enough you can also dissolve gold with hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid. It has the benefit of not having to get rid of excess nitric acid. There is a fellow on UA-cam called Sreetips who does precious metal refining and he has a few videos demonstrating the process.
we're all here because sreetips :)
thats ingenius and pretty cool of that they got the Nobel Prize people to cast the gold back in to medals
I’m literally watching this procrastinating on working on my Franck-Hertz experiment lab report. Perhaps this is a sign to get back to work lol
He could have added sodium metabisulphate then filtered out the precipitated cement gold before melting and casting.
Even with this story as an inspiration, I don't think I would have done any better than barely passing my high school chemistry course. Thanks for the presentation, though. Very nicely researched and delivered.
I have a question. While it obviously hid it from the Nazis, and gave them back the medal, didn't it also end up getting elemental gold from the reaction? So as to say, they started with 23 carat gold, and from the solution extracted 24 carat gold, or pure gold. Or is there something amiss in my understanding?
There may have still been impurities in the gold after reducing, but yeah it would be very close to 24 carat. The smith at the Nobel institute likely added impurities back into the gold to bring it back to 23 carat, since 24 carat gold is too soft.
There are other steps involved and just dissolving it in aqua regia doesn't guarantee that it will come out as pure elemental gold because the other metals will also dissolve and some trace amounts will follow the gold when it is reduced back to metallic form. But it will surely be more pure than 23K gold.
Thanks for this, what an excellent video. Three take-aways for me:
a) A great history/chemistry crossover story
b) An application of the quote from The Last Crusade of Indiana Jones "it tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them"
c) A great explanation of applying Le Chatelier's principle which I can use as an example with my HIgher Chem class next year.
Many years ago in college I wanted to use gold chloride for use in making a rose colored enamel. It was too expensive for a student budget so I talked to a friend at the chemistry dept and he outlined this process for making gold chloride. When he got to the bit about boiling off the aqua regia and all the things to be careful of while doing so I sort of lost interest. I think he thought I was a bit of a weenie as he'd started the whole process with "It's pretty simple and you really don't need any special equipment, all you need to do is ..."
People who purify gold mix it with silver before attempting to dissolve it. It dissolves much more quickly when it’s alloyed with silver. 23ct gold would dissolve very slowly if at all. They use minimal nitric acid though because excess is a nuisance to get rid of.
What a story. I'm a huge science nerd (mostly physics) and WW2 buff and I hadn't heard it before but I will be recounting it at parties now!
I never heard this story before this is fantastic.
Thanks for the
The chances of that glass beaker still being there were one in a million.
Been watching enough sreetips I already knew how aqua regia was made 😅
What an incredible story of how these men were able to keep their gold.
Well yeah, the gold itself was probably not the most important thing to hide. It was the prizes. If they had won the war, they could have claimed these people never got them in the first place.
Thank you for sharing this informative historical fact. I had read about it many years ago in a book. That book didn't cover it in detail though.
As for another peice of history about ingenious use of chemistry I submit as follows. It is related to none other than alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan(c.721-c.815 C.E.). He was the disciple of Ja'afar Sadiq (c.700-c.765 C.E.) and was taught alchemy/chemistry by him. It is said that Jabir invented, under the guidance of Ja'afar, an ink for secret writing which revealed the writing only to the exposure of heat e.g heat generated by candlesticks, oil lamps etc. It is interesting to know that hydrochloric and nitric acids as well as nitrohydrochloric acid i.e. aqua regia were invented by Jabir too most probably under the guidance of his master and mentor Ja'afar Sadiq.
I had heard this story before, but I didn't know the details.
I was familiar with this story, but I appreciate your more detailed explanation of how these two scientists outwitted the nazis.
Awesome story!
what's your source for this story? im curious where to read more about this
Check the CCEA As1 Chemistry past papers. They used this story for a question a few years ago. Not too sure the exact year but you are looking for a redox question about it. If you don't live in the UK you can't do this But I'll actually just find it.
Alright it was Question 13 paper 2019 but they don't site the source. I forgot the only do that for images. Maybe if you looked around more or had the confidential versions but if you look it up on wikipedia you can find their sources. Wikipedia is the best place to find good sources not the best source but best source of sources.
@@cillianennis9921 thank you !
I learned about aqua regia from the anime element hunters when I was a teenager.
that anime about chemistry had a very original plot.
it gets bad after season 1. the ending did not make any sense.(it could have been worse, at least they saved the world).
if you are going to watch it just watch the first season and pretend it got canceled aftwards.
that anime has wasted potential.
in that episode two beetles from the nega-earth absorbed posi-gold and became huge, so the protagonists had to make a pool filled with aqua regia in order to extract the gold from them.
More impressive is that no swiss scientists were present to take the flask
Bravo chiaro e preciso
Sreetips UA-cam channel uses these and other similar processes to recover scrap gold all the time.
I wonder how much lighter were the medals were after being reformed
brother how pure was it in % scale?
23k is 95.8% pure
If you are asking if this method purified the gold somehow, it probably didn't as whatever metal "contaminants" the gold had probably dissolved in the solution as well, and in the end you'd end up with the same material after evaporating the solution.
almost as cool as Walt's use of mercury fulminate in Breaking Bad ;)
The story with mercury fulminate in Breaking Bad is a bit distorted from a chemical point of view...but it's just a movie😀
@@user-vu4qr7cv7bwhat I always thought was an insane plot hole is that dropping it on the ground made it blow up but an explosion with a strong enough pressure wave to break all the windows didn’t set off the rest of the bag…
@@melody3741 exactly....there is an article " Braking Bad IV - can a little crystal blow up a room?" on mercury fulminate...if you are not familiar with it I recommend it to you...😀
@@melody3741not to mention mercury fulminate being so unstable getting a bag or rocks that big would be near impossible
Now I'll smuggle gold to my country like this.
That's one way to keep your assets from government.
2:29 Nitric and hydrochloric acids: togethaa we will devour the very gold
Amazing story... ingenious method at least...
Great story!
Just go over to Sweden, strange.
I have seen this done for purifying the gold. All you need to do is just outsmart the law enforcers who often are less educated, by taking advantage of what they don't know
How heavy was that flask?
The medals are 175 grams each, so there would be 350 grams of gold dissolved in the liquid.
The aqua regia itself has a density nearly the same as water.
Though I don't know how much acid you need to fully dissolve 350 grams of gold.
But I think if you had a container filled with 1 liter of liquid, it probably wouldn't be much heavier than 1200 to 1300 grams. Heavier than the 1000 grams of pure water, but you might not even notice that difference if you were holding it in your hand.
@@Yora21 that’s crazy.
The only problem is that you can not recover exactly 100% of the gold. But close to that, if you are very careful. Also, wouldn't a flask of gold chloride solution be noticeably heavier than normal? And would this be something that would tip off someone to it's contents?
If you enter a lab, you'll see a bunch of selves with a bunch of solutions. Even if you are a Nazi, it is probably common sense not to fuck with that, as half of the materials gives you cancer, the other half just kills you. Including aqua regia.
Also, if you do it well, I don't think there would be any significant losses in this specific reaction.
I doubt a German soldier tasked with retrieving gold medals would think twice about an unusually heavy orange liquid.
if you where a soldier and enter a laboratory and see a bunch of color liquids you wouldnt get close to that shit because they may explode provoke a toxic gas or worse give all your troops a mortal disease reason it was unoticieable by any soldier when someone doesnt know about weird liquids they dont touch it since they know a bad move can provoke a new disease
Its a lab. Labs contain lots of scary stuff known only to those who read chemistry books. German soldiers were typically 19 year old shooters who know nothing about chemistry (there was no UA-cam, Sreetips, or anything like that in those days). To them, all those 'funny coloured flasks' probably contained something that if you spilled a drop on yourself, would strip you down to the bone in seconds. So they stayed WELL away.........
Thanks. :)
So gold has a valence of 3?
A very interesting story.
YAY, SCIENCE!
I like science.
I love history.
And I absolutely friggin hate Nazis.
So this is the perfect video for me. 😁
Aqua Regia is the combination of the three top acids..HCL , H2So4, and Nitric acid.
powerful antidote to whatever ails ya!
The guy who invented kidney dialysis hit his work from them as well…
Better hiding through chemistry! Love it!
If you like refining then Sreetips is the guy with the channel of the same name.👍🏴
All I hear in this video is Sreetips' voice.
Outstanding!! 👏👏👏😎👍
Good story.
very cool story
Very good
Yo that’s what dr doe was talking about
Now that's cool!
So are Max von Laue and James Franck now properly recognized as sharing in two Nobel prizes, not just the ones they won?😄
Fooling into thinking silver could turn gold
Considering ancient currency was in the form of salt, I suppose salt extraction
The invention of metal purifying and forming
Elon musks innovation
Hydrogen generation
It's all amazing and I'm disappointed many dismiss what we take for granted. Great story
The thumbnail looks like it was preserved in AMBER.
Thats what I would've done. Dip it in something that hardens, then spray paint it to look like a hockey puck or something.
Unfortunately the entire invasion was about 6 hours, so they probably had less than that.
It has other uses I can think of. Imagine a T-1000 kicking on your front door. You know something like this can deal permanent damage to it.
who saw the bear?
Great!!
Nice!
How big were these medals? Seems so weird that the germans would be looking so hard specifically for them that they couldnt find a decent hiding place for them.
they probably weren't even looking for them, why would they? lol
they were just looking for valuables. the nazis confiscated a lot of gold, jewelry, etc
@@redcrown5154 I don't if they were looking for those medals specifically, but the Nazis had a policy of looting gold and fine art from Jews and dissenters whenever possible. It's a good thing that they were able to hide these medals, because Germans could have melted them down into bullion and used the gold to buy weapons from Spain or Switzerland.
Mine is 6.173 ounces or 175 grams 😊 it's not really large.
@@JohnDoe-hs1jp sure buddy haha
I really thought this was a video about a guy who was competing against nazis for the Nobel prize
If they fled to Sweden, wouldn't it be easier to take the medals with them?
Germany had made it publicly known that no gold would leave German borders. Only choice was to hide it where no soldier would look.
They really could have just buried it in someone's backyard though...
Bro the germans are literally knocking on your front door. How are you going to escape to your neighbor's yard?
@@HooverShrimpster They had time to dissolve gold, they had time to bury it
@@Superbug-tf8zy Gunther! Get the metal detector and search every spot inside this compound! Even the flower pot!
(Mind you, it's something that actually happened in history)
@@HooverShrimpster If I'm doing that, Hans, then you're checking for any obvious patches of dug-up dirt within 100 meters of the lab.
And to OP's point, they had no idea how long Denmark would be occupied and didn't want to lose their Nobel prizes to the first random German guy to bring a metal detector.
@@Superbug-tf8zy yeah but thats not as cool
Damn
What impressive is the fairytale that the Nobel Prize is a apolitical merit based prize has survived more than a century without falling apart!
That is the true achievement.
It is nasty shit.......I'll tell ya that.
This sounds like a fantasy. How hard is it to hide 2 small medals ina country the size of denmark.
*So, they thought dissolving the **_original_** medals ... and abandoning them (in that state), unprotected, on a shelf, **_during wartime, in a renowned _**_-target-_**_ building_** ... was more prudent than simply secreting their **_2.6" sizes_** ANYWHERE in an entire countryside? **-Genius!-** (I'll bet von Laue and Franck were even **_more_** dazzled by the Swedes' efficiency at **_taking 7 years to re-award them.)_* 🙄
All this effort for a few grams of gold.
Would have been more easy to find a lonely field or Forrest and bury them there.
Do tell me how to do that in the few minutes before the soldiers burst into your office specifically looking for it...
@@theotherohlourdespadua1131 And you think dissolving gold would take only minutes in lab ?
The key here isn't how easy it was or how long it took.
They were dissolved so that there would be absolutely no possibility of their discovery and them being traced back to von Laue and Franck. If the Germans had somehow come upon these medals it carried severe risks to those who smuggled them out. The only way to safely keep them from the Germans with 100% knowledge that they could not be traced back was to destroy them, and while the institute had ways to dissolve the gold, it did not have ways to melt it. A random lump of gold would also be way more conspicuous than a beaker of random orange liquid.
It was about safety first followed by convenience given the location and the expertise of those involved. They were chemists and physicists, not metallurgists and smiths.
@@urizen878 You think a freshly dug hole won;t be found by Germans looking for gold with metal detectors?
Far from a few grams, it sounds like both medals combined would be over a kilogram (I haven't done the math properly, though). That is thousands of modern dollars, not to say the potential legal ramifications from the German authorities.
Seems like hiding it in a number of other ways would've been easier.
They literally stated that the Nazis would search everywhere to find it. Also turning it into something else would make it a lot harder to find, in fact, you can even hide it in plain sight.
Easier, but far less subtle. Digging disturbs and displaces dirt, and if they had kept them in the building they could have easily been found. Of course, trying to take them somewhere else faced the same risks, and trying to leave Denmark risked driving into a checkpoint, and being searched.
They only saved the Gold not the Original cast Prizes..
if you can dissolve gold in aqua regia, then you have plenty of time
Doesn’t this just make them into regular gold lol? Like what is the point
To prevent the Germans from getting the gold and funding the war effort with it. Germany was killing people for their gold teeth and using the money to destroy the world. You try to stop them in any way you can.
Have you seen the whole video?
the point is preserving 13000usd worth of metal, that you can also recast later into any shape including the coins' shape
My guy, have you heard of symbolism?
So destroying them saved them? Coulda smashed the soft gold with a hammer till it couldn't be identified as a Nobel prize if that was the concern. Why not just hide the metals in an chemical solution? Unless they went and dumped out every container ited be just as hidden as before but not necessarily destroyed. To the people shouting about metal detectors id imagine the gold solution would set it off just as much but it sounds like they didn't run every bottle of chemicals through a metal detector so again could have hidden it there instead of destroying it
First of all it’s symbolic seeing as the same gold is used, and that’s all that matters to them. Number two is that they had life or death stakes. It’s easy to say “why not just do this slightly riskier plan” when you don’t have to fear for your life.
If it was 100% gold, it is 24 karat not 23 karat just saying that you might want to correct that.
gode meddews?
Seriously, there were over one billion places that they could have hidden them.
So, in short : they destroyed these men’s Nobel prizes because they couldn’t find a good hiding place, something they could have asked any random 3 year old …
If I'm fleeing I'm not gunna bother saving some prize. Sure I might need the gold for.money. if what good is gold to a dead man?
The alternative is letting the Nazis have it
They weren't smuggled out as a part of their owners fleeing. Max von Laue was still in Berlin when his medal was dissolved in Copenhagen.
The medals were smuggled out to save them from a German law which decreed all gold was the property of the German state and had to be confiscated. This is also why the medals had to be destroyed, if the Germans found them in Copenhagen they would know that they had been illegally smuggled out and it would lead to severe punishments for their owners back in Germany.
The genious was hiding it in plain sight by rendering it invisible to precious metal scanning detection appuratus
This is pure speculation about a brilliant use of chemistry in the Bible. For background you should read I Kings chapter 18, about the showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, as proposed by Elijah to decide which god was the True One. Briefly, the contest was to see whose god would send a fire from Heaven to consume a sacrifice. Verse 32 says Elijah built his altar from stones he had brought with him. Verses 33-35 say that Elijah instructed that lots of water be poured on the altar. Verse 38 says that the wood on the altar caught fire and that the stones were consumed too. I propose that Elijah's "stones" were made out of quicklime that reacted with the water to make enough heat to ignite the wood.
They ruined the medals to "save" them? Sounds a little fishy to me. I wasn't there though.
Misleading title & vid
Very clever but not clever enough to produce the actual medals again. THAT would be clever!! LOL.