Of all the elements, gold is perhaps the most coveted by humanity. It represents wealth, power, prestige, and a love of both the mortal and the divine. For this metal mankind fought wars, assassinated, tortured, crossed deserts, discovered new continents, and spent centuries trying to create it from other metals. The three reasons for the Spanish exploration are traditionally cited as for gold, God, and glory. Given the ever-increasing price of gold, the manufacture of solid gold objects is extremely expensive and in many cases, impractical due to its softness and high density. The search for a method of depositing a thin layer of gold on an object led to the development of gold gilding and later gold electroplating. Before the advent of the Renaissance and modern science, all advances in chemistry were made in the field of alchemy. The word alchemy is an unusual combination of the Arabic word “al” for “the” and the old Greek word “chemia” that refers to Egypt. Together they loosely translate as “the Egyptian Art.” In the Arabic empires, it was believed that all metals were made up of varying proportions of sulfur and mercury. Gold was viewed as the perfect combination of these two “baser” elements. 1 The greatest alchemist of the Arabs was Geber. He wrote three books on his pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. It is from these works that the word “gibberish” is derived because all three works were nonsensical. For hundreds of years, alchemists throughout Europe tried to decipher his writings, believing that he had encrypted them to protect his secrets. 1