Many people use the saying old is gold, many people have found objects to prove old is gold, but why “old is gold”?

Old is gold is a proverb said to be made by Benjamin Franklin, who used it in an essay (Advice to a Young Tradesman, 1748). The actual phrase was recorded in 1719 in the magazine The Free-Thinker. Old is gold means that old things are important, valuable and should not go to waste. Now I presume you would be thinking, people do not want old cars, non-energy efficient items like old iPhones and just throw them away.

But the old is gold saying can be used here. These are old, so you can reuse them into other great stuff. You can recycle the metal on the cars, there are precious metals in iPhones that should not go to waste. An old item turned into “gold”, meaning something far more important.

The thing that I want to talk about which perfectly resembles old is gold is most definitely ancient coins. If you thought that this was a useless coin, how much would you have lost? I would think about of 2 pounds to 10 with a possible chance? But if they are ancient or from roman era or know they are very precious you could have lost a lot more. I would think you would have lost in the cheaper price range. But if you were very unlucky, you could have lost a rare coin worth more than 100 pounds. Now if you were to throw away the most coting coin in the world from auctions (or else they would be a lot cheaper), you would have lost about 19,000,000 dollars. A lot, would you not agree? This old coin (which would have been made in 1933) costs a lot more than gold if you bought that much of gold. 1 kg of gold (at the time of writing) would have costed around 65,000 dollars! If you divide 19 million by 65 thousand, you would get roughly get 292 kg of gold. The coin, 1933 double eagle, weighs around 33g. For 33g of metal, you would get 292 kg of gold. This has happened due to its age and it being made once and then discontinued. I have been shocked while researching about this and I would have changed the proverb now to “Old is gold if not if not more”. But as you all would understand, this is a very rare case that it would be worth a lot more than gold.

The cost of rare coins are heavily based on 3 factors: the cost, the condition, and mainly the age. If you would have asked a passionate coin collector, he would happily take a Roman Empire coin compared to a normal 2 pound coin. Ok, I may have been biased with the age gap, the money offered and me asking a coin collector, but this is still hypothetical. A roman coin can cost from 100 to 27,000 dollars. And this is due to the age. A roman coin at that time would have probably costed under 50 pounds now, but due to time its age must have greatly improved. Plus, it may be also made of gold. This can also be “gold” to historians. Not the worth of the coin. The information historians can gather from an ancient artefact is astounding, astonishing and truly amazing. For example, if there is just a plain piece of clothing that was uncovered by the historians, they can figure out the date it was made, whether it was the outfit of the rich and they can also analyse why the piece of clothing was made.

I was previously telling you how you can recycle iPhones, here is what they do to thrown away iPhones. Did you know, Apple supports recycling? For every apple product you send to them to recycle, they will provide you with an incentive (a little gift). According to The Ohio State University, iPhones are disassembled and then the parts that can be recycled are recycled to help manufacture new iPhones. Places in America collect the iPhones and a site in Tanzania and China disassemble and recycle the raw materials uncovered. Plus, the iPhone screen isn’t normal glass but a combination of rare earth elements, including indium. Indium is worth $200 a pound (0.45kg) but there are no materials to extract it. Adding upgrades and breaking down individual components is difficult to do with iProducts because of the tightly packed components. In a metric ton of phones, there are 308 pounds of copper, 7 pounds of silver and .5 pounds of gold. All of these materials are hard to extract in their ores and would save a lot of money to Apple if they manage to recycle that much. This material would be typically be extracted from 2,000 metric tonnes of mined rock.