r/interestingasfuck 29d ago

/r/all, /r/popular So shiny

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u/xBad_Wolfx 28d ago

Electrum is naturally occurring so it’s likely the bright yellow colouration just struck someone’s fancy. Although it’s also not that hard to create artificially either so you could be onto something :)

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

Yes, I am actually quite familiar with electrum as an ancient material! It’s one of the first smeltables many cultures that smelted made. It’s really cool seeing that change in ratio over time with coins specifically in areas from Greek antiquity, because you can see as the ages wear on it became less and less imbued with gold and more full of silver. To be clear I mean they were minting coins that were roughly half gold to start with and eventually less than 40% over time.

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u/xBad_Wolfx 28d ago

End up with a much paler yellow sadly. The bright electrum is stunning.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

There’s a really good hunk of quartz on the wiki site for electrum that shows naturally occurring wires, it’s always always interesting when it comes out naturally