Ok firsts things first. I believe that the claim that no one knows the full combo to the safe is true. My question is how was the safe created? I mean surely some guy working for some safe company made the tumblers for the safe even though he didnt know they were for fort knox. even if the creation of the safe was computerized how do they put in the combo? If its truly a turn dial safe then you would know what the last number was right?
And now for the bonus long question:
Why is gold valuable and why do we have it. Even in ancient times people wanted gold. But why? as a metal its pretty useless except in electronics which they didn’t have back then. So i assume it was valued because of its rarity? The US is no longer on the gold standard so why do we have a vault full of gold? Is it “just in case” kinda like our emergency oil reserves? Like if something bad happens to our economy we can just auction it off? Why a gold standard and not something rarer?
I’d be willing to bet that there are multiple locks, rather than any sort of strange lock that was built by, and could only be serviced by, multiple locksmiths. Any number of people may know the full combination of a lock, but that does no good if there are three separate locks on the door. Yes, you’d still need three locksmiths, but the locks themselves could at least be standard.
And… Fort Knox is bigger than a safe. There are several sub-vaults, each filled with gold, for a total of about 4600 tons of bullion.
Interestingly, a few years ago the Australian government quietly sold off its gold reserves in a series of tranches so as not to affect the global price.
Gold may be of limited use, but it is still rare and when short supply meets any kind of demand it makes for value beyond the intrinsic.
Why do you think that no one has the full combination for Fort Knox? It’s rather useless for us to discuss why something is true if it might not even be true. Also, it’s not in general a good idea to ask two questions in a thread when one isn’t announced in the title of the thread. You don’t get the right people clicking on the thread.
Besides being rare, it’s also beautiful, easy to transform (into delicate jewels, for instance) and, very important, it is left unaltered, even if you keep it for a very long time.
This gave it its huge value, and as a result it was very convenient as a currency (a small quantity of gold, easily transported, was very valuable) and, again, there was no risk your currency would, for instance, rust.
Compare bringing around a cartload of iron (iron also was used as a currency at some point) and some gold coins and you can easily figure out why gold was preferred.
However, it must not become too rare and too valuable to be kept as a currency. It’s exactly what happened in Europe during most of the middle-ages, when the minting of gold was discontinued, and only silver used as a currency.
A very deep question. But the quick answer to why gold was considered as valuable so early on is that it’s not only rare, it’s nonreactive. Gold doesn’t bond easily with a lot of things, so anything made from a piece of nice shiny gold metal will retain its luster and its bright shiny color without corroding or tarnishing. That’s prettty impressive. In fact, Nature sometimes delivered gold in the form of nice, shiny nuggets naturaly, giving people the idea. Gold didn’t hide in ores like copper and zinc and silver and mercury – it was right there to be admired. So it was desirable from the start, and, naturally, guys at the top of tye food chain demanded it for themselves, which gave gold a special position as a sign of status. It was the ideal medium for coins, since everyone wanted it – it was small and easily carried and could be exchanged for other items of value. And it wouldn’t rust away like iron or copper coins. That the gold itself couldn’t be used for anything practical – you couldn’t eat it or anything – has been the cry of moralists from Aesop and his tale of King Midas (and probably earlier) through Thomas More’s Utopia to the present day. But people still want the gold, because OTHER people want the gold and see it as valuable.
It was precisely because you couldn’t do anything else with gold that it was ideal for use as money. You don’t want to be able to eat money. Money needs to be effectively indestructible to act as a store of value. Another good feature of gold is that its value depends solely on its quantity - if you have a one-ounce lump of gold and you cut it in half, you still have an ounce of gold worth exactly the same amount. Try doing that with a diamond, or a work of art, and you’ll see why gold made good money. Likewise you can pound it flat, melt it, drop it into acid or draw it into a wire without affecting its value. Also if I have an ounce of gold it’s exactly as valuable as your ounce of gold, or anyone else’s ounce of gold. Diamonds, by contrast, come in varying quality; one diamond isn’t necessarily as valuable as another of the same weight. Economists say gold is fungible - a good word to drop in casual conversation if you want to impress people.
I remember reading somewhere that the Fort Knox set for Goldfinger, whilst not accurate, was apparently not completely unlike the real thing, despite the fact the producers basically made the interior sets up from their imaginations…
One of the best posts I’ve ever read on the SDMB was a poster describing how the locks worked at Ft. Knox. It started out convincing, and got more and more outrageous as the post progressed. I’ve tried searching for it, but didn’t have any luck. A little help?
The thread was also full of good info about Fr. Knox in general.
The word “fungible” is the most worthwhile thing I took from my college Econ 101 course.
I also have heard that the Ft. Knox interior sets in Goldfinger were largely accurate, even though they were based on guesswork (the Depository doesn’t give tours, no way, nohow). I understand, however, that you can’t see all the gold at once, as you could in the movie - it’s behind walls, not bars.
The original, signed Declaration of Independence and Constitution were moved to Ft. Knox for safekeeping during World War II, IIRC.
Why does the OP assume that it’s combination locks on the vaults at Fort Knocks to begin with?
I’ve been in nuclear missile silos and weapons storage areas. We do not keep loaded nuclear weapons postured behind combination locks. There are electronic locks and encrypted key code ‘boxes’ a person must physically wear to gain access to some of these facilities. I would assume there would be multiple layers of security at a Federal bullion storage site too: key/code locks, biometric sensors, physical turnkey locks, and lasers. . . lots and lots of lasers.
Why assume it’s just a simple, tumbler-based combo lock?
Not true - something lighter than gold, you could mix in a lighter metal and a heavier metal, and get something that weighed the same for the same volume.
Gold was as heavy as it got in the old days, there wasn’t a combination of metals you could add that wouldn’t lighten it.
