AMERICA’S GOLD

Taranaki Daily News, 6 September 1935, Page 14

AMERICA’S GOLD

SACK TO EARTH WHENCE IT CAME. ELABORATE PRECAUTIONS TAKEN. A cube of gold, about the size of a two and a-half storey house, represents the 9,000,000,000 dollars of precious metal round which spectacular precautions are now taken in America for national safekeeping. An isolated army post at Fort Knox is to be the site for a modem fairy tale strong-box, in which a good share of the nation’s metallic reserve is to be buried. It will be guarded by every device known to the ingenuity of the most up-to-date chemistry and metallurgy, by the modern equivalent of what the old Aladdin’s lamp story-tales described as dragons and genii. The hurried construction of a subterranean vault at the army post, 30 miles outside Louisville, has been authorised, but the plans have not yet been approved, the Treasury . Department said. At this “gold-storage plant” about the same amount of gold will ultimately be placed underground as is now kept in the other inland gold reserve base at Denver. A mechanised cavalry unit of the army is stationed at Fort Knox, which will be handy if anyone should attempt to tamper with the gold supply. The decision to set up an inland gold concentration point really began with new world gold financial policies. Previously gold circulated from hand to hand; now it is all going back underground; into the earth from which it came. No one will see it any more, no one will use it; pieces of paper called “money,” which are not payable in gold, will take its place in the trade centres, arid yet it will be piled there as the theoretical base of the whole fiscal system.

The vault will be surrounded by an air space, on all sides and below, so that guards can patrol about it and beneath it. It will be supported within its exterior underground vault by metal pillars. The actual storage vault itself will be made of a complicated intermixture of steel and concrete. Outside, there will be a layer of chilled, cast-iron plates while inside will be concrete, interlaced with steel webbing. Walls will be three or four feet ( thick, about the width of a mediaeval fortress. A very elaborate timelock door will give the only entrance. One million dollars worth of gold weighs about a ton so that 909 tons represents America’s whole present gold supply. This will be included in a cube 34 feet by 34 feet by 34 feet. The new storage vault will probably hold a large fraction of this total.