NUGGET AS “BIG AS A HOUSE”

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 200, 27 August 1935, Page 10

NUGGET AS “BIG AS A HOUSE”

Huge U.S. Gold Vault

A cube of gold, about the size of | two aud a story house, reproJents the 9,000,000,000 dollars oi precious metal round which spectacu<r precautions are now taken in America lor national safekeeping. An isolated army post at Fort Knox, fcy., is to be the site for a modern tale strong-box, in which a good of the nation’s metallic reserve fE to be buried. It will be guarded by device known to the ingenuity tho most up-to-date chemistry and metallurgy, by the modern equivalent pf what the old Aladdin’s lamp storygales described as dragons and genii. The hurried construction of a subiei ranean 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 •s is now kept in the other inland gold reserve base at Denver, Colo. A mechanised cavalry unit of the army is stationed at Fort Knox, which v ill be handy if anyone should attempt to tamper with the gold supply. The decision tn set up an inland gold concentration point really bc&su with new world gold financial

policies. Previously gold circulated irorn 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, and 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 cau patrol about it and beneath it. It will bo supported within its exterior undcrgrouMl 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, castiron 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 limelock door will give tl»e only entrance. One million dollars worth of gold weighs about a ton, ».o that 900 tons represents America’s whole present gold supply. This will ho in; luded in n cube 31 feet by 31 Got by 31 li *t I The new slor.i vault Will pn,!,.,!>iv | hold a large fraction of this total.