Shelly Clements, age 12, of Lansing, Mich., for his question:
WHAT EXACTLY IS FOOL'S GOLD?
When you are gold prospecting in likely places, any shiny yellow metal tends to look like the real thing. But sometimes the promising sample turns out to be pyrite, which is a chemical compound of iron and sulfur. Because pyrite is less costly than gold, people called it fool's gold. But let's not be fooled by this notion for sometimes a chunk of pyrite may be more useful than all the gold in Ft. Knox. Some people think of pure gold as money money money. They may get carried away with this notion and come down with the strange disease of the mind called gold fever. In gold rush days, many feverish prospectors felt that gold was so very valuable that nothing else had any value at all. Certainly they were determined never to be fooled by something they called fool's gold.
Often this shiny yellow mineral is found in deposits of real gold. Usually it is iron pyrite, a compound of iron and sulfur. But no matter how much it looked like the real thing, those gold hungry prospectors refused to be fooled.
The golden sample was heated and whacked with a hammer. If it tarnished or melted with a repulsive smell, if it shattered under the hammer, then it was discarded as fool's gold alias pyrite.
Suppose you were camping and lost all your gear, including the matches. A nugget of gold would be downright useless. But a piece of pyrite could at least give you a nice warm meal. For the hard, brittle mineral can be used to strike the spark to light a campfire which could save your life.
Pyrite also can be more useful than real gold in the busy world of industry. There, its high sulfur content is extracted to manufacture sulfuric acid. This hot tempered chemical works behind the scenes in refining petroleum and in manufacturing certain steels. It also is used in certain printing processes, in making soaps, glues and dozens of other everyday items.
Some pyrites also contain useable traces of nickel, cobalt, lead or zinc. Others contain enough copper to be rated as copper ores. Obviously there is nothing foolish in a deposit of so called fool's gold. True, the gold is more costly, but the pyrite may be more useful.
Pyrites are quite plentiful minerals. Flaky and chunky deposits often occur in slates, shales and various lava rocks. Some deposits also occur in gold bearing quartz rocks. In this case, a flake of fool's gold might tell a prospector that real gold is quite close.