Worthless Yellow Rocks / Real Life

• Aluminium:
  • Between the late 1820s, when Hans Christian Ørsted first extracted it in pure form, and the invention of the Bayer and Hall–Héroult processes in the late 1880s, pure refined aluminium was more expensive than gold. Merely heating the ore will only give you an impure mixture of several minerals (mostly aluminum oxides and silicates) unlike most other metals, and early methods of extraction required reacting difficult-to-produce anhydrous aluminium salts (typically aluminium chloride) with alkali metals (typically sodium or potassium) until the modern Hall-Héroult process was discovered.
  • Napoleon III reserved aluminium cutlery for the most important of guests. Less favored guests had to settle for gold.
  • In 1884, the United States capped the Washington monument with a 100-ounce pyramid of aluminium to show off its industry.
  • Extracting large amounts of aluminium using the Hall-Héroult process requires huge amounts of electricity, so aluminium remained quite valuable in areas where electricity was not cheaply available well into 20th century. During World War II, aluminium was plentiful only in the US, thanks to TVA and other large-scale hydroelectric projects.^note The Soviets also produced a large amount, but their production was all concentrated in a single hydroelectric facility which was lost within two months of the German invasion, and much of their stock was reserved for tanks, due to their engines being built out of it. Elsewhere, planes were built out of wood or steel to conserve aluminium and enemy drop tanks were eagerly salvaged. (US Army Air Force countered by making drop tanks out of resin-impregnated paper to deny Germans the extra source of aluminium.)
• Diamonds:
  • Given that diamonds are made entirely out of carbon, it really wouldn't be that hard for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to make synthetic diamonds that are more perfect than the real thing. Humans have been making synthetic diamonds since the 1950s! Natural diamonds are made by geological pressure applied to carbon, and the synthetic process does this faster. The gemstone industry reacted by declaring that natural diamonds are more valuable than synthetic diamonds because... well, just because. But even without synthetic production, diamonds are actually quite common. Their prices are kept artificially inflated via a near-monopoly on worldwide distribution and a decades-long advertising campaign that's inextricably linked diamond rings to marriage in the public consciousness.
  • In 2010, astronomers discovered an exoplanet called 55 Cancri e, a hellish world twice the size of Earth, blisteringly hot as a result of its proximity to its parent star, which appeared to be made entirely of diamond. While more recent studies have downplayed this — instead, 55 Cancri e may not just have large amounts of diamonds, but other useful carbon materials such as hydrocarbons on its surface — it still suggests both that the planet has huge, economy-collapsing quantities of diamond, and that other diamond planets probably exist elsewhere in the galaxy^note And more that will exist in the future (in astronomical terms), as carbon is mass-produced in evolved stars. It's believed white dwarf stars have cores composed of diamond.
  • Even in the Solar System, diamonds are far from rare; while there's no means of getting to them with our technology at this current time, it is thought that it rains diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn, the largest and second largest of our neighbouring planets. Lightning strikes create clumps of soot by burning methane in the dense atmosphere, which then falls out of the sky; as this soot falls deeper and deeper into the planet's interior, extreme pressure and heat transforms the soot into very small diamonds!
  • Some meteorites have a significant amount of diamonds in them. But they are microscopic and have to be extracted by literally dissolving the rest of the rock from around them.
  • Diamonds also have practical uses. Being extremely hard, diamonds are used as drill bits and saw tips, as well as abrasives for industrial purposes, as well as scalpels. All of which are surprisingly cheap compared to the fancy jewelry, as the two purposes prize different attributes, and just about no one cares if their industrial diamonds are synthetic or not. Jeweler attempts to market industrial-grade diamonds as "chocolate diamonds" have so far met limited success.
• Platinum:
  • For starters, the name is derived from Spanish for "false silver" — the same way iron pyrite is called "fool's gold". That gives you an idea what the Spanish thought of it at the time.
  • The Spanish Conquistador myth of Cibola, the City of Gold, was partly based on a tribe in the Amazon where a certain metal was so common that it was used for body paint and inexpensive decorations. Unfortunately, when the Spaniards finally found the tribe they were distressed to learn that the metal in question was platinum, which the natives had fashioned into elaborate jewelry. Frustrated Spaniards worked the Indians to death in the mines looking for gold, only to turn up mounds upon mounds of previously unheard-of platinum. Not knowing how to work the ore, since they had worked the tribe to death in the mines (and later engineers never did figure out how they did it), and given that it was so rare back home that it had no resale value, the angry Spaniards called the whole expedition worthless and buried the mounds of platinum ore in slag heaps that later became "lost treasure" more valuable than a city of gold by the 20^th century, quite literally considering the stuff rubbish.
  • Back in the 19^th century, some men counterfeited gold coins by using a "worthless" gray metal and gold plating the coins. Today, that "worthless gray metal" is known as platinum, and it's actually more valuable than gold for its applications. And is estimated to be 10 times rarer than gold.^note Despite this, demand for ornamental gold and its traditional association with wealth leads to their prices per ounce being pretty similar. Whenever gold is more expensive than platinum that's a clue that the gold market is in the midst of a bubble, and thus it's probably a good time to sell rather than buy gold. If you have a car, your catalytic converter has a considerable amount of the stuff. This has led some enterprising thieves to harvest whole parking lots with metal-cutting saber saws, cutting out the converters for recycle value.
  • In the 17^th century, the Spanish government tried to stop the above counterfeiting practice by dumping their entire stock of platinum in the sea.
  • When platinum was first found in Russia, the ignorant population used it for hunting — you had to pay for lead. Then they found out that shooting an animal was more expensive than the animal itself. It's worth mentioning that they thought they were firing low purity silver ore, which looks similar. Smelting and shipping operations in Siberia were so expensive the low purity ore of anything just wasn't worth anything.
• A British man found some old Beatles memorabilia in his attic and sold it for a few quid at a flea market. Turns out it was extremely rare memorabilia that was actually worth thousands of dollars... or maybe not. Urban legends about Worthless Yellow Rocks are, naturally, extremely common.
• The gold miners of Yogo Gulch, Montana had spent decades panning for trace amounts of gold for slim profits while routinely discarding bucket-fulls of the "blue pebbles" that littered the area. While stories vary on exactly who it was, somebody eventually got curious about what exactly these funny rocks were, and had an expert look at them. Today, the legendary Yogo Sapphire Deposit is known for having yielded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the finest sapphires ever mined, with large portions of the lode remaining to be extracted.
• Gold was very abundant in the pre-colonial Philippines. As in, you could see gold everywhere; decorated on houses, jewelry, etc. But finding gold was just as common as, let's say, getting a piece of candy. Pick almost any spot, dig, and you'd find a nugget of gold. And when Portuguese traders came, natives were willing enough to trade two gold pesos' worth... for a measly silver one.
• An interesting variation occurred with the U.S. gold rush into the Black Hills of South Dakota. Miners were pissed that their sifting machines kept getting clogged with a thick blue powder. An enterprising businessman found a way to filter it out and kept the powder as part of the payment. It turned out that the blue powder was silver in concentrations of nearly 100 times higher than the gold. While gold is significantly more valuable than silver, it's not 100 times more valuable.
  
  Gold prospectors in Virginia Range in Nevada were frustrated by the same stuff, in the form of irritating mud that made mining very messy and unpleasant business, and much of it ended up being discarded to be washed away by the streams of Mt. Davidson. It took quite a while before anyone realized that this fractious blue mud was indicative of MASSIVE quantities of silver ore. The site came to be known as the Comstock Lode and is still being mined today, over 150 years after its discovery.
• In the vein of the metal examples above, a surprising number of scrappers will toss off unstripped refrigerators, washers, etc. into the tin pile^note essentially the mulligan pile so they can go out and get more to do the same thing; most of these are druggies just out for their next fix who can't be bothered to take the time to actually process the things.
• Medieval Egypt provides a near-literal example. In 1324, Mansa Musa (literally, Emperor Moses) of Mali, a devout Muslim, went on pilgrimage to Mecca, passing through Cairo on the way. Now, Mali is gold country, and at the time supplied the Mediterranean with a very large proportion of its gold. West African kings since the Ghana Empire had a tradition of taking a cut of every golden ounce, so the Mansa of Mali tended to be extremely rich. Thus, when Mansa Musa went on pilgrimage, besides all manner of little gold items carried by the people in his entourage, he also had with him about 80 camels laden with 300 pounds of gold. Each. When Mansa Musa reached Cairo, he went for a visit to the Sultan, and then down to the souk (bazaar) to buy souvenirs and such. Unfortunately for the Malians, nobody in the entourage had any idea what things were supposed to cost in Cairo, and naturally the Cairo merchants fleeced the Malians for every penny they could get. Plus, there was the fact that one of Islam's basic principles is charity, with the Malians just as ignorant about the proper amounts. This pumped enough gold into the Egyptian economy to cause massive inflation, drastically devaluing all gold in Egypt. For the next ten years, gold, while hardly worthless, commanded ridiculously reduced purchasing power. On the other hand, the Italians doing business in Egypt at the time loved these new prices, since Italy hadn't suffered the same inflation (although everyone in the Mediterranean was affected somewhat).
  • Egypt itself was something of an example in ancient times, as it had access to then-abundant gold deposits in Nubia. Silver, on the other hand, had to be imported from the Fertile Crescent, and jewelry or other items crafted from silver often fetched higher prices in Egyptian markets than equivalent gold wares.
• Manure (which is to say, feces-laden soil) has been handy for agriculture for centuries, but it got especially valuable after the 16^th-century battlefields' warriors tended to have guns in their hands and manure could be used to produce gunpowder. Various states in Europe even levied a tax of manure on farms around this time.
• Euro starter kits were sets of a few coins totaling around from about 4 to 20 Euros given out before the actual introduction of Euro cash. Many of these were simply the first Euros people spent — and these people are now probably kicking themselves as complete, unopened kits can nowadays be worth ten times their original value as collector items. The record is held by Finnish kits, which are worth forty times the nominal value of their coins.
• Not necessarily worthless, but rather worth less: the gold-to-silver ratio was far lower in Tokugawa Japan than in the Western world at the time, and, as a result, Western traders brought large amounts of silver to Japan and traded it for large amounts of gold, nearly ruining the Japanese gold standard before the Closing of Japan put an end to the plundering.
• The exact details are a bit memory fuzzed, but a Modern Marvels about chocolate gives us this: Chocolate was once extremely expensive, and extremely secret; the Spanish kept its existence a secret from the rest of Europe for decades. This came to its logical conclusion when some pirates, having captured a Spanish merchant ship and finding it was full of "dried sheep droppings" burned it and its cargo at a time when cocoa beans were worth their weight in silver.
• Even perfectly ordinary rocks can fall under this trope if there's a sudden demand for them. White Jurassic limestone from Solnhofen, in Bavaria, was just a relatively mundane construction material for roofs and floors (it was used for some fine carving, but only locally) until 1796, when lithographic printing was invented and created an insatiable market for the stuff. When printing tech marched on, Solnhofen's limestone became more or less just another rock again (paleontologists know it for its good supply of Late Jurassic fossils, the most famous of which is Archaeopteryx lithographica — the fossil that provided the first strong evidence that birds are dinosaurs, named after the lithographic boom that led to its discovery).
• Gibbon tells the story of a Roman legionary who found a leather bag full of pearls that had been dropped by a fleeing Persian soldier. The Roman kept the bag and threw away its contents — he assumed that something with no use would have no value.
• There's an interesting case surrounding the original Nancy Drew mystery stories. The books themselves have solid blue covers with the book's cover art being printed on a dust jacket. The books themselves now are fairly cheap (libraries refused to stock them, considering them "junk books," meaning more books were published for people to buy, saturating the market.) The dust jackets, however, which are considered a nuisance to some bibliophiles (for being clumsy and unattractive on the shelf), have become much more valuable. Not simply because fewer dust jackets have survived, but due to an unfortunate fire at the home of the artist, Russell H. Tandy, the original artwork has been lost. At this point, the dust jackets can be worth more than the book itself.
• Pablo Escobar once burned $2,000,000 cash to keep himself and his daughter warm while fleeing police in the mountains of Colombia. His daughter was starting to suffer from hypothermia and the cash was otherwise worthless.
• This worked both ways in the North American fur trade from roughly the 17^th to the 19^th centuries. To the Aboriginal peoples, the furs they were selling to the European fur traders were fairly common, easy to obtain and used for mundane purposes. In Europe, those same furs could be worth huge fortunes due to fashion-conscious European aristocrats hit with the Ermine Cape Effect. The knives, cooking pots and other trade goods the Europeans were giving the Aboriginals in exchange were often fairly common, easy to obtain and mundane, but to the Aboriginal peoples they were often far more effective than the hand-crafted tools they'd frequently been using before. The natives at the time lived in a mostly stone-age (or in South America, bronze age) society; they didn't have access to the technology necessary to smelt iron and steel, and thus the only iron implements they could produce had to be cold-forged from rare meteoric iron.
• Supposedly Nigel Reynolds, who was the arts correspondent on the Daily Telegraph, met J. K. Rowling and she handed him a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read. He took it to his office, skimmed it, and threw it away. Copies of the first edition, of which only 500 were printed, are now worth thousands of dollars.
• During The American Civil War, silver half-dimes were being hoarded to the point that they could not be kept in circulation, and in response, the Union issued first paper five-cent notes, and finally a new five-cent coin made of an alloy of 75% copper and 25% nickel. Fast forward to World War II, and suddenly nickel was a valuable material for manufacturing, so the government had to resort to replacing the nickel in newly minted five-cent coins with an alloy of Manganese and... you guessed it, silver! When World War II ended, the US Government hoped it could recover as many of these silver "War Nickels" as possible from circulation, but many stayed in circulation, and many more were hoarded as an investment, especially once the price of silver began to rise.
• Speaking of WWII: The one-cent Penny is struck from a zinc and copper alloy, both common metals, and considered worthless outside of pocket change, befitting its status as the lowest-value, lowest-denomination unit of the currency. But, in 1943, the demands on copper for use in component parts for the war effort made it so valuable as a strategic resource that the US Mint made all its pennies from plain steel that year. While steel was of course itself an important component of ships and tanks, the American steel industry at the time was more than capable of meeting that particular demand with plenty to spare.^note The scrap metal drives to "support the war effort" were purely a morale-building exercise so that every civilian, even the elderly and children, could feel like they were doing their part to help. Not one ounce of donated bronze, iron or steel was actually used in the making of war material, and in fact little of it was even melted down at all until after World War II was over.
• After decimalisation in 1971, British small coins ("copper") carried on being manufactured in a bronze alloy, the advantage here being that smaller coins using a lot less metal and having a higher purchasing value cost less to manufacture. Scroll forward to the early 2000s and the value of the small coins inevitably diminishing. Those low-value small-denomination coins started disappearing from circulation in large numbers and nobody could work out why. Until it was realised that with the high cost of bronze, those small coins were now worth seven or eight times their face value as scrap metal and enterprising people were harvesting them to melt down. The redesigned small coins are now a thin bronze gilding over a steel core.
• The trope is zig-zagged regarding the myth of El Dorado. Spaniards heard of a tribe for whom gold was apparently so common it was all over the village and they dumped it in the lake for worship. The Spanish assumed it was because they had a massive gold reserve. Except, no. The village was wealthy and purchased gold and dumped it in the lake as a sacrificial offering to their Gods. Why was the village wealthy? It had a salt mine, which was highly desired by its neighbors. The tribe also didn't use gold currency, so while it was valuable, it was only used as decoration, meaning they saw no problems with displaying it everywhere. And the fact that it was valuable is exactly why it was considered worthy of being a sacrificial offering to the gods. If you give the gods something worthless, that's an insult rather than a sacrifice.
• According to some estimations, there's enough gold (and presumably other very valuable, high-density metals) in the Earth's core to cover the entire planet in several meters of it^note Unless you love the hard way or can wait five billion years to have the Sun consuming the Earth and picking the stuff, you'd better look elsewhere such as in certain asteroids.
  • Asteroid 16 Psyche is believed to be laden with quite a significant amount of gold, silver and other valuable metals.
  • There's also an estimated 20 million pounds of gold in the world's oceans, upward of half a trillion dollars at current value (not counting any gold inflation that would occur if 10,000 tons of the stuff suddenly entered the market). This doesn't refer to gold coins and bars from sunken treasure ships or to any veins of gold that might be beneath the seabed. This is gold that's part of the oceans, as in dissolved into the water. The problem is there's simply no way to get it. Gold is 13 parts per trillion in ocean water, and we can't filter out such tiny amounts.
• The idea of "collector's editions" of comic books came from the fact that early issues of well-known titles, such as Superman #1, are worth a fortune now, so it follows that special editions of popular titles will eventually increase in value. However, the plan is a non-starter, as publishers release a "collector's edition", and collectors snap up as many copies as they can and work hard to keep them in mint condition, thus eliminating the rarity that made those early editions valuable. For example, comics published before or during World War II are valuable because paper was needed for the war effort, and many comic books were given up for this purpose. (Super-Patriot Captain America actually encouraged his young readers to do this.) Not to mention they were mostly seen as cheap, disposable entertainment for kids and there was no active collector's market or comic book shops then, meaning the vast majority were damaged, destroyed, or lost over decades of play and exposure to the elements.
• When the Spaniards (starting to see a pattern here?) first landed in what would become modern Mexico, gold was the only metal any of the civilizations there knew how to work, and they used it mainly for decoration. Although it was not exactly "worthless" by their standards, specially to the dominant Aztecs, it seemed perfectly fair for them to trade it off to the bearded strangers for things they had never seen before. These things were, for the most part, glass beads and mirrors. It's also interesting to note that although gold was very valuable to the Aztecs, it was not nearly as valuable for them as it was for the Spaniards. So gold was everywhere, and it was often given as an offering. So when they offered great gifts of gold to those weird strangers that may or may not be ancient gods, well, the Spaniards just wondered where they had the rest of it, if they had so much they were willing to part with...
• The cœlacanth was occasionally fished up as bycatch by African trawlers. The fish had no commercial value because its flesh was foul-smelling, oily, and distasteful, but in 1938, one specimen was recognized by a museum curator for its unusual appearance; this here was a fish that was thought to have died out at the end of the Mesozoic Era, a living fossil representing an important transitional stage between finned fish and limbed tetrapods unchanged for almost 400 million years. But before its scientific value was found out, it was just thrown away because it couldn't be eaten.
• People have been dumb enough, or desperate enough to throw bullion-grade silver and (even rarer) gold coins into circulation, and there's nothing stopping them; an American Silver Eagle, while worth many times more in metal value (while silver values fluctuate, for the last few years the metal value is somewhere around 18 - 20 times that of its face value), has a face value of a dollar; as a result, it's rare, but not unheard of to see particularly stupid people using them to pay for stuff worth far less than a handful of eagles, in some cases leaving some extremely lucky cashiers in their wake, as all they then have to do to retrieve the silver is replace the coins with ordinary currency that equals the same face value as the finds.
• Classic urban legend: A jilted wife advertises her ex-/absentee/cheating/imprisoned husband's car for way less than cheap in the newspaper. A youngish man comes to buy the car, typically a cherry 50s-70s pony car or custom muscle car with a Blue Book value that looks like a phone number, for $10. (In some versions, she just wanted to get rid of the reminder; in others, the husband had sent a message asking her to "sell the car and send me the money".) In such cases, variants include the wife selling the car for ridiculously small money, but refusing to sell it without something else, like a radio or spare tire, for which she charges closer to actual value of the car. While this has certainly been done in real life, it's worth noting that if there was a court order to the effect of "sell X and give the money to Y", pulling this trick will make the judge quite angry.
• Uraninite was originally called "pitchblende", meaning 'deceptive black' in older German, because miners knew it as a worthless black rock. Then it turned out to be essential for both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
  • Occurred again with depleted uranium (only uranium-238); which was discarded as a byproduct from making enriched uranium (more uranium-235) for bombs or reactor fuel rods. It turns out to be useful for armor piercing ammunition as well as for manufacturing plutonium and for dismantling nuclear weapons by mixing it back with the enriched uranium so that it can't explode.
• Plutonium is possibly the most valuable substance by mass on the planet, partially because of its sheer destructive potential in nuclear weapons, but also partially due to the sheer amount of investment you have to make in order to synthesize it (any plutonium that naturally existed in the Earth's crust at the time of its formation has long since decayed to mere trace-amounts, so the only way to obtain it is to bombard a lighter element with neutrons until it transmutes into a plutonium isotope). Its value exceeds that of gold by a few orders of magnitude at least. This is why at Los Alamos at least one dummy core^note In nuclear weapons, a "core" is a spherical casting of plutonium. In order to make the big boom this core is compressed uniformly by conventional explosives until it achieves a supercritical state was fabricated out of gold, on loan from the Federal Reserve. These dummy cores were intended for training people on how to handle the real thing ^note Plutonium is extremely dense so the cores are a lot heavier than they look, and as they are both radioactive and extremely chemically toxic they must be handled with extreme care. Gold is also very dense (having 97.3% of plutonium's density) and thus a dummy core of high-purity gold will be similar in weight, but since it's neither radioactive nor toxic it won't kill the trainees if they make a mistake., to test core fit within the complete bomb assembly, and so on. One half of one such core ended up being used as a door stop. If anybody was going to steal material from the lab, they'd go for the far more valuable plutonium than the boring old gold.
  • Similarly, the uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee required gigantic electromagnets to separate uranium isotopes. Because copper was a critical material for the war effort (not just wiring, but also engine radiators, brass shell casings, bronze gears and ship propellers, etc.), somebody suggested silver be used (silver actually has slightly higher conductivity than copper, but of course copper is much more plentiful and inexpensive). The US Treasury was contacted, and the Army Corps of Engineers arranged to 'borrow' tons of silver bullion to be drawn into wires and wound into magnets. True to their word, after the magnetic separation was superseded by the more-efficient gaseous diffusion process, the magnets were dismantled and the silver returned to the Treasury.
  • Another incredibly valuable substance is Calcium-48. It's very useful in particle accelerators in the creation of superheavy elements. The problem is it's incredibly rare in nature and the only way to extract it is to separate it atom-by-atom from a block of calcium. It's valued at about $1 million per gram.
• It's not just gold or diamonds which are prized on Earth yet superabundant elsewhere. Genuine, Apollo-collected moon rocks are considered literally priceless - by law, they're U.S. government property and can't be sold to private buyers - and their potential black-market value is ranked far higher than that of cut diamonds. That's here on our own planet; back home on the Moon, they were just plain rocks.
  • After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a selection of artifacts from the Soviet space program were put on sale to American collectors. This included two-tenths of a gram of moon dust from the Luna 16 spacecraft. They sold for $442,500 in 1993 - about two million times higher than the cost of lunar meteorites, which are the other source of moon rocks on Earth.