The story of human innovation is one of striving toward what's better,
more advanced, more extraordinary.
We craved a faster connection to one another,
a vaster wealth of information.
Speed, impact, ability.
And time after time, gold plays a role in helping us reach it.
Sometimes it's invisible in the background,
sometimes it gleams in plain sight.
Whatever the era or industry, gold seems to be there.
This is the story of gold's ability to unlock the extraordinary.
Modern technology is so ingrained in our lives that sometimes we don't even notice it.
But electrical connections are everywhere
and each one has a high probability of using gold.
Back in 1925, an inventor named Charles Ducas
patented a method of printing electrical path directly onto non-conductive board.
The result became known as the printed circuit board.
And people quickly realised that the best material to use was gold.
And you know what? It still is.
Then, in 1947, scientists at AT&T's Bell Labs
watched what happened when two gold point contacts were applied to crystal germanium.
A signal came through one gold point and increased as it passed through the other,
and with that the transistor was born.
From that point onward, it seemed that where there was innovation, there was gold.
So it's not surprising that it had an integral role
in one of the landmark advancements of our lifetime:
gold helped wire the Internet.
It was there in the first experiments
laying the groundwork for the modern Internet we have today.
It has played a significant part in helping our connections stay stable
and resilient, to allow billions of us to communicate in this way.
It's ubiquitous in the huge data centres which are crucial to the Internet and the Cloud.
That's because gold plays a role in extraordinary connections,
from the big things to the tiny ones.
When it comes to making things happen fast, gold doesn't stop at connectivity,
The same properties that make it reliable for the Cloud
make it a favourite for the road.
You can still search the Internet today and you'll see people asking the question,
"Is there really gold in a McLaren F1?" It was a bit mysterious.
You can't see it when you look at the car from outside.
It also does add this little level of mystique to the car
which when you're talking about a very exclusive car,
just adds a little something else for people to talk about.
Coming up with the idea of the McLaren F1 road car
was something that Gordon Murray, the Chief Designer at my old team at McLaren
had had in his mind for some time, and he sort of sketched something out
as a very rough kind of pencil sketch
and Ron Dennis, the Head of McLaren, loved the idea, loved the concept behind it.
and immediately saw this vision of how the McLaren organisation
could grow into something way bigger than just a Formula One Team.
And it was from there that this car behind me was conceived
and went on to become what it is today.
Setting out to conceive and then build the ultimate super car
means having the best in every single area,
but to do that you have to use the very best materials in building it.
And when it comes to managing the temperatures of the engine bay,
you know, it sounds like this incredibly crazy idea to use such an exotic material,
but in that particular instance that was gold.
Gold has these incredible heat reflection properties.
It's one of the most reflective materials.
It's also very soft and malleable, so you can actually form it into shapes
that will fit your very kind of complex engine bay which is really important.
There are lots of other materials that can reflect heat in a similar way,
but being able to work them into the shapes and the forms that you need
is much more difficult.
So they were able to get gold in very, very thin sheets
that they could apply right across the back of this carbon fibre engine bay,
protecting not only the carbon fibre from the extreme heat of the engine,
but also the fuel cell and the driver that were just a few millimetres away from that engine.
This is a roll of the gold foil tape and this is what I used to use
to stick all over the suspension on the Formula One car back in the day.
It's the same stuff they used in the back of this.
It's 18 carat gold, I believe.
Around about £3,000 for a roll like this which is amazing,
but look how thin it is.
And that means you can get it into all these weird and wonderful shapes,
these places in the car that many other materials that are much harder,
are much more difficult to work with, this is the perfect solution.
So, I think it's widely accepted now
that the days of the combustion engine on the roads are numbered.
You know, we can't continue burning fossil fuels the way we have done for many years,
and so electric vehicles are surely going to play a huge part in that.
And when you think about electric vehicles and electric propulsion,
efficiency really is the key to that. You talk about efficiency
and transferring electrical energy from batteries through to motors,
the most efficient way to do that is by using the most efficient materials
to transfer that energy through the system.
And again, gold with its conductivity properties is a really key part of that.
So as we get more and more EVs on the road, we're looking for more efficient ways
of transferring energy through the system of an electric vehicle.
It may be that gold becomes even more prevalent on today's roads
as we get more and more electric cars there too.
We've come to rely on gold
as a material that helps us achieve extraordinary connection and performance.
Now, recent discoveries are prompting us to wonder:
could it be that gold doesn't just unlock the extraordinary,
it unlocks energy?
I think we're at a pivotal moment in humanity.
I truly believe that the economy of the 21st century will be the clean economy.
It'll be the green economy.
Energy is the basis of our quality of life.
That being said, energy also comes at a cost.
So now we have to think about ways that we can produce energy
without producing carbon dioxide,
ways of maintaining our quality of life and our standard of living
without polluting the atmosphere.
To me a fossil fuel is essentially liquified sunlight.
It was sunlight that shone on the earth,
spurred photosynthesis, created plant matter.
That plant matter died and went underneath the ground, solidified,
and then liquified under immense heat and pressure over thousands of years.
And then we as humans,
dug it up from underground, extracted its energy from it,
and then allowed the carbon to go back into the atmosphere.
Now imagine if we could take that process
and then engineer it to take sunlight, water, carbon dioxide
and make fuels that we can use to sustain our quality of life.
I like to call it artificial photosynthesis.
The role that gold plays is a catalyst.
It helps to speed up the reaction and make it more efficient.
The reaction that we're talking about is carbon dioxide being converted into fuel.
When we think about how carbon dioxide is converted on the surface of gold,
let's take for example, my hand. Let's imagine that my hand is a slab of gold.
And carbon dioxide, the way it works it would bind to the surface of the gold,
and that gold would feed that carbon dioxide electrons,
and those electrons would convert that carbon dioxide into a fuel.
In the case that I was setting, it would convert it into carbon monoxide.
There's really interesting properties about gold and the way that it's shaped.
So what I discovered in my research is that if you have gold that's rigid and spiked,
it actually allows for more points of contact for the carbon dioxide to convert.
It allows for the carbon dioxide to go into the ridges and edges of these spikes,
and that increased surface area allow for the carbon dioxide to be converted
much more quickly, much more rapidly.
In fact, gold was the only metal that we were able to create this exact nano-needle shape with.
Gold is very stable, it's very inert
which means that it won't react with anything else around it.
It'll just react with the CO2.
All the other metals, they would form dendrites or they would form bush-like structures,
but gold was special, and it was the only one
where we could make the sharpest and most perfect nano-needle.
So how far are we away from this technology becoming a reality?
I would say we're about five to ten years away.
And there are all of these brilliant minds that are working on it,
and we've seen that we can take technology out of the lab
and into a prototype within a span of a couple of years.
What's really exciting is that people are starting listen.
The financial sector is starting to move.
I've never before seen more capital being invested into clean technology
and into the opportunity in this de-carbonisation, and so that gives me hope.
Hope. It's what emboldens us to try things like connecting the world,
or constructing the greatest performance vehicles, and changing the way we source energy.
Gold has played a part in extraordinary feats of engineering,
and it looks like it's going to be doing the same for many generations to come.
And still, there is more to the story of gold.