Gold in the 1800s served far more purposes than money and jewelry. It filled teeth, toned photographs, detected electricity, tipped writing pens, covered buildings, and was even prescribed as medicine. The metal’s unique properties, including its resistance to corrosion, extreme malleability, and electrical conductivity, made it useful across nearly every domain of 19th-century life.
Currency and the Gold Standard
The most dominant use of gold in the 1800s was as the backbone of national currencies. The U.S. government set the official gold price at $20.67 per troy ounce in 1834, and that price held essentially unchanged for the rest of the century. Gold coins circulated as everyday money, and paper currency derived its value from being redeemable in gold. This system, known as the gold standard, anchored international trade and gave gold a fixed, central role in economic life that shaped everything from mining booms to geopolitics.
The California Gold Rush of 1849 and later strikes in Australia, South Africa, and the Klondike brought massive new supplies of gold into circulation, fueling economic expansion and migration on a global scale. Gold coins weren’t just stores of wealth. They were the coins people carried and spent.
Jewelry and Mourning Rings
Gold jewelry in the 1800s followed specific standards that varied by quality and purpose. In England, 22-karat gold (about 92% pure) was the traditional standard for wedding rings and formal pieces. An 18-karat standard was introduced in 1798 and became the go-to for higher-quality rings and general jewelry throughout the Victorian era.
One distinctly 19th-century tradition was mourning jewelry. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria popularized elaborate mourning customs, and gold rings inscribed with the name and death date of the deceased became common commemorative objects. These were often crafted in 22-karat gold, continuing a tradition that predated the 1800s but reached its cultural peak during the Victorian period.
Dental Fillings
Gold was one of the primary materials for filling cavities throughout the 1800s. Early in the century, dentists would literally take gold coins to a gold-beater to have them flattened and thinned into foil suitable for dental work. The technique involved heating small pellets of crinkled gold foil over an alcohol flame, which improved the gold’s ability to bond to itself and be shaped inside a tooth.
By the mid-1800s, specially designed “plugging” instruments and mallets were used to compact gold foil into tooth cavities by hand pressure. Later in the century, spring-loaded automatic condensers replaced hand tools, pounding the gold into place mechanically. Gold fillings were durable and biocompatible, which is why some survived in patients’ mouths for decades. The technique remained a cornerstone of dentistry well into the 20th century.
Photography
Gold played a critical chemical role in 19th-century photography. The dominant printing method of the era, the albumen print, relied on gold chloride to improve both the appearance and longevity of photographs. In a process called gold toning, the silver that formed the photographic image was partially replaced by metallic gold. This did two things: it shifted the image color from a flat yellowish-brown to richer tones of cool brown, purple, or bluish-black, and it protected the image from fading by shielding the remaining silver from oxidation.
The technique was borrowed from daguerreotypists, who used a mixture of gold chloride and sodium thiosulfate (called “sel d’or,” literally “salt of gold”) to intensify their daguerreotype images. Without gold toning, many 19th-century photographs would have degraded within years. The ones that survive in archives today often owe their preservation to this thin layer of deposited gold.
Architecture and the Gilded Age
Gold leaf, beaten into sheets so thin they’re nearly transparent, was applied to buildings, domes, picture frames, and interior surfaces throughout the 1800s. The technique of gilding involves floating delicate sheets of gold leaf onto a prepared adhesive surface, creating a luminous finish that resists tarnishing.
After the Civil War, gilding became especially common in American architecture during the period from roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s. This era of conspicuous wealth became known as the Gilded Age, a name coined by Mark Twain that referenced gold’s surface-level brilliance. Classical, Palladian, and Gothic Revival buildings used gilded decoration extensively. Ballrooms, state capitols, church interiors, and civic buildings across the country featured gold leaf on ceilings, columns, cornices, and ornamental details.
Scientific Instruments
Gold’s physical properties made it essential for one of the key scientific instruments of the 1800s: the gold-leaf electroscope. This device detected the presence and relative amount of electric charge on an object. It worked by attaching two extremely thin strips of gold foil to the bottom of a metal post. When an electrically charged object was brought near or touched to the top of the post, both gold leaves acquired the same charge and repelled each other, visibly spreading apart.
Gold was ideal for this purpose because it could be beaten thin enough to respond to tiny electrostatic forces, and it wouldn’t corrode or tarnish in ways that would affect its behavior. The leaves were typically enclosed in a glass chamber to protect them from air currents. These instruments were standard equipment in 19th-century physics laboratories and classrooms.
Writing Pens
The 1800s saw the development of gold-nibbed pens, which solved a persistent problem with steel nibs: corrosion. The acidic iron-gall inks common in the 19th century ate through steel tips relatively quickly, but gold resisted this chemical attack. The challenge was that pure gold was too soft to hold up under the pressure of writing.
In 1834, an English maker named Hawkins produced the first 16-karat gold nib tipped with iridium, a much harder metal, at the very point where the pen contacted paper. This combination of a corrosion-resistant gold body with a wear-resistant iridium tip made gold nibs the standard for quality writing instruments throughout the Victorian era. Gold-nibbed dip pens and, later, fountain pens became essential tools for the expanding literate and professional classes of the 1800s.
Medicine
Gold compounds were used as medical treatments in the 19th century, though with limited understanding of how or whether they actually worked. Gold had a reputation as a “nervine,” meaning a therapy for disorders of the nervous system. Doctors prescribed gold salts for depression, epilepsy, migraines, glandular problems, and most notably alcoholism. The idea of “potable gold” as a healing substance had roots stretching back centuries, and 19th-century physicians continued the tradition with varying degrees of scientific rigor. Some of these uses would later prove to have a kernel of legitimacy: gold compounds are still used today in certain treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, though the 1800s applications for conditions like alcoholism and impotence were largely ineffective.