Yesterday, I ended up reading an article on Aqua Regia. Aqua Regia, or "The King's Water," is what alchemists called nitro-hydrochloric acid. Nitro-hydrochloric acid is unique in that it can dissolve "noble" metals, like gold and platinum, where other acids can't. That's why it was called The King's Water--because royalty could use it to see if something was really gold or not. (See? I learned all this from Wikipedia!)
So, I'm reading all this interesting stuff, and then I see this at the end:
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.
You get what happened? Two German scientists won Nobel Prizes for their work in science, but the Nazis wouldn't recognize the award for political reasons. The medals were made for the winners, but they were kept in another country, in hopes that they could be given to the winners some day. When the Germans invaded that country, they looked for the medals--but a clever scientist dropped them both into jars of aqua regia, dissolving the gold. The Nazis who went in looking for the medals only saw chemicals on the shelf, and left. Then, after the war, the scientist took the gold back out of the aqua regia, and they recast the medals for the winners! How awesome is that? It's a great scientific answer a real-life problem.
I read that, and I immediately thought: story idea! I could write a mystery where something golden is stolen--but it really isn't gone. It had just been dissolved, and it's sitting right there in the room! That would make a great twist in a mystery.
Wikipedia has a nice feature on their home page, where they link to a random article every day. They also have links on the home page to people, places, and things that happened on this day in the past. If you're looking for ideas, you can find a lot of them just by reading one new article a day on Wikipedia. And if nothing else, you'll learn something. :-)
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