BOGUS GOLD.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 372, 29 May 1889, Page 6

BOGUS GOLD.

A few days since a prominent manufacturer of gold rings, Julius Wodiska, went to th£ office of a refiner on John-street, New York, to see about the refining of some ' sweeps '" from his factory. The refiner handed to him a small ingot that looked like gold and asked him, ' What is that V Mr Wodiska took up the acid bottle from the table besido him and ' touched ' the yellow surface. The fluid took no effect. Then he rubbed the ingot on the stone kept for testing purposes until a good mark was obtained and put the acid on that. ' Twelve-carat gold,' he replied decidedly as the result of his test, ' There is not a grain of gold in the whole ingot,' responded the refiner. Mr Wodiska sat down promptly on the nearest stool and breathed so hard that he got red in the face. He could not believe it. Again he made his tests ; this time filing into the ingot for the purpose. The acid made the report as before to his experienced eye, ' twelve-carat gold !' Then the refiner explained. The ingot had been sent to him for test by one of his customers, who had been deluded into buying it and had grown uneasy when thinking how cheaply he had got it from an unknown man, whose anxiety to effect a private sale of it gave at least a questionable colour to his right of possession. The refiner had tiied it sufficiently to make sure that it was not gold, and appioximately to get at a knowledge of what were its component metals, but had not yet made a sufficiently close quantitatire analysis to determine their proportions. He affirmed that it was a mixture of platinum, aluminum, copper and silver. It would seem that very great difficulties must have been encountered in making such a combination, because of the widely different melting points of those metals, but he was sure that those were the constituents of the mass. A piece of the alloy that he had put through the rollers showed that it worked quite as well as gold and was as susceptible of a high polish. Since then the keeper of a small jewellery store on Avenue A haa become the unhappy possessor of another ingob of the new alloy. He also bought from a man who had evident preferences for strictly private and quick sales, even if he did not get full gold value, and who volunteered no confidences as to how he obtained the ingot. It looked to the storekeeper like quite a pretty and profitable transaction until he took his prize to an assayer. How many more victims have been caught already by the modest metallurgist who has invented this seductive material there is no knowing, but they' are no doubt numerous. In each of the cases discoveied the ingots have been small, such as would be I within the means of the keepers of little shops, and so hnd ready sale, especially when the seller conveyed the impresfion that he was a thief and was therefore willing to dispose of the chunk at less than its value. Of course in a vast majority ot instances the victims would suffer their losses in silence, when they learned how they had been swindled, rather than avow that they had bought what they must have supposed to .be stolen goods. The pawnbrokers have yet to be heard from. Doubtless they will bleed as freely on the solid twelve-carat gold ingots as they did at one time on the yellow diamonds dipped in aniline ink before the trick was discovered. The thing is bound to make big trouble in the tents of Israel if that modest but talented metallui'gist is at all industrious. i Inspector Byrness has > lying upon the table in his office a big yellow bar of metal that once did duty as a ' gold brick,' and was the basis of the biggest swindle of its kind ever perpetrated in this country. It had a real gold corner that was cut off by the intending purchaser, and that assayed so well that he paid several dollars for the mass, only to learn that he had assayed all there was of it that possessed any value. That was considered a pretty clever trick at the time when it was played, but the new device of having a whole bar of solid twelve-carat (bogus) gold discounts it, And the pawnbrokers and people who buy gold cheap on speculation are not the

only ones whom it behoves to take a lively interest in the new metal. Those fields will soon be worked out, buttheabilit to makey the alloy will remain and the next demonstration of it will be in 'solid gold jewellery,' turned out by unprincipled manufacturers and sold at cheap prices to the public. There will be no lack of excuses to explain most favourably ifcß surprising cheapness, and who, of ordinary jewellery buyers, can tell that the stuft is not gold when it is so perfect an imitation as to ' deceive even the, vary elect,' as one might say.