Counterfeiting of coins has a long history. No less a personage than Isaac Newton took this bull by the horns. Late in his career he became Master of the Mint and obsessed about counterfeiters. He even designed coinage to stymie the criminals. But it was Joseph Black, Professor of Chemistry at Glasgow University who in the 18th century uncovered one of the cleverest counterfeiting schemes. One of Black’s main contributions to chemistry was the realization that carbon dioxide was given off when calcium carbonate was heated. He came to this conclusion by carefully weighing the carbonate before and after heating. The decrease in weight represented the loss of carbon dioxide.
Black developed an expertise in weighing which, as it turned out, came in very handy. At the time it was common practice for students to pay their university fees directly to the Professor, who sat at the entrance to the lecture room and collected gold coins. Some enterprising students tried to reduce their fees by shaving some gold off the coins. They probably often got away with this, but not in Black’s classes. The Professor, an expert with a balance, took to weighing the coins as he took them from the students. The students learned not to cheat and learned some science at the same time. Maybe this business of giving gold coins to the Professor wasn’t such a bad idea. With the cutbacks in education perhaps we should reinstitute it. But some clever students would probably still figure out a way to cheat.
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