A Million-Dollar Surprise.
It was Christmas Eve, 1992. Most of the workers with seniority were home, having dinner with their families. A recently hired hand was tending to the metal detector. It stopped the conveyor belt several times, and the fellow climbed on top of the belt and threw the metal into the trash heap on the ground, next to the detector.
Finally a large chunk of metal triggered the detector again. The worker became curious and called the night supervisor over to see "what was breaking down in the plant--where was all this brass coming from?"
The supervisor allegedly took one look and responded: "You idiot, don't you know what this is?"
It was gold. Most of the gold in that mine was almost microscopic, so the worker had probably never before seen solid gold of that size.
They went through the trash pile and recovered about 300 lbs. of gold. The largest piece is said to be worth $3.5 million, and it's on display at the Ironstone Vineyards, in Murphys, California.
The
specimen weighs about 44 lbs. and it is of a rare variety of crystalline gold.
The metal detector that picked it up was not designed to be sensitive to gold. The only reason it registered was because of its large size.
When I saw this chunk of gold, I decided that I was going to design a detector specifically for gold. (I think you can see the gleam in my eyes. They call it "gold fever", and it's incurable).
This happened more that ten years ago. Since I work full time on medical electronics projects, the development of the gold detector has taken place on weekends...hence the long delay.
Now, the gold detector is nearing the field testing stage. I call it the "GoldSweeper", because like the brushes that the old Chinese miners used to clean the bedrock with, in areas deemed to be cleaned out by other miners, this detector will find gold in areas deemed to be worked out by users of other detectors.
Initially, prospectors in the Georgetown area, who have been aware of this development for some time, will be given the opportunity to field test the detector. Their results will be posted on this web site...
"GoldSweeper" is a registered trademark. Electronic design patents are pending.
( To view pending patents, click on the link below and type: in/Westersten in the search window.)
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.html