Content Creator/Host/TikTok Extraordinaire Megan is here today with a story about science and resistance:

This week in trivia we learned that four U.S. Presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize… but we’re not gonna talk about that.

Today, I want to tell you the story of the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to a Nobel medal. Rather, two Nobel medals.

In 1914, Max von Laue won the Nobel Prize in Physics, followed by James Franck in 1925. They were both German scientists, so before World War II, they sent their Nobel medals to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark to keep them from being confiscated by the Nazis.

When the Nazis invaded Denmark in April 1940, Niels Bohr and another chemist named George de Hevesy realized that not only were von Laue and Franck’s prizes in jeopardy, but so were the prizewinners. It was illegal to send gold out of Germany by this point, and the scientists’ names were clearly engraved on their medals.

De Hevesy first thought they could bury the medals, but they ultimately decided that was too dangerous, as the Nazis would just dig them up from the gardens. So, they turned to what they knew best: science. De Hevesy put the gold medals in a solution called aqua regia, a mixture of one part nitric acid and three parts hydrochloric acid, and waited for the gold to dissolve. He put the nondescript jar on a shelf in the lab, and let it sit.

De Hevesy fled the country during the war. Once it was over and he was able to return to Copenhagen, he found that the jar had been undisturbed all those years. So, he basically reversed the chemistry and precipitated the gold back out of the solution.

In 1950, that gold was sent back to Stockholm, where the medals were re-cast using the original gold!

By the way, George de Hevesy won his own Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943 (for unrelated work).

If you want to see this story in a video format, click here.

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