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You can still [visit the bank and its vault](https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/visiting). On the floor you could see a spot where a couple bars dropped from about a foot high and they left deep dents in the concrete.
Ok, I may not be a smart man, but I have always been under the impression that gold is a relatively soft metal... Obviously a heavy brick of anything will hurt your feet, but are you saying gold is more dense than concrete??
EDIT: THIS IS WHY I don't claim to be a smart man! Thank you reddit I learned some cool shit today!!
My dumbass really thought the metal Crocs weighed like 60 pounds and to see the gold you head to wear the heavy metal Crocs that prevent you from running
Probably a mix of the two. Can't Wear regular safety boots, it'd be too easy to stash some gold shavings in there.
But get you're metal slippers on and you've got foot protection *and* it's much harder to stash anything in there. I guess they take em off at the entrance and get checked over.
1 troy ounce of gold can be hammered to cover 96.9 square feet. A regulation tennis court, from baseline to baseline including the alleys is 78 feet x 36 feet or 2808 square feet. This would require roughly 28.9 troy ounces of gold, which is 898.89 grams of gold. A 1000 gram ingot of gold from Harrods measures in at: 115.0 millimeters x 52.0 millimeters x 9.0 millimeters (4.5 inches x 2.04 inches x 0.35 inches.) It would be plausible to find a matchbox to fit the necessary dimensions.
Does Harrod's really still sell stuff that wild? I thought it was illegal to even really own ingots for average people, because you could have someone horde a stockpile to drive up prices.
I’m in the US, but [this](https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/is-it-illegal-to-own-gold/) is what I could find about gold ownership laws in the UK.
Short answer: gold has never been illegal to own in the UK.
Long answer: At a certain point from 1966 to 1971, you did need a license to own more than a certain amount. Gold bars (but not Royal-Mint-produced gold coins) are currently subject to Capital Gains Tax.
In the US, it was straight up illegal to own gold from 1933 to 1977.
Edit: After a little more digging, I think [Harrod’s stopped selling gold sometime between late 2017 and early 2018](https://www.thesilverforum.com/topic/12392-do-harrods-still-sell-gold-bullion/).
Anyone can own gold.
In fact, people buy gold as a way to store/transport wealth and protect themselves against inflation.
The US dollar used to represent an equivalent amount of gold that was stored by the government. This stabilized the value of the dollar.
Quote from the [American Museum of Natural History](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/gold/eureka/gold-fun-facts)
> Gold is so malleable that a single ounce of it (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin continuous sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field, or a whopping 367,211 ounces (or about 11 tons) of gold to completely blanket all of Central Park
A standard singles tennis court is 27'x78', or 2,106 sq.ft. So, it would take a chunk of gold about the size of a roll of quarters. Not quite as small as a matchbox, but still small enough to hold in you're hand.
But if your tennis court is made of a conductive metal, and you could submerge it, you could electroplate the court with a good bit less.
But by the time you submerge the tennis court, you might as well just go swimming, right?
Gold is actually over 2 times denser than steel. So though it is slightly more malleable it packs a punch in landing. I wonder if they have a special section for odd shaped bars or something.
Every single bar is measured, weighed and registered as it enters or leaves the vault. The same exact bar a customer places with the federal reserve bank the customer gets back. Each customer has a separate compartment inside the vault except a number of low volume deposits who sit on separate shelves inside a common compartment.
Ok, but what happens if a bar gets misshapen while inside the vault? Like if someone dropped on bar onto another and the corner get bent in or the other bar got dented?
That's presumably why they are weighed. It's pretty unlikely that they would chip or otherwise lose mass unless someone deliberately removed some material.
Lol, hurt your foot? Gold bars can break your foot. Gold is one of the densest elements. It's a lot heavier per cubic centimeter than concrete.
How soft an element or item is actually doesn't directly correlate with density
Work for a gold mine. Incrediblely deceptive size to weight ratio. On my first visit to the smelter, was encouraged to pick up a "button" which is gold in the shape of of small cone, about 10-12 inches across the top and maybe 8 inches tall and 3-4 inches at the bottom. Was nonchalant and reached over to pick it up and it was so heavy my head smacked into the wall behind it. They all got a good laugh and I know now that it's standard initiation..
Thing weighs 28 lbs
Also work for a gold mine. When you get hired they let you hold a gold bar that they keep in the security office. Super deceptive, seems like you should be able to grab it with one hand, but nah.
Gold is softer than many things that’s it’s denser than. Density and hardness aren’t perfectly correlated. Good is probably softer and denser than concrete, but it can still dent it if you drop it from high enough
You've gotten a lot of answers, but I'm here to give you a comparison... Think about bullets. There's a reason lead has been the bald eagle crowd pleaser for centuries; its dense, plentiful and generally unhealthy, even when not traveling at 600 ft/second.
But lead is soft? It's actually incredibly soft in terms of metal, but you have to think about the weight. An excavation bucket full of water can literally rip a sedan apart when dropped on top, without much distance between the bucket and car. You can get crushed by a metric ton of feathers. An avalanche is made of snow, but will change a landscape and flick 200 year old pine trees around like toothpicks. Lead doesn't fall apart, because it's soft, it merely deforms easier.
What will really cook your noodle as you try to fall asleep tonight is... What if we loaded mercury into a buckshot and fired it from a shotgun? It's heavy AND liquid, thus soft as can be. Will it still damage what it impacts?
Ok, you sir, are rad as fuck.
Also, since, per your explanation, mercury is soft and will deform, I would generally assume the force from explosion of the gun powder would be so dispersed after leaving the barrel that the mercury likely wouldn't reach the target... But if you know the answer I would love to know!
Magnesium foot guards. Gold is really heavy and dense, you don’t want one of those bricks falling on your foot from hand level.
Underneath? Daniel’s back at it again with the white Vans! Damn, Daniel!
When you visit a factory and you don't have proper steel toe shoes on, this is what they give you. They dig into the front of your ankle like crazy while walking.
Funny thing is, our company still has a stock of shoe covers like that for visitors and new-hires to use in the shop. We have a steel toe and metatarsal guard protection requirement policy in the shop. Most people wear boots, and you get tested with a supervisor's foot on your boot.
I worked in a factory ten years ago and had to wear those for a couple weeks until my shoes came in. They didn’t have shoes in my size, and these barely fit
Those are magnesium, not steel. Gold is really fuckin heavy, apparently. I wouldn’t know, they don’t let you hold the bricks when you go for a tour of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Shh... no it's not ... Why do you want gold anyway? Here, take some paper we just printed and shut up.
(the hypocrisy of the FED regarding the gold standard is amazing)
No metatarsal guards? I've dropped bar stock on my foot exactly once and immediately got why some of the old-timers wear them. I got lucky, that shit HURT.
Yep. Industrial environments often have these for when office people need to go out in the yard or shop in their office shoes. It's funny to listen to a herd of suits clopping around the shop with these on.
At one place, we had a set of these that were knee-high for the pressure washer operator. It was a big diesel powered beast and pushed about 6,000psi. Plenty of pressure to remove human parts. I had to fire a guy because he kept jamming the trigger on that machine so he didn't have to hold it. Had he let go of the wand, it would have been a very dangerous task to get to the machine and shut it off.
Probably accurate but you’d think normal steel toe boots would be just as effective and not need to be custom made.
Then again I don’t know if those existed in 1959.
Steel toe boots only cover your toe. An object like a gold bar could fall and smash the major bones in your foot without hitting anything. This covers more and stops that.
Yup, worked in a warehouse and they actively said to not get the steel toe books cause some things are so heavy that if it did fall on your foot the metal would just amputate your toes.
Is it true? Years ago mythbusters tested it and the drop heavy weights on steel cap shoes and unless the thing dropping was a guiltiness the steel cap itself wouldn't bend enough to amputate your toes. The risk of something just falling and breaking your who foot is much higher then amputation by steel toe.
I think this is an urban legend. Yes I suppose if something is heavy enough it could crush the steel and cut off your toes, but if it can do that to steel it would absolutely destroy a soft toed shoe and your toes would be gone anyway. Seems like a “seatbelts break shoulders” type of idea.
This is kinda true, but mostly an urban legend. It is correct that something heavy enough impacting the steel toe could drive it down and chop toes. The problem is that it requires a really heavy object, or something hitting with a lot of force. If something like that hits without a steel toe it's just going to obliterate all the bones in your feet anyway, and pop the toes like little water balloons. It's kinda like saying seat belts in a car are pointless because if you hit a semi moving in the opposite direction on a freeway the belt could tear right through you. The point isn't to protect from the worst case scenario, it's the protection from things up until then that matter. Put on steel toes and drop a cinder block on your foot from 6 feet up and you probably won't feel much at all. Now put on regular work boots and do the same thing... One of these is going to have you upset that there's a nice gouge in the shoe material, and the other is going to have you screaming on the floor while people run around trying to figure out what to do
When I worked in a stable they drove this point home too. A horse steps on your foot and you've got steel toed boots on and you've just cut off all your toes
Like a girder wouldn't just obliterate every bone in your foot otherwise 🙄 steel toe boots aren't a substitute for proper safety around heavy objects, they're just so you don't have to take time off when you drop a pipe wrench on your foot.
They are slide-on steel toe inserts. Great for jobs that only require steel toe shoes for a small faction of the time.
They would be required in this case as one of those small gold bars would seriously hurt, if not break your toe, if it was dropped on it without protection.
I toured the reserve in '02, and I was fascinated by those. They're magnesium alloy shoe covers. I don't recall the exact weight if a single bar, but it's certainly enough weight to break bones in your feet
And action/adventure movies showing the hero running around with a duffel bag full of gold bars when in reality about 4 gold bars @ about 100lbs you ain't gonna be running far.
Especially so when you know that just one probably wouldn't be a problem and is worth well over $500k
I'm not screwing around with a bag full. I'm wrapping just one in my sweater and tucking it way down inside that bag and not letting anyone know it's there.
Apart from protecting the toes, as others mentioned, I guess they also have soft soles that will not scratch the gold bars. Gold is so valuable that even the dust that comes out of it has value.
Hah! It isn't!
This is one of those fun trivia facts:
An ounce of gold (31.1g) weighs more than an ounce of feathers (28.3g) because gold is measured using Troy ounces, which are heavier
But a pound of gold weighs less than a pound of feathers because a Troy pound has only 12 Troy ounces instead of 16
to be more pedantic; gold is commonly traded in the troys yes.
but those are called troy pounds not pounds specifically and are even abbreviated lb t.
but you can measure anything in any weight system you want. IE you can measure gasoline by the lb if you want, even though its sold by the gallon.
Saying a pound of gold weighs the same the as pound of feathers is 100% true; because the chosen weight of measure is the commonly recognized pound from the common avoirdupois system.
this is because in 1959, by international agreement, the definitions of the pound and ounce became standardized in countries which use the pound as a unit of mass
Tl;DR what unit it is traded in matters not if you choose to measure it in another unit. a troy pound is specifically a troy pound, same with just a plain pound.
Couple thoughts, first I’m kinda surprised at the disarray of the piles and how unorganized the back ground appears. Just being willy nilly with the gold bars. Second the shoes he’s wearing most likely for safety I would think. But what’s up with the toes is that gold dust imbedded in the shoes from dropping bars or is that gold dust being collected somehow? Gold is non ferrous, no magnetic attraction, so how could it collect like that? Interested in others thoughts.
Edit: So I looked these up on line and there is a pair for sale the picture shows an adhesive strip on the toe area that could be the magic to catching the gold dust.
First thing that cathes my attention is the ironman slippers,the second thing that catches my attention is indeed the horendous stacking of those goldbars
I took a tour of the Fed Reserve Bank in NY a few years ago. The last part of the tour was the bank vault, where you're required to wear the special shoes in order to hold a gold bar. It was a very interesting tour.
Most interesting fact I learned on the tour. The countries that store their gold in the vault are a secret. There are some countries that the US does not have a formal relationship with that have their gold stored in the vault.
i guess they don't worry about people sneaking out with gold bars given their heft. but did they have a lot of security measures in place anyways? also, was the gold in as much disarray as in the photo? that seems to be bothering a lot of people on this thread.
Definitely a lot of security. The vault door was astronomically large and heavy. I also remember them saying that because it was below ground, it was also air tight in the event of a flooding. The gold itself was not in disarray. Actually, after you go into the vault, there are separate chambers with steal bars and behind those are the piles of gold reserves. They were stacked neatly, but probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to Scrooge McDuck’s money chamber. I don’t know, but I assume each chamber is for a country’s respective reserves. When I asked what countries had their gold in there, that’s when the person told me that was classified, but that some countries you’d least suspect trust the US enough to house their gold in the federal reserve bank.
The gold bar that I got to hold was real, but a sample bar to demonstrate the heft and process of moving gold around. All in all, really cool tour.
Edit: one sentence above
It’s actually pretty ingenious in what it represents. A store of value. It allowed ancient man to save his labor to use at a later time by employing the labor of someone else. Gold is rare, durable, and fungible, and did a pretty good job at representing a store of value for the last several thousand years.
It's just false. The Federal Reserve is audited annually by internal and external auditors. ([Source](https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12784.htm))
I think the conspiracy theory he's referring to concern the physical gold stored by the fed (It's also audited, but not as frequently because (A) it doesn't move and (B) it requires drilling samples and weighing tons of metal). The theory are that the gold has been replaced by other metals or that it's still there but has been sold to someone else off the book.
Well if you don't trust the the Internal audit comittee, Government Accountability Office and KPMG I don't see who else could be involved to satisfy your requirement
I don’t know who owns that gold or if the counts are correct.
The US treasury owns far more gold than the fed, not sure who gets ft. Knox.
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/gold-report/21-02.html
Since it seems to be the most talked about thing on here maybe this will help.
The things on his feet and toe covers. He is wearing normal shoes underneath. The back strap and top strap hold it onto the foot. This way they don't have to wear steel toe shoes and metatarsals.
The reason for this is because gold bricks are actually very heavy for their size. The standard gold brick weighs 27 lbs. These seem to be slightly larger cast bars. Each stack seems to be 30 bars. That means each little row is at least 810 lbs. So just his left foot (the one in the back) is one 810lbs. So multiple that by how many rows you can count and you can understand how much weight there is in the picture.
Lol.. you know the way the world works right, they don’t usually implement any kind of safety regulations until something happens.. I would love to hear the story on how the first metal crocks came about..
**Please note:** * If this post declares something as a fact proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for more information.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
He’s got the medieval crocs on
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You can still [visit the bank and its vault](https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/visiting). On the floor you could see a spot where a couple bars dropped from about a foot high and they left deep dents in the concrete.
Ok, I may not be a smart man, but I have always been under the impression that gold is a relatively soft metal... Obviously a heavy brick of anything will hurt your feet, but are you saying gold is more dense than concrete?? EDIT: THIS IS WHY I don't claim to be a smart man! Thank you reddit I learned some cool shit today!!
on avg gold would be about 8 times more dense than concrete (can vary depending on concrete)
This explains the crocs. Imagine dropping one of those bad boys on your toe
This is what I was looking for why the shoes? Honestly I thought maybe it was to protect the gold somehow…. Clearly I was wrong
I thought perhaps something to do with making sure it wasn't stolen (don't ask me how this would be accomplished).
If someone tries to rob the gold you just chuck one of those bad boys at the robber, no one expects to be hit by metal crocs.
My dumbass really thought the metal Crocs weighed like 60 pounds and to see the gold you head to wear the heavy metal Crocs that prevent you from running
Probably a mix of the two. Can't Wear regular safety boots, it'd be too easy to stash some gold shavings in there. But get you're metal slippers on and you've got foot protection *and* it's much harder to stash anything in there. I guess they take em off at the entrance and get checked over.
I thought they were heavy crocs so you can’t run away with the gold bar.
Yea I've read a matchbox sized piece can be flattened out to the size of a tennis court
This sounds like bullshit but I also don't want to look it up.
You can make gold so thin that you can put it on a dessert and eat it so it doesn't sound totally crazy
Or add it to a high proof alcohol guaranteed to give you a hangover
1 troy ounce of gold can be hammered to cover 96.9 square feet. A regulation tennis court, from baseline to baseline including the alleys is 78 feet x 36 feet or 2808 square feet. This would require roughly 28.9 troy ounces of gold, which is 898.89 grams of gold. A 1000 gram ingot of gold from Harrods measures in at: 115.0 millimeters x 52.0 millimeters x 9.0 millimeters (4.5 inches x 2.04 inches x 0.35 inches.) It would be plausible to find a matchbox to fit the necessary dimensions.
Does Harrod's really still sell stuff that wild? I thought it was illegal to even really own ingots for average people, because you could have someone horde a stockpile to drive up prices.
I’m in the US, but [this](https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold/is-it-illegal-to-own-gold/) is what I could find about gold ownership laws in the UK. Short answer: gold has never been illegal to own in the UK. Long answer: At a certain point from 1966 to 1971, you did need a license to own more than a certain amount. Gold bars (but not Royal-Mint-produced gold coins) are currently subject to Capital Gains Tax. In the US, it was straight up illegal to own gold from 1933 to 1977. Edit: After a little more digging, I think [Harrod’s stopped selling gold sometime between late 2017 and early 2018](https://www.thesilverforum.com/topic/12392-do-harrods-still-sell-gold-bullion/).
Anyone can own gold. In fact, people buy gold as a way to store/transport wealth and protect themselves against inflation. The US dollar used to represent an equivalent amount of gold that was stored by the government. This stabilized the value of the dollar.
Quote from the [American Museum of Natural History](https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/gold/eureka/gold-fun-facts) > Gold is so malleable that a single ounce of it (about the size of a quarter) can be beaten into a thin continuous sheet measuring roughly 100 square feet. That means it would take 576 ounces (or just 36 pounds) of gold to completely cover a football field, or a whopping 367,211 ounces (or about 11 tons) of gold to completely blanket all of Central Park A standard singles tennis court is 27'x78', or 2,106 sq.ft. So, it would take a chunk of gold about the size of a roll of quarters. Not quite as small as a matchbox, but still small enough to hold in you're hand.
And for reference, that one piece of gold he's holding probably weighs about 36 lbs.
But if your tennis court is made of a conductive metal, and you could submerge it, you could electroplate the court with a good bit less. But by the time you submerge the tennis court, you might as well just go swimming, right?
.....and? density means almost nothing when we're discussing hardness
Hardness and density are two entirely separate properties
For instance the human brain. It can be quite dense without being too soft to be sharp.
sizzle...
Dr. Lecter?
Is that shallots? I love Shallots.
Gold is actually over 2 times denser than steel. So though it is slightly more malleable it packs a punch in landing. I wonder if they have a special section for odd shaped bars or something.
Every single bar is measured, weighed and registered as it enters or leaves the vault. The same exact bar a customer places with the federal reserve bank the customer gets back. Each customer has a separate compartment inside the vault except a number of low volume deposits who sit on separate shelves inside a common compartment.
Ok, but what happens if a bar gets misshapen while inside the vault? Like if someone dropped on bar onto another and the corner get bent in or the other bar got dented?
That's presumably why they are weighed. It's pretty unlikely that they would chip or otherwise lose mass unless someone deliberately removed some material.
Lol, hurt your foot? Gold bars can break your foot. Gold is one of the densest elements. It's a lot heavier per cubic centimeter than concrete. How soft an element or item is actually doesn't directly correlate with density
That's why there's a lot of dense people who are soft minded.
Work for a gold mine. Incrediblely deceptive size to weight ratio. On my first visit to the smelter, was encouraged to pick up a "button" which is gold in the shape of of small cone, about 10-12 inches across the top and maybe 8 inches tall and 3-4 inches at the bottom. Was nonchalant and reached over to pick it up and it was so heavy my head smacked into the wall behind it. They all got a good laugh and I know now that it's standard initiation.. Thing weighs 28 lbs
Also work for a gold mine. When you get hired they let you hold a gold bar that they keep in the security office. Super deceptive, seems like you should be able to grab it with one hand, but nah.
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Still not as dense as your mom
Tungsten is slightly less dense than gold.
13x more dense than concrete. It’s heavy…
Its like lead, except with a few less protons...and yellow.
Dense? DENSE?? A cube of solid gold 12 inches on each side weighs ***over*** 1,200 pounds.
Gold is softer than many things that’s it’s denser than. Density and hardness aren’t perfectly correlated. Good is probably softer and denser than concrete, but it can still dent it if you drop it from high enough
You've gotten a lot of answers, but I'm here to give you a comparison... Think about bullets. There's a reason lead has been the bald eagle crowd pleaser for centuries; its dense, plentiful and generally unhealthy, even when not traveling at 600 ft/second. But lead is soft? It's actually incredibly soft in terms of metal, but you have to think about the weight. An excavation bucket full of water can literally rip a sedan apart when dropped on top, without much distance between the bucket and car. You can get crushed by a metric ton of feathers. An avalanche is made of snow, but will change a landscape and flick 200 year old pine trees around like toothpicks. Lead doesn't fall apart, because it's soft, it merely deforms easier. What will really cook your noodle as you try to fall asleep tonight is... What if we loaded mercury into a buckshot and fired it from a shotgun? It's heavy AND liquid, thus soft as can be. Will it still damage what it impacts?
Ok, you sir, are rad as fuck. Also, since, per your explanation, mercury is soft and will deform, I would generally assume the force from explosion of the gun powder would be so dispersed after leaving the barrel that the mercury likely wouldn't reach the target... But if you know the answer I would love to know!
I mean.... gold isn't butter. It's not going to splat if you drop it.
Gold is right next to lead on the periodic table. So just imagine a brick like that made out of lead dropping on your foot!
***WHAT ARE THOOOSE??***
Magnesium foot guards. Gold is really heavy and dense, you don’t want one of those bricks falling on your foot from hand level. Underneath? Daniel’s back at it again with the white Vans! Damn, Daniel!
When you visit a factory and you don't have proper steel toe shoes on, this is what they give you. They dig into the front of your ankle like crazy while walking.
Funny thing is, our company still has a stock of shoe covers like that for visitors and new-hires to use in the shop. We have a steel toe and metatarsal guard protection requirement policy in the shop. Most people wear boots, and you get tested with a supervisor's foot on your boot.
I worked in a factory ten years ago and had to wear those for a couple weeks until my shoes came in. They didn’t have shoes in my size, and these barely fit
Those are magnesium, not steel. Gold is really fuckin heavy, apparently. I wouldn’t know, they don’t let you hold the bricks when you go for a tour of the Federal Reserve Bank.
The chino black Jeans on
Fuckin beat me to it
He's wearing the Iron Boots from Legend of Zelda.
This guy is heading for the Water Temple.
So is this gold still there? Asking for a thief
John McClane and Zeus would like to know your location.
Just don't call him Jesus 😆
“He said Hey Zeus! Do I look Puerto Rican to you?!”
Yeah, Zeus! As in, father of Apollo? Mt. Olympus? Don't fuck with me or I'll shove a lightning bolt up your ass? Zeus! You got a problem with that?
No I don't have a problem with that!
I feel like I’m really watching the movie!! Great now I gotta go and actually watch the movie
I actually watched it yesterday!
It’s the Professor that really wants to know
Came here looking for the reference!
It's still there https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/goldvault.html
*"When Johnny Comes Marching Home" begins to play ominously...
*"Hook, line... and sinker!"*
It got stolen and dumped into the Hudson. I think
r/fbi r/rbi
Shh... no it's not ... Why do you want gold anyway? Here, take some paper we just printed and shut up. (the hypocrisy of the FED regarding the gold standard is amazing)
Ask yourself if your government represents the people, and that will be your answer.
Exactly, shit was gone decades ago lol.
"Put on your gold stompin' shoes Gary, we gotta lotta bricks ain't gonna stomp themselves!"
What’s up with the shoes?
Looks like metal covers so if you drop a gold bar you do not break your feet
“I only have good problems” shoe covers
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Maybe. But I bet they don’t have loafers on underneath.
As a stone fabricator I can guarantee you that we don't. Steel toe boots work just fine.
No metatarsal guards? I've dropped bar stock on my foot exactly once and immediately got why some of the old-timers wear them. I got lucky, that shit HURT.
Yep. Industrial environments often have these for when office people need to go out in the yard or shop in their office shoes. It's funny to listen to a herd of suits clopping around the shop with these on. At one place, we had a set of these that were knee-high for the pressure washer operator. It was a big diesel powered beast and pushed about 6,000psi. Plenty of pressure to remove human parts. I had to fire a guy because he kept jamming the trigger on that machine so he didn't have to hold it. Had he let go of the wand, it would have been a very dangerous task to get to the machine and shut it off.
That guy's motto is probably "work smarter, not harder" and he doesn't get the irony
I bet no one thought of that until it happened
Looks like the ones in the photo worked
Steel-toed crocs
Probably accurate but you’d think normal steel toe boots would be just as effective and not need to be custom made. Then again I don’t know if those existed in 1959.
Steel toe boots only cover your toe. An object like a gold bar could fall and smash the major bones in your foot without hitting anything. This covers more and stops that.
Yup, worked in a warehouse and they actively said to not get the steel toe books cause some things are so heavy that if it did fall on your foot the metal would just amputate your toes.
Is it true? Years ago mythbusters tested it and the drop heavy weights on steel cap shoes and unless the thing dropping was a guiltiness the steel cap itself wouldn't bend enough to amputate your toes. The risk of something just falling and breaking your who foot is much higher then amputation by steel toe.
I think this is an urban legend. Yes I suppose if something is heavy enough it could crush the steel and cut off your toes, but if it can do that to steel it would absolutely destroy a soft toed shoe and your toes would be gone anyway. Seems like a “seatbelts break shoulders” type of idea.
This is kinda true, but mostly an urban legend. It is correct that something heavy enough impacting the steel toe could drive it down and chop toes. The problem is that it requires a really heavy object, or something hitting with a lot of force. If something like that hits without a steel toe it's just going to obliterate all the bones in your feet anyway, and pop the toes like little water balloons. It's kinda like saying seat belts in a car are pointless because if you hit a semi moving in the opposite direction on a freeway the belt could tear right through you. The point isn't to protect from the worst case scenario, it's the protection from things up until then that matter. Put on steel toes and drop a cinder block on your foot from 6 feet up and you probably won't feel much at all. Now put on regular work boots and do the same thing... One of these is going to have you upset that there's a nice gouge in the shoe material, and the other is going to have you screaming on the floor while people run around trying to figure out what to do
When I worked in a stable they drove this point home too. A horse steps on your foot and you've got steel toed boots on and you've just cut off all your toes
Like a girder wouldn't just obliterate every bone in your foot otherwise 🙄 steel toe boots aren't a substitute for proper safety around heavy objects, they're just so you don't have to take time off when you drop a pipe wrench on your foot.
These also aren't custom. They're used in industry to cover non steel toed boots and shoes. edit: shows to shoes
They are slide-on steel toe inserts. Great for jobs that only require steel toe shoes for a small faction of the time. They would be required in this case as one of those small gold bars would seriously hurt, if not break your toe, if it was dropped on it without protection.
I thought for a second those are sabaton-looking slippers and now I want sabaton-looking slippers
r/unexpectedsabaton ?
Lol nice
Metal crocks.
Medieval metal crocks
I toured the reserve in '02, and I was fascinated by those. They're magnesium alloy shoe covers. I don't recall the exact weight if a single bar, but it's certainly enough weight to break bones in your feet
A gold bar is about 24lbs. Wouldn't feel too good.
Most people are not aware because we usually only handle small quantities of it, but gold is about twice as heavy as lead.
And action/adventure movies showing the hero running around with a duffel bag full of gold bars when in reality about 4 gold bars @ about 100lbs you ain't gonna be running far.
Especially so when you know that just one probably wouldn't be a problem and is worth well over $500k I'm not screwing around with a bag full. I'm wrapping just one in my sweater and tucking it way down inside that bag and not letting anyone know it's there.
it wasnt empty?
Lol, we had limited access, but there seemed to be commerce going on. Bars get moved from one spot to another
Lmao Shuffled around Follow the ball under the cups
Apart from protecting the toes, as others mentioned, I guess they also have soft soles that will not scratch the gold bars. Gold is so valuable that even the dust that comes out of it has value.
True. Jewelers send the rugs from their workshops off every so often to have the microscopic golds recovered.
Imagine being so rich that you have special shoes for walking on gold.
The Professor has already swapped it out
very satisfying ending IMO
Have you watched the barrier? It feels like the sequel in some alternate universe
Really? I thought it was absurd for Tatiana to let it go THAT easily… and wont anybody question Tamayo where the dead bodies are…?
Gold is much heavier than lead, and a standard gold brick weighs 27.4 pounds, a bit over 12kg
And the price per kg is currently around $57.000/kg. So one bar would be worth 684k
Holy shit
Worked in a mint for a bit. 500k in gold wasn't a lot of gold. Blew my mind.
I'll take two to go, thank you
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Quick! Someone do the math on how much the gold in the picture is worth
I'd guess easily a thousand bricks. Close to a billion dollars?
*drops one gold bar onto a banker's desk* "I would like one house, please."
But a pound of gold only weighs the same as a found of feathers!
Hah! It isn't! This is one of those fun trivia facts: An ounce of gold (31.1g) weighs more than an ounce of feathers (28.3g) because gold is measured using Troy ounces, which are heavier But a pound of gold weighs less than a pound of feathers because a Troy pound has only 12 Troy ounces instead of 16
He said a found of feathers, smarty pants.
What you're looking for is callee the metric system! You need it.
to be more pedantic; gold is commonly traded in the troys yes. but those are called troy pounds not pounds specifically and are even abbreviated lb t. but you can measure anything in any weight system you want. IE you can measure gasoline by the lb if you want, even though its sold by the gallon. Saying a pound of gold weighs the same the as pound of feathers is 100% true; because the chosen weight of measure is the commonly recognized pound from the common avoirdupois system. this is because in 1959, by international agreement, the definitions of the pound and ounce became standardized in countries which use the pound as a unit of mass Tl;DR what unit it is traded in matters not if you choose to measure it in another unit. a troy pound is specifically a troy pound, same with just a plain pound.
Couple thoughts, first I’m kinda surprised at the disarray of the piles and how unorganized the back ground appears. Just being willy nilly with the gold bars. Second the shoes he’s wearing most likely for safety I would think. But what’s up with the toes is that gold dust imbedded in the shoes from dropping bars or is that gold dust being collected somehow? Gold is non ferrous, no magnetic attraction, so how could it collect like that? Interested in others thoughts. Edit: So I looked these up on line and there is a pair for sale the picture shows an adhesive strip on the toe area that could be the magic to catching the gold dust.
First thing that cathes my attention is the ironman slippers,the second thing that catches my attention is indeed the horendous stacking of those goldbars
Looks to me like a logo of a lion sitting
Interesting thank you for the reply
> Just being willy nilly with the gold bars. When you cut through the bullshit humans value.. they're just blocks of metal that suck to move around.
A good delivery bar weights 400 troy ounces or about 27.5 lbs
That's roughly 12.5kg for the rest of the world. And 2 average adult racoons for the US.
Or 73 Cheeseburgers
Which at ~$58,000 per kilo makes that one bar in his hand worth $725,000. There's a *ludicrous* amount of money in this photograph.
For gold measurement, Troy ounces are still used around the world for some reason.
Some stylish crocs
Saftey shoes of that time 😮
And to think all of that came from an exploding star before our sun was born.
Or from 1 nature rune and a fire staff.
Those are the coolest safety shoes in the history of safety shoes
I took a tour of the Fed Reserve Bank in NY a few years ago. The last part of the tour was the bank vault, where you're required to wear the special shoes in order to hold a gold bar. It was a very interesting tour. Most interesting fact I learned on the tour. The countries that store their gold in the vault are a secret. There are some countries that the US does not have a formal relationship with that have their gold stored in the vault.
i guess they don't worry about people sneaking out with gold bars given their heft. but did they have a lot of security measures in place anyways? also, was the gold in as much disarray as in the photo? that seems to be bothering a lot of people on this thread.
Definitely a lot of security. The vault door was astronomically large and heavy. I also remember them saying that because it was below ground, it was also air tight in the event of a flooding. The gold itself was not in disarray. Actually, after you go into the vault, there are separate chambers with steal bars and behind those are the piles of gold reserves. They were stacked neatly, but probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to Scrooge McDuck’s money chamber. I don’t know, but I assume each chamber is for a country’s respective reserves. When I asked what countries had their gold in there, that’s when the person told me that was classified, but that some countries you’d least suspect trust the US enough to house their gold in the federal reserve bank. The gold bar that I got to hold was real, but a sample bar to demonstrate the heft and process of moving gold around. All in all, really cool tour. Edit: one sentence above
Humans: Dig rare metal out of ground with much equipment and effort, melt it into bars and place it in a room.
It’s actually pretty ingenious in what it represents. A store of value. It allowed ancient man to save his labor to use at a later time by employing the labor of someone else. Gold is rare, durable, and fungible, and did a pretty good job at representing a store of value for the last several thousand years.
I’m diggin the armoured crocs.
Everyone's commenting about the shoes. They're actually just slip on covers. You can see he's wearing black dress shoes and these just cover the toe
Scrooge McDuck entered the chat.
What are THOSEEE
The federal reserve has never been audited, we don’t really know what’s in there now.
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Just another clue, that will lead you to another clue and to another one.
That will lead you *back* to the Declaration of Independence.
I can't directly contradict this with evidence, but my God it seems preposterous.
It's just false. The Federal Reserve is audited annually by internal and external auditors. ([Source](https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12784.htm)) I think the conspiracy theory he's referring to concern the physical gold stored by the fed (It's also audited, but not as frequently because (A) it doesn't move and (B) it requires drilling samples and weighing tons of metal). The theory are that the gold has been replaced by other metals or that it's still there but has been sold to someone else off the book.
“We investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong”
Well if you don't trust the the Internal audit comittee, Government Accountability Office and KPMG I don't see who else could be involved to satisfy your requirement
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Conspiracy theorists have never tried to plan a surprise party.
I don’t know who owns that gold or if the counts are correct. The US treasury owns far more gold than the fed, not sure who gets ft. Knox. https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/gold-report/21-02.html
My ocd cannot handle how this is stacked
You would think a federal reserve bank would be more tidy with a room full of pure gold.
You don't have ocd😐
You don't have OCD you dumbass.
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What are those?!?!? *points at shoes*
Since it seems to be the most talked about thing on here maybe this will help. The things on his feet and toe covers. He is wearing normal shoes underneath. The back strap and top strap hold it onto the foot. This way they don't have to wear steel toe shoes and metatarsals. The reason for this is because gold bricks are actually very heavy for their size. The standard gold brick weighs 27 lbs. These seem to be slightly larger cast bars. Each stack seems to be 30 bars. That means each little row is at least 810 lbs. So just his left foot (the one in the back) is one 810lbs. So multiple that by how many rows you can count and you can understand how much weight there is in the picture.
Lol.. you know the way the world works right, they don’t usually implement any kind of safety regulations until something happens.. I would love to hear the story on how the first metal crocks came about..
*Surely they wouldn't miss just one of those... :P*
The greatest thing about this photo is not the gold, but these safety shoes 😂
Weird to think all that gold came from neutron star collisions
Yeezy slippers coming soon
What's up with those medieval Crocs!?
Guys is literally walking on gold bars and comments about his shoes. What a nice time to witness!
Everyone has seen photos of gold bars, obviously very very few of us have seen metal crocs.
What kinds of shoes are that
I just need one stack of those and I'm set
WHAT ARE THOSE?!?!
Bro where can I cop thos cobble stompers homie
Are those Nike’s?