The Nobel Prizes and the Water of Kings

My second blog post and already I'm breaking the premise of the blog - this little story has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in my current book. However I'm hoping you will find it of sufficient interest and charm to forgive my deviating off-script.

-oOo-

A few days ago in work, I needed to make some aqua regia to clean up some stubbornly filthy glassware. "What's aqua regia?" you ask. And I'm glad you did. Aqua regia (from the Latin for "King's water") is a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids, in a particular proportion. It was the precise nature of this proportion which I couldn't quite remember and so had to go to Google to look it up. This is how I came across the story of the Nobel Prizes and the Water of Kings

In April of 1940, Hungarian chemist (and future Nobel Prize winner himself) George de Hevesy was working at the Nils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. When the Nazis invaded on 9th April Hevesey, in order to prevent their confiscation, took the solid gold Nobel Prize medals belonging to Max von Laue and James Franck and dissolved them in aqua regia. It was against the law at that time to send gold out of the country and, had he done so in order to prevent their theft, he would have been liable to prosecution by the Reich. He placed the bottle containing the now completely dissolved medals back on a shelf alongside many other similar bottles where it remained undisturbed until, three years later, he fled the country to seek refuge in neutral Sweden.

The story does not quite end there, however.

After the war he returned to his laboratory and found, with what one can only imagine, great delight that the bottle was still there. He precipitated the gold back out of the solution and returned it to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They then recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.