On 1 November 1961 the central banks of the United States and seven European countries agreed to pool their gold and intervene together in the London market, selling when the price rose and buying when it fell, to hold it at US$35 an ounce. The arrangement held for six years before mounting private demand overwhelmed it, and the pool was wound up in March 1968.

Why it still mattersThe pool remains the clearest example of governments trying to hold the gold price in place, and of private demand eventually proving stronger than the defence.

At Ballarat in 1854, diggers angry at heavy licence fees and high-handed authorities built a stockade and raised their own flag. The soldiers who stormed it killed around two dozen men — but the miners largely won the argument, and the Eureka Stockade is now remembered as a milestone in Australian democracy.

Why it still mattersThe dispute was over licence fees, in effect a tax on the right to dig. Questions of who taxes gold and on what terms still shape mining jurisdictions today.

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In 1863 the first spoon dredges went to work on the Clutha River: little more than a leather bag on an iron hoop, dragged across the riverbed from a moored punt. Crude as they were, they began the shift from the lone digger with a pan towards mechanised mining, and Otago went on to become a proving ground for the bucket dredges later used around the world.

Why it still mattersDredging made low-grade gravels economic for the first time, an early lesson that the size of a resource depends as much on technology and cost as on geology.

On 31 December 1974 Americans were again free to own gold bullion, more than four decades after Executive Order 6102 required most private gold to be surrendered to the Federal Reserve. The change, signed into law by Gerald Ford that August, reopened the largest economy in the world to private gold investment.

Why it still mattersAmerican investors became a permanent part of the gold market, and the legal right to hold bullion is now taken largely for granted in most advanced economies.

When James Marshall spotted flecks of gold in the tailrace of Sutter's sawmill in January 1848, he set off the greatest rush in history. Within two years hundreds of thousands had poured into California from every continent — the original gold rush, and the one that fixed gold fever in the modern imagination.

Why it still mattersCalifornia's gold helped expand the world's monetary gold stock at a decisive moment and pulled the United States westward, in population and in finance.