eli5 what made people think that silver was such a precious resource?
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An interesting note on some of the comments here: many people are, correctly, pointing to the fact that Silver was valued for its low reactivity and tendency not to tarnish.
However, if you’ve ever held silver before you will likely have noticed that it was indeed tarnished, and that exposing it to air will cause it to tarnish again in short order. Were people blind hundreds of years ago? Have the chemical properties of silver changed in the last few hundred years?
Sort of. See, silver does not react readily with oxygen, carbon, or nitrogen. But it does react with sulfur. In, say, 1400, sulfuric compounds in the air were all but nonexistent. But then, we learned about fossil fuels and coal power. That led to the rise of factories, pumping large amounts of Sulfur Dioxide into the atmosphere. As a result, ever since about 1800, silver has tarnished on contact with air.
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