Shaping the Earth: Dominic Frisby's Amazing Lecture About the History of Mining

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00][Applause] W well thank you very much ladies and gentlemen good evening and welcome and thank you very much for coming to watch this this lecture with funny bits all about the the the amazing history of Mining and um I have a friend called Dominic and uh bizarrely enough and he writes jokes for a living and he writes jokes for people like Jimmy Carr and Sasha Baron Co and Ricky Javas and sometimes even Dominic Frisbee and one of the things that he says is that the process of writing a joke is not a process of invention it's a process of discovery you're pulling back the sand to see what's there and there's another veteran billionaire Trader who I follow on Twitter by the name of Peter brand and he says exactly the same thing a trade is a process of discovery and similarly going through The Fringe brochure up at the edra festival trying to find a decent show is also a process of discovery and indeed mining itself uh is a process of discovery you're pulling away the Rock and the sand and the Earth in order to find out what's there and it's quite interesting I think over the course of history human beings have often um got muddled between what is invention and what is really um only Discovery anyway with that in mind I start we're gonna start with this quote I was listening to a podcast in 2011 and there was this old Texan man with a real kind of Texan draw and he's actually died and I haven't been able to find out what his name is because I can't find the podcast um so I just Googled I put into my AI art app Wise Old Texan and it came back with that picture there uh so that's not actually what he looks like but we'll just go with it but he said there are three ways uh you can add real wealth to the world you can grow stuff you can make stuff or you can mine stuff and everything else is just pushing about what's already there and I always thought that was quite a quite a profound thought and let's keep it at the back of our minds as we go through this lecture so let's do a quick straw poll um broadly speaking do we think mining is a good thing let's sort of raise our hands okay and uh it's a slightly biased audience that I that I attract uh I don't T don't tend get the and and uh but raise our hands if we think it's a bad thing nobody but even if you there's probably a couple of you out there but just keeping quiet and um and often people shout out it's a necessary evil which is a sort of halfway medium between the two um but over the course we'll we'll look and see if it's a good or a bad thing it's one of the questions that we'll be asking but all mining is basically it is the process of extracting stuff from the earth that is what mining basically is so let's start with a question for you what is the oldest profession and prostitution absolutely right a few of you quick to shout that out I I have since learned that we're not actually allowed to say prostitute anymore you have to call it sex worker uh I've recently learned but yes people say that prostitution is the oldest profession and um if we imagine ourselves in the ancient world in Ancient Mesopotamia uh here we have a uh an ancient Mesopotamian sex worker uh as as imagined by Ai and there she is and I I have my doubts that's all I'm going to say I have my doubts I was uh watching this documentary all about be well I wasn't I was actually presenting this documentary All About Beauty and we were interviewing these um Beauty experts and one of them was a darwinian beauty expert and he argued that because of sexual selection human beings have got progressively good-look with each generation and that therefore means that sitting in this room ladies and gentlemen we have the most beautiful people in history and uh it's a pleasure to be pleasure to be sharing the room with with such Lookers um but in any case if that argument is true it's it's very unlikely that an ancient Mesopotamian sex worker would have looked like that but in any case whatever she looked like what would we have had to pay this lady with gold absolutely right gold or silver or perhaps even bronze or something down down if she wasn't as good-looking as that um but any but in any case whatever she was paid with gold or silver how would we have obtained that gold or silver mining of course and therefore by its own definition mining precedes prostitution as the world's oldest profession and there are actually examples of stone tools that have been found in Kenya uh which predate not just Homo sapiens but the homogenous by um about a million years so mining long since predates humankind and here um there have been examples of neandertal Mines that have been found in of all places Hungary I don't know why but Hungary is obviously the world center of neander tals it produced a till of the Han I guess so any in any case um we've there have been examples of neander Flint weapons and tools uh neander mining that have been found and here are those neandertal miners hard at work this is this was taken on an iPhone uh some millions of years ago but we contrast this image of neandertal mining with this uh picture taken and this is a genuine underground mine in Australia and but you can see even and those trucks by the the way are absolutely enormous they're probably as big as this building they they are that big and Mining is one of the few areas where automated uh driving actually happens on a regular basis we don't we we don't have automated self-driving vehicles on the roads yet but in mine in mines they already exist and they are you know economically fiable and and regulated and accepted and everything else but those trucks are you know as big as a house they are just huge and so we have this incredible modern technology but basically they're just doing exactly the same thing which is sifting through the Earth trying to extract valuable stuff so even in this high-tech way that we do it it's still this exactly the same principle and this ladies and gentlemen is the oldest mine in the world it's 43,000 years old and it's called the inua mine in eswatini which is now um swamp land and it actually shut down in 2018 but the reason it shut down was because of the dispute between the owners who an Indian company owns it and the locals over you know environmental stuff and wrongdoing and bribery and Corruption and all this all the rest of it um but that mine has been producing it's an iron iron or mine it's been producing for 43,000 years and it's incredible to think that even after all that time were that dispute not happening that mine would still be producing Paleolithic humans used it to get hematite to to color their skin with and um great tragedy there was an arson at this mine and um all the a lot of the ancient stuff that got mined got ruined in the got got destroyed in the arson unfortunately um and until the 13th century I found this quite interesting we only actually knew of seven Metals in fact we knew about eight or nine we knew about antimon Ian zinc but they weren't considered metals and so each metal was given a planet and a day of the week and now I think we know I think it's 95 different metals that we know about but until the 13th century we only knew of seven gold silver iron Mercury tin copper and lead and if you think there's a list um of the main industries around the world agriculture manufacturing energy and so on and if you look through that list none of them could exist without Mining and if you look around in this room everything you see in this room is here because of mining the world around us it just could not exist without mining mining is absolutely foundational to everything and if you look back at at British history the British were once the well with that in I actually typed in minging is foundational to everything I accidentally typed into my uh AI app oh oh oh dear somebody's that's my daughter calling me um sorry about that I wondered why it didn't get a laugh and I realized my daughter's on the phone there we go but yeah I actually accidentally typed in minging is foundational to everything and AI came back with this incredible image I mean you know I don't know it's just incredible in about 30 seconds it's just incredible what AI can do but yes so in is foundational to everything just as mining is and but with all that in mind how many producing metal mines are there in the UK in Mainland UK not including Northern Ireland or or or or Ireland and anyone the person that gets the right answer I'm going to give a free copy of one of my CDs too so so one person says two zero seven zero he's absolutely right there you go what's your name Nile Nile there you go Nile you can have a free CD um there is not one producing metal mine your challenge Nile is to find something to play it on what's the CD yeah you you look too young to know about mining but anyway um the there is not one producing metal mine in the UK and um this is a list taken from the um the directory of mines and quaries in the year 2000 and you can see there's lots of gravel quaries and clay and and shell and Pete and that kind of thing but these metal mines here the iron or mine is not producing the lead mine is not producing those tin mines in cormal none of them are producing there is not one producing metal mine in the UK I just find that incredible especially when you consider just how culturally important mining is in British history a fantastic book by um Jeremy Paxman that I've just finished reading all about BR the history of coal and he argues that coal the we couldn't have had the Empire without coal everything was built on the energy provided by coal and you just think of you know the Cambo School of Mines the Royal College of Mines we were the global Center of Mines we sent all our mining our miners our technology our expertise to California Australia South Africa South America all over the world and today we do not have a single producing metal mine I just find that absolutely incredible um the S&P 500 is an index of the largest 500 companies in America what percentage of that index is allocated to Mining and the person that gets that right can also have a a copy of my CD so we have 3% there 20% 20% there four four four five five the nearly you can have a seat the correct answer is 0.6% uh alocate there you go there's your oh will you pass it back I thought it was you that won it but there we go uh don't steal it on the way back um 0.6% it goes up a little bit if you include energy oil and gas it goes up to 4.3% and maybe oil and gas should be included um because they are the process of extracting stuff from the ground but excluding oil and gas the answer is 0.6% and the reason I think for this is so much has to do with scalability now let's if if you imagine the digital world let's just say I invent a brilliant app the world's best app and I can put it on um I put it on the App Store and in theory a billi people can download that app tomorrow you know anyone without access to the App Store if Google does a one little change to its algorithm and it uploads it millions of people around billions of people around the world will s can suddenly use that change to this algorithm so there's an incredible scalability to digital but mining the process to that first somebody has to make a discovery so that and there are many geologists who go through their entire life without making a discovery but once a discovery gets made the time from Discovery through to actual prod production is 15 to 20 years so that's 15 to 20 years before anyone before that M starts making a profit that's a long time to wait for a return on your money and many people you know it's it's not attractive to investors and there are so many things that can go wrong over the course of that 15 to 20 years it might turn out that once the initial discover is made made made you have to drill around a bit you drill around you dig around you do all sorts of tests you might discover after a few years that it's just not economic there's just not enough there or the political situation can change and you might get a very anti-mining politician or something that that prevents any progress or um it might uh turn out that metal prices change and what was looked economic at one point is no longer economic there's just so much that can happen over 15 to 20 years and also what Happ s a great deal is the person that made the original Discovery might have been exaggerating uh uh or even lying and I'm afraid that is built into mining because in order to attract investment to drill out and and see what you've got there you have to sell Blue Sky you have to go we've got the world's biggest Discovery here it's going to make you rich invest invest invest so the whole process lends itself to exaggeration and one man who found this out to his great cost was Samuel Clemens uh AKA Mark Twain the Great American wit and writer in 1862 there was a a huge silvery Discovery in a place called Comstock load in Nevada and It produced some of America's first 100 millionaires fortunes got made and um Mark Twain was working in the Mississippi at the time on the Riverbats and he heard about um this silver rush and he he saved up a I think it was a month's wage paid $150 and got a 21 a stage coach ticket across the states took him 21 days to get there and he arrived at exactly the wrong time in the cycle because all the easy to find silver had already been discovered the companies had started moving in and it was no longer economically viable for individual operators to um make a fortune there but it looked like it was still possible if he'd got a year or two later he would have realized there was nothing nothing doing a year or two earlier he might have made the money but he got there at exactly the wrong time and he spent a year in what he called hard and long and dismal labor and he made a number of Investments and he lost everything and uh he ended up he he described it as one Prospect was a dead sure thing but then it is the deadest country for disappointments the world ever saw and he ended up shoveling tailings in a quartz Mill to earn a living and he started drinking very heavily and he would go into this local bar and when he walked into the bar he would call out Mark Twain and uh that was for the barman to put two marks up on the chalkboard against his name for the two whiskies that he was about to drink now did anyone see my show about weights and measures a couple of years ago a few of you can you remember what that distance was anyone a yard a it's actually two yards it's a fathom uh and it's used as a measure of depth 6 feet a fathom and it was used by Sailors as a measure of depth because it was quick you could pull the Rope like that and you could quickly work out how deep the water was with your piece of rope and when the Mississippi um Boats were uh the paddle Steamers they needed a uh two fathoms of depth in order for the paddles to turn safely and so somebody on the boat would shout out Mark Twain to Mark the two fa terms of depth and that's why Mark Twain started shouting out Mark Twain when he was pissed for the two uh for the two things but anyway one of the people he was speaking to in the bar worked for Lo was the editor of a local magazine and gave him a job writing and that's how he got started in his career as a great wit uh because of failed mining Investments so uh I hope that my failed mining investments will Kickstart my comedy career as well um but he ended up coining the Great about mining which is a gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top and that's the great definition of Mining and the that comes with it so here's a nice little story for you in the 16th century there was a prospector by the name of Stefan schlick who was exploring for metal in the a mountains of bohemia which would be on the sort of borders between the Czech Republic and uh Germany and he found silver uh in a mountain there called and the mountain was called wakim's tow which would translate literally as wakim's Dale as in Overhill overdale uh and um as a result of his Discovery uh he made an absolute fortune and a silver mine was built and he started in those days miners would mint coins from their own production and he started minting these 1 o silver coins which were called wakim's tayor or wakim's ters and um these coins these 1 o silver coins uh became incredibly popular and they were adopted throughout Europe first by the Holy Roman Empire in those days there were so many city states everyone was mining their own coins and the value of the coins of of course was determined by the metal weight but the Holy Roman Empire adopted these 1 o coins and they were eventually copied across Europe the Spanish had their peso the Dutch had the dala the Scandinavians the dalor the Swiss the Taylor and the French the the echu and the English had the crown U but they were all 1 o silver coins and um of these silver coins the most successful coin was the Spanish dollar uh and there is a Spanish dollar and um most of the Spanish the reason for the success of the Spanish dollar was the enormous discoveries of gold and silver silver especially made in Central and South America by the Spanish conquistadors and this mountain here is called Sero Rico which literally means the Rich Mountain and that mountain has produced uh 50,000 tons of silver throughout its history and they think there's another 60,000 tons in there and in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries that one mountain produced 80% of the world's silver it's just an incredible number and the Spanish of course started minting their their silver dollars and these dollars there were eight Reales eight Reales eight Spanish realas to $1 and that's why the um parrots would always cry out Pieces Of Eight uh that's where that comes from because there was eight so one piece of eight and that's why they cried that and um my ex-girlfriend is a comedian and I got her to come and see the show and she wrote me this joke which I can't say without saying it was actually written by a woman but about the parrot she said typical Birds always talking about money um but she wrote it not me so I'm disclaiming all responsibility in any case these Spanish coins they went from South America across the Pacific to China Japan the Philippines and they became the basis for the currencies there they made their way back to Europe and they also went to North America and um they were basically a hugely successful International currency and in North America at the time the British in their wisdom had told the uh um the settlers that they weren't allowed to Mint their own coins uh they had to use coin British coins but at the time there was a massive shortage of silver in Britain which we'll come to in a moment so there was a shortage of coinage which meant that the Spanish dollars were embraced even more and when um the Americans uh unwisely in my view overthrew their British overlords um they needed to design a new Curren and it was based Alexander Hamilton had designed it he of Hamilton Fame and $1 us would be the value of a Spanish mil dollar as the same is now current so the US dollar was 1 ounce of silver it was a Spanish dollar and uh even the S dollar symbol is actually derived from the pay the peso the p and the S but that's all a dollar is it literally means from the Dale how about that from that from that little Discovery in Czechoslovakia and now if you go and visit that town there's like about 2,400 people live there and and it's it seems to have no awareness of it this incredible history um so here's another game for you what are the we'll we'll just shout out some countries and we're going to work out which are the world's leading mining countries by the total value of everything they produce in a year austral okay Australia well fifth we're going to start from the bottom up so who is the fifth largest that's true South Africa good guess the answer correct answer is Chile Chile uh and 30% of Chilean uh um GDP comes from its copper mines um and there is uh the largest copper mine in Chile Escondida and that is 3,000 MERS it's at 3,000 MERS altitude and it's owned by BHP Australian company and that one mine is responsible for about 2 and a half 3% of Chilean GDP and you can just see what an incredible feat of engineering it is right who's fourth on the list Canada Canada good guess wrong Russia it's good though it's quicker the show's quicker if you just shout out countries Russia is the fourth Russia actually has the most valuable um reserves by Reserve but in terms of actual production it's only fourth and there is a one of Russia's most famous mine that mine is in Siberia and it's a diamond mine called the Mir mine and it goes 500 M deep and it's such a perfect circle that when it's windy you get the centrifugal force you're not allowed to fly helicopters or planes or anything anywhere near it because the central Fugal Force takes the aircraft down but again another incredible feat of engineering it's now gone underground and it's in Siberia so you get the 24-hour days and the 24-hour nights and all that stuff third United States well done um and here is the largest mine in the United States Bingham Canyon which which um is it's the largest copper mine in the world it's also the the biggest pit in the world it's not the deepest pit it goes to 1200 MERS the deepest mine in the world is in South Africa uh called the imponen mine which is 2 and a half miles underground two and a half miles imagine getting the lift to work in the morning two and a half miles underground um terrifying what put your hands up if you've actually been inside an underground mine okay quite a lot of you and did you feel you can feel that there's a sort of power to them it's weird there this a sort of awe strength now one of the dwarves were all kind of in awe of the of of power dwarves by the way all the um the miners of myth dwarves lepre horns gnomes they're always very small and very strong which is the you know the ideal physique for mining small and strong um but yes the but this this this mine is um it's been producing copper since 1906 and it still goes on producing copper today and it was just found by Two Brothers Two latterday Saints one afternoon when they were grazing their cattle imagine finding the world's most prolific uh copper mine of an afternoon um incredible again incredible feat of engineering who's the second largest producer in the world Wales once upon a time once upon a time we're 100 years out of date but there we go Australia is the second largest producer and you can see by volume it's quite a way above uh United States um uh and there is Australia's largest mine Mount whaleback that's an iron or mine and again that mine is four miles long that pit and a mile and a half across again incredible incredible feat of engineering and then the world's largest Miner China absolutely right of course but unfortunately if you try and get pictures of China's largest mines you can't get them so I can't show you a picture of China's largest mines so those are the world's largest um uh producers by nation and there we have the world's largest producers by company BHP and Rio are both Australian companies Southern Copper is Mexican Glen cor Swiss and Freeport McMoRan or macaran is uh American and I put their market caps up there that's that's how valuable those companies are and then by comparison I've put the market caps of the world's three largest tech companies up there Apple Microsoft and Nvidia and you can see just how much bigger those tech companies are than those mining companies and yet you could not have a PC or a iPhone or anything without mining it's just foundational to them and yet apple is you know I mean how many times bigger I can't even do the math 20 times bigger 20 times bigger yes 20 times bigger um so thank God I've got that right now this is quite an interesting little table and it show shows mining around the world and where it's growing and where it's shrinking and this um goes from 20 the year 200000 to 2017 I don't have a more recent um uh version of it but you can see North America it's grown a little bit Latin America it's grown 24% quite a bit Africa quite a bit Europe mining is in is we're we're mining less and less and less we m 16 17% less now than we did 20 years ago and then obviously Asia Has Gone Bananas and oana which is selling straight into the Asian market Has Gone Bananas as well so you know that is also the way that wealth is going it's leaving Europe and with that in mind we discuss a subject that we all think about every day the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and some 200 different explanations as to why Rome declined and fail have been offered and these range from climate change please uh the rise of Christianity leagy from too much time spent in hot baths too many Banquets even Alien expl Invasion but one argument you never hear and we're about to make it now is that Rome declined and fell due to the depletion of its Minds now at its moment at its mightiest 50 to 75 people live lived in the Roman Empire and there it is in green and the Pax Romana the piece was kept by the Roman army uh 100,000 soldiers all paid in gold and silver and the quantity of gold and silver in circulation was on a scale never before seen in the world and never seen again until the gold rushes of the second half of the um of the 19th century and um there's one argument you often hear I love this this this looks like um uh Roman Legions meet Scarface this picture here but we we often hear that uh Roman soldiers were paid in salt uh and that's the word so Soul salar means to give salt and the word salary comes from uh giving salt uh from the same Source but they weren't actually paid in salt they were given an allowance to buy salt um and obviously Salt's very healthy and by the way if you want Dominic Frisbee with his healthy hat on every morning have a pinch of salt pinch of Celtic sea salt before you have anything crunch it up eat it and then drink your first glass of water of the day and it will hydrate you much better H it works as a an electrolyte a little magic trick there and the Roman soldiers were at it um so there's very little gold and silver in central Italy in fact there's none at all and and originally they used bronze uh bronze uh as money but as the Empire expanded and they took over particularly Macedonia and then Northern Spain uh and they took over the mines there and those mines in Macedonia were the mines that enabled Alexander the Great and his predecessor Philip of maedon um gold and silver started making its way into into the Roman money now the Roman business model very effective business model is uh you conquer and then you plunder and then you tax and uh it's a great business model and it's been tried and tested by conquerors throughout history never failed anyone and um but it only works as long as the Empire keeps expanding when the Empire is no longer expanding you no longer have the new the the the income from conquest and loot and so you have to find other ways to get income and by the first century taxation was only uh it didn't cover the Imperial budget so where were they're going to get the money from and the solution wasn't to reain in their spending it was to mine it and um in that regard gold mining is a bit like Central Banking in that when you're mining gold or silver you're creating money that wasn't previously there and bringing it into existence um and there's a I put that gold mining and Central uh Central Banking and one of those is fiction and one of those is fact and the dwarf is the fact if you didn't need in any case so here this is a a mountain range in Northern Spain called lass medul laet and this is not AI That's a genuine picture and what you see there is the entire entire mountain range has been washed away and the way the Romans used to mine is they would they would fire The Rock to heat it up and then they would pour water on it and that's how they would extract uh The Ore from the metal and in the course of doing that the pollution was so bad it's thought to have reached Greenland that's how bad the pollution was from from their doing this they obviously needed extraordinary amounts of wood as well and you can see like that mountain side have been like that once upon a time but it's just been washed away and there was a big argument as to whether it should be allowed to be a UNESCO world heritage site because of the fact that it was created from something that was so environmentally damaging but eventually it was accepted and there was the Romans fought first juliia Caesar then Augustus Caesar it was only a gripper who eventually took the region people fought long and hard for it because obviously it was so valuable and once the Romans had taken control of it they followed the biggest mining operation the world had ever seen and those mines produced for from for 200 years and in that mountain range there are some 250 different mine sites have been found and that mine there was no other region in the Roman Empire was as prolific and that mine brought the gold and silver uh that the Roman Empire needed however after 200 years the resource ran out the mines depleted oh by the way before I come to that just just plyy wrote this wonderful description about everything that happened there and he said it was all motivated by the Greed for gold and this we'll come back to this again but the Greed for gold made people motivated people to do some of the most incredible things and in this case huge engineering advances um uh uh underground ventilation lighting drainage all things never previously done in in mining but the most important thing was how to get the water they needed to to to the to the mountains and um we tend to think of the Roman aqueducts of being there so that the water so that the Romans could all have hot baths a lot of the time those aqueducts were there to get water to the mines that's why the aqueducts were built and Northern Spain has got some of the most incredible aqueducts that you'll see in the Roman Empire and it was all to get the water to the mines all these huge engineering advances all motivated by the greed for gold but as I said the um the mines depleted they ran out of gold and silver and it's only after those mines depleted that you saw the sudden acceleration in the debasement of Roman coinage and the sil the the Roman um uh silver coin the Denarius went from 93% to zero just like the US dollar and the pound but they but so that's why I make the case that perhaps Mining and the depletion of its mines had something to do with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and we're on a similar trajectory um now by the way I love this you look at the coins people think that everyone before Galileo and Christopher Columbus and so on thought that the Earth was flat the Romans knew that the world was round and I present his evidence for this two coins there's a Denarius from hadrien there and a a trasan um uh orius there and here we see Providencia who is the Roman goddess of foresight overlooking the globe the Roman Empire and here this is trasan this is an early uh coin of hadrien and there we see Tran the previous Emperor handing hadrien ownership of the Empire a globe they knew the world was round and Aristotle said the world was round um we we're going to fast forward now to England in the late 17th century and Sir Isaac Newton known as a physicist also a great Alchemist but um he was also uh orig uh Master of the mint and the equivalent of that would be governor of the bank of England today and British coinage was a mess uh because the silver content of a British coin was worth more melted down than the face value of the silver coin so everyone was melting down the silver coins and selling them to the French and this was a huge trade and we'd run out of silver it was all going onto the continent and in addition to that something like 15 to 20% of coins were counterfeit they were fake coins and worst of all people were using those fake coins to pay their taxes so the British government was Finding itself handed all these fake coins and Isaac Newton was called in to sort it all out and he is credited with putting Britain on the gold standard which became the model for the world he the father of the gold standard but that gold standard was accidental he was trying to put England on a gold and silver standard and he said to uh the British government if you want to um stop people selling this bullion abroad you need to reduce the silver content by 20% of the coins so that the silver content matches the face value of the coin but Parliament also saw the value of their wealth being destroyed by 20% and they said no they didn't understand the difference between token value and actual value so Newton was never able to solve that problem he was able to solve the problem of the counterfeits and those poor counterfeits he was he's now seen as having been autistic uh and he pursued the counterfeits with autistic Zeal and rumbled every single one of them and they all ended up in the Gallows poor people didn't realize they were up against probably the cleverest bloke in history but nevertheless he couldn't get his silver and gold standard working but in 1695 some Portuguese explorers discovered gold in Brazil in Min jerice and there was a huge Gold Rush and in those days you would have to give the king's fifth you would have to give a fifth of everything you found to the king in taxes but if you were a member of the clergy then you could give it to the church instead so amazingly all those Portuguese discovering uh gold in mines your eyes we're all clergymen um but uh but one of one person writing about it a clergyman writing about it described the Gold Rush as white colored black Amar Indian men and women young and old poor and Rich Nobles and commoners Layman and clergy everyone rushed to Minas jerice in in uh Brazil and within 30 years World gold output had doubled and by 1750 that one area accounted for 65% of Global Production and it all went back to Portugal and the Portuguese with whom we've always had very good trading relations and I think with that they're the one country with with whom we've never been to war little stat for you um all used their gold to buy English manufactured goods so that 2third of all the gold discovered in Brazil ended up in Britain and this sudden influx of gold was what made Newton's gold stand Ed possible and in Cornwall it all particularly went to the southwest and the South Coast for obvious reasons because of the trading routes um these that's a Portuguese midor that was the Portuguese gold coin and they were all coming to England um very little specie of any other kind is to be met with said the Cornish receiver General we have hardly any money but Portugal gold and those gold coins would eventually make their way back to the mint where they'd be remed as guins and the silver meanwhile carried on leaving because now the Chinese and the Indians were paying even more than the Europeans for silver and with the south sea trade and all of that the silver was leaving Europe Al together and going to Asia and so it was that discovery that made Newton's gold standard possible um now a very similar thing happened in the 20th century um there was a a carpenter by the name of James Marshall who was working at a at a saw mill a woodmill uh in uh California and at this time California was still Mexican uh it had only it only got handed uh uh over to the Americans a week after this discovery but he was investing and they didn't know about it poor people anyway he was he was um doing some work in The Sawmill and he looked in a ditch at the bottom of the Sawmill and he saw two gleaming things looking at him about the size of half a p and he picked them both up and he looked at him and he ran back to um the shed where everyone was working Eureka boys I think I found a gold mine and the only this was a a a a a a John Sutter's Sawmill and John Sutter had an encyclopedia Britannic and he looked it up and they all agreed that it was gold and he told them not to tell anyone and they all of course went straight out and started panning for gold and he lost all his employees almost straight away and words spread up the river to a Mormon settlement and they started paning for and one of the Mormons went to San Francisco with a with a bottle of gold dust shouting gold gold from the American river and so was the California Gold Rush ignited and this was 1848 the following year 1849 990,000 people traveled to California it was almost deserted prior to that point um it was and 990,000 people is just an extraordinary number for the time and 40,000 went from the East Coast Across America in stage coaches uh very treacherous Journey risked their lives many ended up dead there are examples of people resorting to cannibalism braving freeing freezing cold weather desert heat all the rest of it 20,000 went on a boat right round at the bottom of Argentina Cape Horn and came up the other side and 30,000 went down to Panama and then marched across Panama through mosquito infested jungle and then got a boat back up the other side and that's how they all went got there and 8 19 49 that's why the the um American football team is called the 49ers and and and this California state motto I think is Eureka anyway and and what was amazing about this Gold Rush is is it was a gold rush for every man you didn't need expense of equipment all you needed was a a pick and a shovel and and you could explore and it was a bit like early Bitcoin mining in that respect in that you know students could mine Bitcoins on their computers you didn't have to have huge amounts of capital or anything like that so because it was a gold rush for every man every man went there and um there was a an article the whole country resounds with the sworded Cry of gold the field people left their families they left their home their wives in search of their Futures the field is left half planted the house half built and everything neglected but the manufacturer of shovels and pickaxes no capital is required to obtain this gold and the laboring man wants nothing but his pick and shovel and Tin Pan with which to dig and wash and as a result of this it created all these economic distortions the first being that anyone who worked as domestic servant or anything like that low-level workers all just got up and left their jobs and went to California so there was a huge shortage of domestic servants so for a brief period domestic servants were earning as much as congressmen because they were in such demand there was a huge shortage of women in California it was all men who went there so things you know female services to one of a better word washing ironing and cooking all charge huge amounts you would have to pay 15,000 oun sorry 15 ounces uh to spend the night with a with a sex worker to spend the night with a lady 15 ounces $25,000 gold today 15 ounces would be $45,000 to spend the night with a lady um and there was no justice it was Justice was issued locally one guy um uh Stole was caught stealing $300 and he had a big tea branded on his face and his ears cut off uh so maybe we need to bring that back um but anyway and it was just an incredible time and but as a result of all these people going there they needed feeding uh so Farms all sprung up they needed clothing clothing manufacturer they needed equipment Factory sprung up all this needed financing Banks sprung up infrastructure they needed to get the gold back into America so Railways and roads were built it was the reason the Panama Canal eventually got built um and just this incredible uh acceleration in investment and what was uh um quite interesting about it is that gold funded the uh unionists in the Civil War funded Lincoln and one of the reasons they won that Civil War was they were better funded than the Confederates but most of the California Gold went to Lincoln and and that war effort but you saw you know incredible energy and creativity and courage and determination imagination Innovation all these things wonderful human qualities but then you saw terrible human qualities greed ruthlessness crime violence environmental destruction Inc you know forests torn down Rivers polluted you name it um and it all happened so quickly um and what that led to there was an Australian guy called Edward Hargraves who was in Sydney and a boat landed in Sydney Harbor and it was like gold gold in California they're all you went to the harbor to get news from around the world they're all gold gold and and he had been wandering around Australia for 20 or 30 years and he hold about he heard about this gold and he got straight on the boat to go back to California and the bloke he was sharing a cabin with was a sheep farmer and he'd sold his sheep and bought a ticket and he'd gone to California as well and they shared a cabin and while they were in the cabin they started discussing the geology of new Sou Wales and they discussed it and discussed it over the journey to the extent that they thought there's gold in north New South Wales there must be and so they got straight on the boat and came back again to Australia and indeed they found uh gold there and that sparked the Australian Gold Rush on which Australia was built and um incredible stories about the Australian Gold wash the one I like is that for a brief period it became a good thing to become a convict because you got free passage to Australia so they stopped sending the convict there but again um Australia within a couple of decades became the world's largest gold producer and of course that gold all went to Britain and uh helped us do Imperial things and then of course the biggest uh there was discoveries in New Zealand in Western Australia in Victoria and then the biggest discovery of the lot the Vitz vatas rant in Johannesburg um and the man uh who made that Discovery an Australian prospector by the name of George Harrison anyone tell me how much he sold his his Discovery for his his his Prospect for 101 pound1 pound and that Discovery has produced it used to produce 1,000 ounces per year sorry 1,000 tons per year It produced 40% of all the gold that has ever been mined that one Discovery and he sold it for tener bad deal um so ladies and gents we're coming to the end of my my little talk and hopefully I've just you know told you some great little stories from history and you just see how mining underpins everything uh from money right through to everything we we we do and have around us and yet it is the most loathed industry in the world whenever you watch a film the miners are always the bad guys there's a scene from Avatar uh the miners were always the baddies in Avatar and note that was the most expensive film in Hollywood history and its AI Graphics are not as good as mine that's how much much it's Advanced and the miners was and the reason Min is even today this this picture was taken a couple of years ago of cobalt mines in the DRC and you you kind of think how is it possible in today's world for you know this kind of scene to be taking place with all those men you know carrying those bags like but then you think at the same time it's providing those people with opportunities and and and salaries that they wouldn't otherwise have like all these things it's it's it's never quite simple but these pictures that were shown and there are kids in there and we'll come to that in a moment there are kids in those those pictures are reminiscent of the pictures that the Brazilian photographer Sebastian salgardo took of the famous Brazilian mines in the 70s they're exactly the same all those men with the with the bags of AE on their backs and we great quote here the first time I saw the mine I was speechless I got Goose pumps 52,000 men working without a single machine in a well 200 M deep half the people were carrying heavy bags up the wooden stairs the another descended the muddy slopes sinking into the abyss what a great quote and there there's another picture from DRC and it's almost identical to the salgardo picture I mean they're just so similar it's incredible and this has been going on since forever this is a Roman writer diodorus describing the minds of Egypt there is absolutely no consideration nor relaxation for sick or maimed for aged man or weak woman all are forced to labor at their tasks until they die worn out by misery amid their toil I find these pictures incredible these are coal mines in Virginia in 1913 so barely 100 years old we used to send all the kids down the mine you look at those boys they're all prepubescent or most of them you know they can't be you know 12 13 years old and you can't really see in the light but you just look at some of their arms eyes if you just look at their eyes they've got these weird the weird eyes some of them and that's because um do you remember when the Chilean miners were rescued in the mines and they were all given those sunglasses to wear cuz they're underground all day long in the darkness and uh they they the the um they were called Trappers they would they would being in charge of ventilating the mines and here we see you know they didn't have torches they've got their little candles on their heads but look at look at his eyes all their eyes those poor boys having their eyes damaged and this is going on 100 years ago and it was it was happening in the UK as well and in Virginia and the these these terrible things that human beings have done to each other but yet because of the work that those kids did you know there was coal mining Coal Energy was created you could say oh some rich person got to keep their house warm but also human beings generally advance so those people sort of made our modern Comforts and modern luxuries so that people no longer have to go down there they made that possible and today of course in in the advanced parts of the world it's all automated and Ai and robots and advanced exploration and all this incredible high-tech so the industry is getting better and better and better but it's never going to be perfect here's an argument you never hear this is a picture of Brazilian Rainforest it's a picture I'm sure many of you have seen many times all the deforested areas what's happening now in Brazil is all the areas that are remaining forested that aren't being chopped down are areas owned by mining companies by varet in particular because they have a duty to protect the land and it's their land and there's clear title whereas all the areas that are being logged and that's where the land isn't there's no clear ownership and or or it's not owned by mining companies so even with all the environmental destruction that mining has done over the years it's actually preserving the brilliant Brazilian Rainforest in a way that has it would not otherwise be possible and you think mining would be making that argument and telling the world that story but it's such a Dopey industry that they don't their PR is terrible so my final point is you know in an answer to the question is mining good or bad it's not as simple as good or bad it's a necessary evil but it's an incredible industry that has made many amazing things possible and on that note ladies and gents I thank you very much for listening I know it's hot in here thank you very much thank you [Applause]