Free Now I Know by Dan Lewis

chance the medals’ discovery. The chemist de Hevesy took more drastic action. He created a solution of aqua regia—a concoction consisting typically of one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid—so named because it can dissolve two of the “royal” metals, gold and platinum. He placed the medals in the solution, which promptly dissolved them. He then left the gold-bearing aqua regia solution on his laboratory shelf within the Institute, hidden in plain sight as Nazi storm troopers ransacked the Institute.
    The plan worked, and von Laue and Franck were safe—as were their awards. The gold remained safely on that shelf, suspended in aqua regia, for the remainder of the war, unnoticed by the German soldiers. When the war ended, de Hevesy precipitated the gold out of the solution, and the Nobel committee recast the medals.
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    BONUS FACT
    Throughout human history (through 2009, at least), humankind has successfully mined roughly 165,000 metric tons of gold. At gold’s density, that comes out to about 300,000 cubic feet—a relatively tiny amount. For comparison’s sake, all the gold ever mined could be contained by the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, which has a volume of approximately 1.2 million cubic feet.
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A CITY FIT FOR A KING
COCA-COLA’S BATTLE AGAINST RACISM
    The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. On October 14, 1964, he became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. His hometown of Atlanta wanted to throw him a party: an interracial banquet, with official invitations going to the city’s leaders and titans of industry. The city’s mayor, religious leaders from across faiths, a university president, and the publisher of the major area newspaper signed the invites.
    Unfortunately, Atlanta was still racially segregated, and although King had many fans, he also had many enemies. Many whites were upset that King had been honored by the Nobel committee; one of the state’s senators, Herman Talmadge, expressed his dissatisfaction with the honor, wondering aloud why the committee gave a peace prize to a person who promoted law-breaking. Invitations to the highly exclusive event came back with many more declinations than expected. A
New York Times
report claimed that a well-known (but unidentified) banker in the Atlanta area took to the phones, hoping to convince other whites to abstain from attending the banquet, and certainly others preached the same message.
    As the days ticked by, it looked more and more likely that the Dinkler Plaza Hotel—the site of the gala—was going to be rather empty on the evening of the event. Mayor Ivan Allen realized that such a result would be a stain on the city’s reputation, both immediately and forevermore. He also knew that it could significantly set back the clock on racial relations in Atlanta. He struggled to find a solution, but then, an unlikely hero stepped in.
    Mayor Allen and J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, called a meeting of Atlanta’s business leaders, and Austin threw down the gauntlet. According to a memoir (
An Easy Burden
) by a former aide to King named Andrew Brown, Austin told those assembled that “it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”
    They decided. Within two hours, all the tickets were sold, and interest in the event skyrocketed so much that Martin Luther King, Sr. (yes, the honoree’s father) had trouble getting enough tickets for his own use. The Dinkler Plaza was stuffed to the brim with more than 1,500 partygoers, and, perhaps most importantly, the police detail outside had nothing to do. The police were there to combat the hordes of protesters expected to descend upon and disrupt the party—but the threat