The Golden Plates

A person I know was talking to me one day about various religions and weird beliefs. At some point the LDS church was brought up and questions were asked regarding many of our beliefs, one of which was the Golden Plates. It was mentioned that the plates, if made of gold, would have weighed to much for Joseph Smith to be running around the woods hiding out from his would be persecutors. Of course this made me think so I went to my trusty old computer and did a little online research. I then took this data and decided to do a little experiment. The following are the facts and the myths associated with the plates.

The first argument presented is how much would a block of gold, the dimensions of which have been reported by Joseph Smith to be 6 inches by 8 inches by 6 inches, weigh.

For me this is really simple to figure out. I used my trusty engineering skills to create a solid model of a block of gold at the prescribed dimensions in cyber space. Here are the results.

A solid Block of gold at the mentioned dimensions would weigh around 235 pounds.

Now in my opinion this would be impossible for one man to pack around in a cloth bag while running, etc. I know I couldn't do it, I could lift this much weight but not move around with it very fast.

Now before anyone gets all freaky deaky on me keep reading.

First of all we need to keep in mind the plates were not a solid block of gold but a series of thin sheets about as thick as common tin. So the next thing I needed to determine was how thick is common tin at the time of JS? With a little research I found that common tin was about .02 inch thick. about the same thickenss as the typical phone book cover.

Next assuming the plates were handmade and didn't lay flat against one another I needed to figure out how much air space would have been present.

For this I allowed a 40% reduction of the total area. This gave me dimensions, assuming at this point there were no gaps and modeling a solid block, of 6 x 8 x 4.125 inches.

At these dimensions the block would have had a total volume of 198 cubic inches. Entering this into my computer I found that pure gold would weigh in at 136 pounds. In my opinion more managrable but still heavier than what any man could reasonably hope to pack around while running. So this creates another dilema which I had to solve.

Back to the internet for a little more research.

First of all J.S. never said the plates were made of gold only that they had the appearance of gold. Therefore it can be assumed that it was very possible and most likely that the plates would have been made of an alloy. But what alloy?

The interenet revealed an alloy used commonly by the mayan and Aztec which was made using a mixture of copper and gold. For the most part this alloy was 97% copper and 3% gold. With a few calculations I determined that if the plates were made from solid copper they would have weighed about.....

63.7 lbs

If made from the alloy mentioned above they would weigh in at 66 lbs.

Now I asked myself, could a person pack around a 66 pound weight while running through the woods, jumping logs, brush etc.? For this I went out to the shop and cut me a block of steel that weighed in a 66 pounds. Yes it was larger in size than the plates would have been but I wanted to see just how hard it would be to pack this around.

Here is what I found.

I could heft the block and holding it near my body move freely about with it. I don't think I could have run very far or done any leaping over logs and running through brush. Now J.S had the plates in a bag so he could have potentially threw the bag over a shoulder which would have better facilitated the running and jumping although they still would have been difficult.

Now because I am practical I thought to myself. Who cares about the weight? Lets assume J.S. was filled with the spirit and was easily able to carry this block all nimbly pimbly around the woods.

The real question becomes, how many plates at .02 inch would there have been and were there enough plates to store the information contained in the Book of Mormon?


By my calculations there would have been 206.25 plates in the entire book including the sealed portion. I have no idea how much data could be contained on these plates as I am not familiar with the egyptian language but I assume it is a possibility.

In my humble opinion it is possible that J.S. could have packed the plates around and the data contained thereon was enough to write the BOM. OF course there are many other factors to consider, like how corrosion would have effected the alloy of two dissimilar metals who's places on the galvanic scale are far enough apart to cause corosion of each other just by contact, or how copper tends to corrode over time when exposed to air and moisture. Another question I have is how they would have created plates only .02 inches thick with any consistency using the rudimentary metal working tools of the time.

Honestly I think this is an interesting subject and if I had all the time in the world it would be interesting to pursue further. Finding out more about the ancient inhabitants of the America's and their metallurgical skills.