[2] Fulminating gold was the first high explosive known, and was noted in western alchemy as early as 1585.
Sebald Schwaerzer was the first to isolate this compound and comment on its characteristics in his book Chrysopoeia Schwaertzeriana.
Schwaerzer's production required dissolving a sample of gold in aqua regia, adding ammonium chloride to the saturated solution, and precipitating the solution through lead spheres and drying over oil of tartar.
Jöns Jacob Berzelius, a leading chemist of the early 19th century was one such person.
[4] It wasn't until Johann Rudolf Glauber in the 17th century that fulminating gold started to have uses.
[6] In the 18th and 19th centuries, work continued on finding the chemical formula for fulminating gold.
He then decomposed a ground sample with copper(II) oxide to find that it was a salt with an ammonium cation and a gold nitrogen complex as the anion.
Ernst Weitz continued studying the compound with state of the art techniques and concluded that fulminating gold was a mixture of "diamido-imido-aurichloride" and
He managed to ignore the poor solubility of the complex in most solvents, but noted that it did dissolve readily in aqueous gold(III), ammonia, and chloride systems.
His conclusion on the formula proved to be incorrect but offered a fair estimate for later scientists to jump from.
Due to the massive interest in the study of fulminating gold in the early and middling eras of chemistry, there are many ways to synthesize it.
According to Steinhauser et al. and Ernst Weitz, a very homogeneous sample can be obtained by hydrolysis of
They have also noted that different synthetic routes, as well as using different amount of ammonia when precipitating the product, leads to different ratios of Au, N, H, and Cl.
From extensive attempts at crystallization by Steinhauser et al. and vibrational spectroscopy, it has been concluded that fulminating gold is an amorphous mixture of polymeric compounds that are linked via μ-NH2 and μ3-NH bridges.
[8] Recent EXAFS (Extended X-Ray Absorption Fine Structure) analyses by Joannis Psilitelis has shown that fulminating gold is a square planar tetraamminegold(III) cation with either four or one gold atoms in the second coordination sphere.
[9] It is also known that the unusual colouration of the smoke is caused by the presence of heterogeneous gold nanoparticles.