A history of gold in dentistry

The earliest gold in teeth

The Etruscans, who lived in what's now Tuscany and Umbria in Italy, were the first people known to make false teeth. From about 700 BCE, they took teeth from another person or from an animal such as an ox, and fixed them into a band of gold with a metal pin. The band was then fitted onto the wearer's remaining teeth.

Only the wealthy could afford them. Dentistry wasn't its own job yet, either. Physicians handled teeth as part of their general work.

The Phoenicians worked with gold in teeth too. A Phoenician dental bridge made with gold wire was discovered in 1862 and is now in the Louvre, in Paris. When researchers examined it closely in 2019, they found it held lower front teeth, and that the maker had trimmed some of the teeth to make them fit in the arch.

Gold foil fillings

Modern dentistry took shape in the 1700s. In 1728, the French surgeon Pierre Fauchard published Le Chirurgien Dentiste ("The Surgeon Dentist"), a book that brought together what was known about diagnosing and treating teeth. He's widely recognized as the father of modern dentistry.

By the early 1800s, dentists were filling cavities with gold. Writing in 1888, the dentist James Truman said the profession had used soft gold foil, and only soft foil, for filling cavities for at least half a century before 1855.

That year, according to Truman, a Dr. Arthur introduced a new kind called "cohesive" gold foil. Over the following decades, dentists built a whole system of filling around it.

Gold foil stayed in use well into the next century. The University of Melbourne's collections include a box of gold cylinders and foil strips for cohesive gold fillings, dated to around 1920.

Taggart and the cast gold inlay

The next big step came from Chicago. In 1907, William H. Taggart published a paper titled "A new and accurate method of making gold inlays." He patented his casting machine on September 10, 1907.

Taggart's method used "lost wax" casting, and it became known as the "disappearing wax" technique. Lost-wax casting is an ancient idea: you make a model in wax, build a mould around it, melt the wax away, and fill the empty space with molten metal. Taggart's machine let dentists use it to make precise cast fillings in gold.

Temple University's Kornberg School of Dentistry, whose historical museum holds one of Taggart's machines, calls his technique revolutionary and "one of restorative dentistry's greatest achievements." Thanks to Taggart, dentists could cast gold crowns and inlays with precision.

What's actually in a gold crown

Gold crowns are almost never pure gold. The American Dental Association (ADA) explains that gold is so soft and easy to shape that it has to be hardened with copper, silver, platinum or another hard, durable metal. Adding 10% copper by weight, for example, raises gold's tensile strength (how much pulling it takes to break it) almost fourfold.

The ADA sorts dental casting alloys by how much "noble" metal they contain. Noble metals are gold and the platinum-group metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, osmium and ruthenium. They're stable and don't react much in a moist place like the mouth.

So a "gold" crown can hold a lot of gold, or very little. According to the ADA, noble alloys, especially gold, have the longest history of any dental material and are often called the standard other materials are judged by.

Gold-based alloys were also used for porcelain-fused-to-metal crowns and bridges, which combine metal with porcelain. Until computer-made ceramics took off, porcelain-fused-to-metal was the most common type of restoration made outside the mouth, such as a crown, bridge or inlay.

Why gold is fading from dentistry

Price was the first push. By 1980, the ADA says, the rising price of gold had led to the development and growing use of base metals. Nickel-chromium and cobalt-chromium are the most common base alloys.

Looks were the second. The industry and patients have been turning to ceramic materials for cosmetic reasons. In 1985, the first ceramic inlay made by a chairside computer-guided machine was placed in a patient's tooth.

You can see the change in the World Gold Council's numbers:

In 2014, the Council described a long-term shift to cheaper alternatives and a continued preference for ceramics for their cosmetic appeal. In 2025, dental demand fell another 7%, and the Council said alternative materials continued to dominate. The decline kept going in 2026: in the second quarter, dental use dropped another 6%, to about 2 tonnes, as dentists kept switching to ceramics.

To put that in perspective, total technology demand for gold in 2025 was about 323 tonnes, and electronics used about 270 tonnes of it. Dentistry is now a small corner of the market.

Why people sell old dental gold

Crowns, bridges and inlays don't last forever, and when one is replaced, some people take the old piece home. Many end up tucked away for years. Families also come across them when sorting through a loved one's belongings.

Not every metal crown contains gold. Predominantly base metal alloys, such as nickel-chromium and cobalt-chromium, contain less than 25% noble metal and may hold little or no gold. Gold alloys range from high noble, with at least 40% gold, to alloys with very little. That's why testing matters more than looks.

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