Mormonism and Wikipedia/Golden plates/Composition and weight

Described composition and weight

The plates were first described as "gold", and beginning about 1827, the plates were widely called the "gold bible". When the Book of Mormon was published in 1830, the Eight Witnesses described the plates as having "the appearance of gold". The Book of Mormon describes the plates as being made of "ore". In 1831, a Palmyra newspaper quoted David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, as having said that the plates were a "whitish yellow color", with "three small rings of the same metal".

Joseph Smith, Jr.'s first published description of the plates said that the plates "had the appearance of gold". But Smith said that Moroni had referred to the plates as "gold." Late in life, Martin Harris stated that the rings holding the plates together were made of silver, and he said the plates themselves, based on their heft of "forty or fifty pounds" (18–23 kg), "were lead or gold". Joseph's brother William Smith, who said he felt the plates inside a pillow case in 1827, said in 1884 that he understood the plates to be "a mixture of gold and copper...much heavier than stone, and very much heavier than wood".

Different people estimated the weight of the plates differently. According to Smith's one-time-friend Willard Chase, Smith told him in 1827 that the plates weighed between 40 and 60 pounds (18–27 kg), most likely the latter. Smith's father Joseph Smith, Sr., who was one of the Eight Witnesses, reportedly weighed them and said in 1830 that they "weighed thirty pounds" (14 kg). Joseph Smith's brother, William, said that he lifted them in a pillowcase and thought they "weighed about sixty pounds [27 kg] according to the best of my judgment". Others who lifted the plates while they were wrapped in cloth or enclosed in a box thought that they weighed about 60 pounds [27 kg]. Martin Harris said that he had "hefted the plates many times, and should think they weighed forty or fifty pounds [18–23 kg]". Joseph Smith's wife Emma never estimated the weight of the plates but said they were light enough for her to "move them from place to place on the table, as it was necessary in doing my work". Had the plates been made of 24-karat gold (which Smith never claimed), they would have weighed about 140 pounds (64 kg).