Silver has been used as a store of monetary value and as currency for more than 4,000 years. The Lydia civilization made it into a coin currency in 600 B.C. In 1980, the white metal hit its all-time high during the Hunt Brothers' futile attempt to corner the silver market. That event caused silver to spike briefly to more than $47 an ounce, a price level that will be hard to reach and breach in the foreseeable future. Even so, as commodities go, silver makes for an alluring investment at the present time.
When investors think of silver, they tend to view it as a cheaper version of gold. That's a mistake. On one hand, silver is like gold in that it is an investment-worth precious metal. However, there is also a strong industrial demand - when companies such as chip giant Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) think of silver, they do so for its industrial uses.
And the industrial uses of this white, lustrous metal only figure to increase. Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal. That conductivity makes silver the perfect metal for solar-cell production, meaning the metal figures to be a critical component in the developing alternative energy sector.
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