Blogs
13 Jun, 2020Thomas Edison had a superb mineral collection. He bought it in 1890 for $8000 (in today’s real money £185k). It was the personal collection of the notable self-taught mineralogist, gemmologist & Vice President of...
18 May, 2020Above, red crystals of lorándite TlAsS2 pseudomorphing into yellow crystals of fangite Tl3AsS4. The specimen is from one of the world's hotspots for thallium, the Allchar mine, in the Republic of Macedonia. The mine ...
31 Dec, 2018In October 1881. the illustrious scientist Benjamin Silliman Jr. was at the Torrance mine, Socorro, New Mexico - He found a new mineral, and described it as vanadiferous mimetite. Famed for his 1855 report on the...
24 Dec, 2018Merry Christmas to all! The mineral baubles decorating the above tree are all from the same unusual American mine. The Christmas of 1902 was a corker for George B. Chittenden of Gila County, below (that's a contented smirk...
14 Nov, 2018On the morning of the fifth of August 1898, a large rock entered the atmosphere over Maine, USA. Traveling at around 50 times faster than Concorde, it plunged from frictionless space into ever thickening layers of air....
06 Nov, 2018In November 1777 French botanist Joseph Dombey, above, set sail for Peru and Chile, as part of the joint Spanish-French Ruiz & Pavón Expedition. The arduous eleven year botanical exploration provided a wealth of plant...
18 Oct, 2018The Shinkolobwe radium mine, 1922. The Belgian mining engineer above is sitting on a 7 ton boulder of pitchblende. An immense quantity of gamma-rays is irradiating his gonads. Safety equipment, a tie and a pith helmet....
05 Oct, 2018In 1985 I had acquired some palladium metal, as a by-product of some illicit platinum reclamation I was undertaking. I made the above quarter-ounce "nugget" with it, drilled to be worn as a pendant. Natural Pd specimens...
14 Sep, 2018Crystals to cosmetics, this post is about various minerals which have been used, without chemical alteration, as makeup. OCHRE Evidence of the use of minerals to adorn human skin has been gathered back to around 7000 years...
24 Aug, 2018Mineralogy’s greatest curiosity was not how Dr. John Woodward (1665 - 1728, above) obtained a pallasite meteorite for his collection, decades before the meteorite was actually discovered in Siberia…. Also it was not how...
11 Aug, 2018This instrument was invented by Edmond Becquerel in 1857, and the design developed during the eighteen sixties. It enabled him to see very short lived phosphorescence in minerals. Since fluorescence and phosphorescence...
02 Aug, 2018My friend Paul and I recently went to The Weardale Mineral Show at St. Johns Chapel, a small village 7 miles west of Stanhope, here in the North East of England. I primarily went there to meet up with e-Rocks boss Mark....
