#element sample

Lantern mantle - Thorium sample

Here's an incandescent gas mantle, made with traditional thorium nitrates. You're supposed to tie these over the head of a gas lantern; when the flame is lit, the fabric body burns away, leaving a shell of thorium oxide. The thorium oxide then glows from heat and makes the light far brighter.

Thorium is radioactive, and the shell formed when the lantern is burned is brittle and easily crumbles. Since it's very bad to have loose radioactive particles, other metal oxides have become popular; thorium, however, works the best.

Source: Century Primus (originally), Cali-picker Estate Finds on eBay (reseller)

Radium-painted oil pressure gauge - Radium sample

Finally, I have an actual radium sample! I've struck out before with both a "radium" watch hand from Luciteria - which is usually reliable - and a pocket watch that I hoped was radium but was wrong about. Unfortunately, the paint is too degraded by most of a century of 24/7 high radiation exposure to glow well under blacklight.

This is an oil pressure gauge manufactured by the U.S. Gauge Co. for a U.S. Air Force Douglas aircraft. Part number is AW-1⅞-14-CJ, serial number is 22338.

Radium is one of the most radioactive elements you can fairly easily collect; this sample gets me about 1.6 kCPS on my Radiacode 102, though it's second to my 1 uCi americium source (gets me about 2.6 kCPS) as far as my collection goes. For the record, the highest numbers I've seen on it are from a PET scan patient, who got me 16.1 kCPS and was still picked up by the scintillator across the living room and up the stairs - it's scary to see that radiation coming from a person.

If you want radium, I'll highly recommend this seller. They're very polite and have more radium-painted gauges up on their shop, but it'll cost a pretty penny.

This sample is planned to represent radium in my WIP poster, but I don't have a high-quality image yet because my good camera decided all my SD cards are broken for some reason (they are not).

Source: US Gauge Co. (originally), donnylv on eBay (reseller)

Date of Acquisition: 20 Jul 2026

Cinnabar specimen - Mercury sample

Cinnabar is a mercury ore and pigment. This is a nice specimen of it that probably won't heal you and may in fact harm you.

Source: Crystal Age on Amazon

Cast Iron Mortar & Pestle and Steel Ball Bearings - Iron sample

Here's a cast iron mortar & pestle that I filled with steel BBs for display.

Source: New Age Imports, Inc. (mortar and pestle) and QINGZHENG (steel BBs) on Amazon

Autunite filler specimen - Astatine sample

This is a chunk of the radioactive uranium mineral autunite, which may or may not have one or two atoms of astatine in it at any one point. Real astatine is unobtainable, so it's represented by this.

Source: Poppyspoppyshop on Amazon

Goldschläger - Gold sample

Goldschläger is a brand of cinnamon schnapps that contains flakes of 24-karat gold leaf. The gold does absolutely nothing in the human body and doesn't have any flavor at all, so it's purely for looks.

Having tried some, I can really taste the cinnamon, but the alcohol burns my throat and it's horrible. Since this is 107 proof (53.5% alcohol by volume), there's a lot of it too.

Lead sheet - Lead sample

This is a roll of lead sheeting that I bought for radiation shielding; it's an excess of caution for the samples I have now, but it's better practice than a cardboard box, and is decent future-proofing. It won't be enough for legitimately dangerous sources, though.

Lead is better behaved than many other poisonous metals, like mercury and thallium, but it's still a significant contamination risk that you won't know is killing you before it's too late. Handling it with bare hands got a bunch of lead dust on my fingertips.

I still need more lead. This wasn't enough to cover the full inner surface.

Source: Phillips Safety Products, Inc. on Amazon

Date of Acquisition: 10 July 2026

Light emitting diode - Exciton sample

When electricity flows through a material, electrons are torn from their slots in atoms and move through it.

The neutral charge of an atom is lost when that electron goes away, making it a positive ion. Thus, there is a positive charge where the electron used to be. This phenomenon is called an "electron hole", and these holes are considered quasi-particles that are positively charged.

These holes want to be filled (don't laugh), and electrons enter the gap, bringing the atoms back to neutral charge. This emits a tiny amount of light; light-emitting diodes (LEDs) work by opening and filling gargantuan amounts of holes to create enough light to see.

(Holes also sorta move through the material like electrons do; when an electron fills the gap, now there's another hole where that one used to be, and it appears to have moved.)

An "exciton" is the phenomenon where an electron and a hole, due to their opposite charges, briefly orbit each other before the electron fills the hole. They lack a nucleus and most definitely aren't in the scope of the periodic table, but they are sometimes considered exotic atoms, similar to positronium (which is an electron and a positron - an antimatter electron - orbiting each other).

Some evidence even points to excitons somehow condensing into a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a massive upscale for electron holes, since they aren't real. Isn't quantum mechanics fun?

I can't prove that the electrons and holes in this LED manage to orbit each other before combining, but the fact that it lights up proves that they are both present, and I don't have a better sample of this non-atom. Do you?

Source: EDGELEC on Amazon