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Beryllium is an alkali earth metal, reasonably stable in air, and extremely toxic in powdered form. It's used as an alloying element for copper, imparting great strength and springiness to the metal. But because of its toxicity, care should be taken when machining beryllium copper.
Solid lumps of beryllium left alone are not dangerous as such: It's not going to rub off and go through your skin. It's used to make critical high-strength, low-weight parts for missiles and the like.
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 Crystalline lumps, 99.9%.
Ed Pegg got these little lumps of pure beryllium from Tom Salow.
Source: Tom Salow
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 18 July, 2002
Price: $10/gram
Size: 0.4"
Purity: 99.9%
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Electrical insulator.
Beryllium oxide is used as an electrical insulator, I suppose because it's a good insulator. It's quite glassy, like a real ceramic, not powdery like many metal oxides. I don't know if that's a basic property of the material, or whether it's somehow vitrified in a matrix of some other ceramic material.
Want to see one in action? Here's a picture of what looks like this exact insulator being used to make a fun little gadget, a tabletop fusion machine. I have it on good authority that this is not like cold fusion, that it really does work to produce fusion. (It's not a practical source of power because of the tiny amounts of fusion that actually occur, but it is said to be the only low-cost source of neutrons if you need them for some reason.) It sure would be fun to tell our personnel manager we're building a fusion reactor in the unused cubicle: I wonder what the employee manual has to say about that....
Source: eBay seller billw86@hotmail.com
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 8 November, 2002
Price: $20
Size: 9"
Purity: 36%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
This particular sample requires a special warning: Powdered beryllium is extremely toxic! Max Whitby has calculated that this sample contains enough beryllium to contaminate 100,000 cubic meters of air to the regulatory hazard level. Were it to break, special precautions would be necessary. Fortunately, it's a relatively course powder and would probably not spread very far or very fast, but it would definitely be necessary to clean it up carefully and completely (not using a vacuum cleaner).
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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