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Iron is the metal of industry. Tools, machines, railroads, cars, bridges, buildings, all are built primarily out of steel, which is just iron with a few percent of carbon added. Of all the metal refined every year the largest fraction by a huge margin is iron.
The reason for this is strictly because it's incredibly plentiful, easy to refine, and cheap. It's actually a pretty lousy metal in many ways. It's very heavy, but worst of all it's reactive and unstable in air. In other words, it rusts. Not only that, it rusts in the worst possible way, into a flaky powder that splits off and exposes fresh metal to rust. (Aluminum rusts too, but aluminum oxide (rust) is a tough, hard, transparent coating that actually makes the aluminum stronger, and that completely stops the rusting process as soon as a thin layer is formed.)
If aluminum were dirt cheap and iron cost as much as aluminum does, almost none of it would be used. It would still have application for machine tool bits that need to be very, very hard, but bridges, buildings, cars, etc, would be built exclusively of aluminum, and they would last virtually forever instead of rusting away to nothing after just a few decades.
Frankly, the fact that iron rusts the way it does is one of the great lousy breaks in the world of chemistry.
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 Rusty iron plate.
Just some old iron pulled from a junk pile at the farm. The sound is steel plate like this being beaten with a blacksmith's hammer.
See hafnium for some pictures of a plasma-arc cutting torch cutting some steel plate much like this, and see oxygen for a story about how oxy-acetylene cutting torches actually work.
Source: Marco's Scrap Metal
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 15 April, 2002
Price: $0.10/pound for scrap iron.
Size: 1.5"
Purity: >95%
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Precision steel micro-bearings.
We think these balls are about 1/32-inch diameter. Ed Pegg reports that these particular balls were accidentally magnetized by noted physicist Stephen Wolfram, making them unsuitable for Ed's experiments.
Source: New England Miniature Ball Corp
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 15 April, 2002
Price: $5/1000 (which is not a lot of bearings)
Size: 0.03"
Purity: >95%
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 Civil war canister shot.
Chris reports that he found this approximately 2.5 inch diameter crude iron ball while walking in the woods in Pennsylvania. I immediately assumed it was a civil war cannonball, because that's the most interesting thing it could be. But a close second, and probably more likely according to a civil war author I asked, is that it's "canister shot", which is like shotgun pellets on a larger scale. Or it could be a crushing ball from a stone tumbler, but that's so boring it just can't be.
Analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439) indicates that it is virtually pure iron.
Source: Chris Carlson
Contributor: Chris Carlson
Acquired: 5 June, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 2.5"
Purity: >99%
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Magnetite sand.
Another element (compound actually) from Chris. He panned this sand from a Lake Michigan beach, like panning for gold except you get black magnetic granules instead of rich. It is very magnetic, as you can see from this picture (there's a magnet under the paper, which is making the sand stick up).
Source: Chris Carlson
Contributor: Chris Carlson
Acquired: 15 August, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 1"
Purity: <40%
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Steel pennies.
During 1943, the height of the second world war, copper was in such demand for the war effort that pennies were briefly made out of steel. They probably should never have gone back to copper, because exactly 40 years later in 1983 the price of copper and the value of a penny crossed paths again, and they had to switch to zinc, for good this time.
Steel pennies are actually zinc-plated steel, just like cheap roof flashing, and they corrode the same way.
Source: Theodore Gray
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 20 September, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.5"
Purity: >90%
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1944 zinc steel penny Belgian 2 franc.
This peculiar coin was minted on the same blanks as US steel pennies (see above), but it was made by the US for use in Belgium during the war. From the eBay description:Here is the greatest anomaly in modern United States coinage history. During World War II, as the Americans advanced into Belgium, it was decided that the USA would create this first coin of "liberation". These two Francs coins of 1944 were minted in Philadelphia on the blanks of US zinc coated steel pennies of 1943 ( this metallic combination was used but once in our history, replacing the former copper pennies, as copper was desperately needed in the war effort ).
Source: eBay seller wholesalenow
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 20 September, 2002
Price: $10
Size: 0.5"
Purity: >90%
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50 calibre armor piercing shell. Not uranium after all.
I had high hopes that this rifle shell contained a depleted uranium core. But it doesn't. Analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439) revealed the following composition for the core of the shell (the cladding having been cut away on a lathe):
98.84% Iron
0.54% Molybdenum
0.47% Lead
0.16% Copper
No uranium.
Source: eBay seller accurateimage@yahoo.com
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 31 July, 2002
Price: $10/each
Size: 2.5"
Purity: 98.84%
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Strange lump.
Ed Pegg found this strange-looking lump of metal/crystal in some sand when he was 6 years old, and has managed to keep it for 33 years through about 20 moves. He never knew what it was until I took it in for analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439).
You'll never guess what it is: I was certainly quite surprised to find out and so was Ed. It is a mixture of 62% iron and 38% titanium (!). Since he found it near an air force base in Florida, it's almost certainly some kind of alien space metal that fell off a truck transporting a crashed flying saucer to the secret lab at the air force base.
Either that or Ed should go back to where he found it and become fabulously wealthy after staking a titanium mining claim.
Source: Ed Pegg Jr
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 18 December, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 1"
Purity: 62%
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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.
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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Pyritized Ammonite.
A fossil is the impression left when the body of an ancient animal or plant is encased in some kind of mud or sand, which turns into rock over great expanses of time. After the matrix around the object has become firm enough to hold its shape, the object itself is slowly replaced by some other mineral that works its way in from the surrounding matrix. If all goes well, the rock or mineral formed where the body used to be is different enough from the surrounding rock or mineral that it's possible to separate them and rediscover the original shape of the object. (If it doesn't go well, either there's no fossil formed, or it's one that is so subtle you just don't notice it.)
A fossil can be formed out of all kinds of different minerals, so there are really two entirely separate ways to describe one: What it's a remnant of, and what it's made out of. This sample is a fossil of a type of animal called an Ammonite, but even more interestingly, it happens to be made of pyrite (iron sulfide), also known as "fool's gold" because it looks a lot like gold.
Imagine that: An animal shape recreated in shiny gold crystals, and it's an entirely natural process. Amazing.
Technical details: This is a Pleurocerus Ammonite from the Jurassic age, found in Nuremburg, Germany.
Source: indiana9 Fossils
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 29 March, 2003
Price: $15
Size: 1.5"
Composition: FeS2
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Pyritized Ammonite.
This ammonite was tagged as a Quenstediceras sp. from the Jurassic age (161 million years old), Callovain Stage, Ulyanovsk, Russia. The matrix of rock it's attached to shows very nice pyrite crystals. See the sample information above for more about this type of fossil.
Source: Time Trips
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 29 March, 2003
Price: $12.95
Size: 1.5"
Composition: FeS2
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Pyritized Ammonite.
See the previous two samples for more information about this type of fossil. This is not, I repeat not, an artificially enhanced sample! It's not plated or painted or metalized, just cut and polished to bring out the natural shine of the pyrite crystal.
Source: Exclusive Fossils/Nord Fossil
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 29 March, 2003
Price: $25
Size: 1.5"
Composition: FeS2
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