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Indium is a wonderful metal because unlike so many soft, silvery, low-melting-point metals it's neither dangerously reactive nor toxic. It is so soft you can easily bend it, or dent it with your fingernail. Having handled both, I would say that subjectively speaking it's fairly similar to sodium in terms of feel. The big difference is that I have sensibly never touched sodium with my bare hands (it would burn them), while you could lick an indium bar without coming to harm.
I recommend indium if you want to have something quite unusual, yet safe, around: It's not a common experience to play with a metal this soft.
Indium forms an alloy with gallium that is liquid at room temperature, and is fairly non-toxic. This would be a great substitute for mercury, except it sticks to everything and stains hands, which means you can't really touch it either. This is a real shame, because it would be great fun to have a liquid metal that is safe and clean to play with. (People used to let kids play with mercury all the time, but this was not a good idea because of mercury's toxicity.)
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Ingot.
Purchased by Ed from Randolph Zerr, estuff@aol.com, on eBay in May 2002. Those marks you see in the picture are from people's fingernails: This stuff is very soft!
Source: Randolph Zerr
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 8 May, 2002
Price: $20/50 grams
Size: 1.5"
Purity: >99%
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 Crying bars.
When you bend it, indium gives out a "cry" much like the better-known "tin cry". Neither of them is really much like a cry, as you can hear if you play the sound for this sample.
This sound file is a bit larger than most, because it's a super-high fidelity recording made in the "dead end" studio at WGBH Boston, using the finest high sensitivity microphones available, and I didn't want to lose anything by compressing it. My host family when I attended the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, Jane and Miles, are both sound engineers at WGBH, and they kindly set up a recording session to capture this important element sound.
When Oliver Sacks came to visit me he liked these bars so much that I gave him one to take home, so there are actually only two left in the table.
Source: Mark Rollog
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 31 July, 2002
Price: $5/each
Size: 2.5"
Purity: >99%
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 Three 70g ingots.
These ingots were melted down from some thick indium wire that a guy got from Boeing. I am not sure of their purity, but will test them eventually, and the price was right.
Source: eBay seller ezthirfty
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 4 January, 2003
Price: $30
Size: 2"
Purity: >95%
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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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