40 Fun Facts About Beryllium

Beryllium was once called glucinium because some of its toxic compounds have which taste?

Sweet-tasting salts gave the element its first name, and early researchers identified beryllium compounds by tasting them, a highly hazardous habit given how toxic the metal is.

Which space telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, has a main mirror of 18 beryllium segments?

James Webb's mirror works in extreme cold, and beryllium was chosen because it is light, exceptionally stiff and deforms less than glass at those temperatures.

Which green gemstone, the traditional birthstone for May, is a variety of the beryllium mineral beryl?

Emerald is rarely flawless: its mossy-looking internal cracks and inclusions are known as jardin, the French word for garden.

Which 1999 sci-fi comedy starring Tim Allen features a starship powered by a beryllium sphere?

Galaxy Quest sends its washed-up television actors to a nearby planet to take a replacement sphere from ferocious, childlike alien miners.

Which fictional detective solves the Victorian mystery of a banker's damaged beryl coronet?

Sherlock Holmes clears the banker's son by reading footprints in the snow, in one of the twelve stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Thin beryllium foil forms the window of the tubes that generate which radiation, because it passes straight through?

X-rays are barely absorbed by beryllium's very light atoms, which makes window foils for X-ray tubes the oldest use of the metal and still one of the most important.

Berylliosis, a chronic allergic-type disease caused by exposure to beryllium, mainly attacks which organs?

Lungs that have become sensitized to inhaled beryllium develop small inflamed nodules called granulomas, and the symptoms can take years to appear.

Which metal thinly coats the beryllium mirrors of the space telescope that succeeded Hubble?

Gold reflects infrared light superbly, which is exactly what the telescope collects, and the coating is itself covered by a thin layer of glass for durability.

Adding about two percent beryllium makes which metal six times stronger and ideal for spark-free tools?

Copper alloyed with beryllium is tough and non-magnetic, and because tools made from it do not strike sparks they are used in the oil, gas and gunpowder industries.

Which pale blue variety of beryl, the birthstone for March, includes Brazil's giant Dom Pedro gem?

Aquamarine takes its name from Latin words meaning water of the sea, and the Dom Pedro, now in the Smithsonian's natural history museum in Washington, is the largest cut gem of its kind in the world.

Which metal, famous for rechargeable batteries, sits just before beryllium at number three in the periodic table?

Lithium and beryllium are the only two metals in the second row of the periodic table, fewer than in any later row.

In 1932 James Chadwick fired alpha particles at beryllium and discovered which subatomic particle?

Neutron discovery won Chadwick the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the same beryllium reaction still drives small laboratory sources of the particle.

Beryllium tools are used for repairs beside which hospital machine, where ordinary iron tools would be dangerous?

MRI scanner magnets generate very high magnetic fields that tug at iron, but beryllium is non-magnetic, so tools and fittings made with it can be used safely nearby.

Alexandrite, a color-changing beryllium gem, was named in honor of a future emperor of which country?

Russia's Ural Mountains yielded alexandrite that looks green by daylight and red by lamplight, and the gem was named for the future Alexander II.

Tiffany gem expert George Kunz named a pink variety of beryl after which American banker and collector?

J. P. Morgan had given important gem collections to museums in New York and Paris, so his friend Kunz proposed the name morganite in 1910.

The largest known crystal of any mineral, an 18-meter beryl, was found on which island nation?

Madagascar's record-breaking beryl was 3.5 meters across and weighed about 380 metric tons.

In 13th-century Italy, clear beryl was ground into the lenses of which new invention because glass was too cloudy?

Eyeglasses were first made in 13th-century Italy with lenses of beryl or rock crystal, which is why the German word for them, Brille, comes from beryl.

Beryllium is the lightest member of which periodic table family, alongside calcium and radium?

Alkaline earth metals mostly react with water, but beryllium is the exception: it does not react with water or steam unless at very high temperatures.

French chemist Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin discovered beryllium in 1798 and which shiny plating metal a year earlier?

Chromium turned up in a red lead ore, and among all the substances Vauquelin analyzed in a long career, it and beryllium were the only two new elements he detected.

Each beryllium mirror segment on the space telescope that succeeded Hubble has which shape?

Hexagon-shaped segments are the reason bright stars in the telescope's images show six sharp spikes of light.

Friedrich Wöhler isolated beryllium in 1828, the year he famously made which natural compound in a laboratory?

Urea was believed to be something only living organisms could produce until Wöhler made it from ammonium cyanate, in a reaction that still carries his name.

Which English chemist, who isolated potassium and sodium, tried and failed to isolate beryllium metal?

Humphry Davy never freed the metal, but he still proposed a name for it, glucium, and versions of that name stayed in use into the twentieth century.

Which Formula One team raced with beryllium alloy pistons until a Ferrari protest got the metal banned?

McLaren ran the lightweight pistons in its Mercedes-Benz engines from 1998 to 2000, before the sport outlawed beryllium engine parts.

Most beryllium in the universe formed when what smashed heavier atoms apart in the space between stars?

Cosmic rays do a job that stars cannot, because inside the cores of stars beryllium is destroyed as it is turned into heavier elements.

Beryllium-10, which rains out of the atmosphere, helps scientists date which natural records of past climate?

Ice cores preserve beryllium-10 layer by layer, and because less of it forms when the Sun is active, they also keep a record of solar activity.

Before beryllium was discovered, chemists wrongly thought beryl was just a silicate of which lightweight metal?

Aluminum really is in beryl, and beryllium's chemistry resembles it so closely that four leading analysts overlooked the second metal sitting beside it.

Sound travels through beryllium at nearly 13 kilometers per second, which makes it prized for which hi-fi part?

Tweeter domes must be light and rigid to reproduce the highest notes, but beryllium is expensive, brittle and toxic if mishandled, so it appears only in high-end speakers.

Until 1949, beryllium compounds coated the inside of which kind of electric light, sickening factory workers?

Fluorescent tubes once glowed thanks to beryllium phosphors, until a cluster of illness among American lamp makers led the industry to drop the metal for safer coatings.

Which CERN machine, the world's largest particle accelerator, has beryllium beam pipes at all four main detectors?

Large Hadron Collider detectors surround a beryllium pipe because collision debris passes through the light metal almost undisturbed, and it keeps working a few degrees above absolute zero.

Beryllium was used inside the Joint European Torus, a doughnut-shaped machine in England built to study what?

Nuclear fusion, the reaction the machine was built to tame for future power grids, was studied there from 1983 until it finished operations in December 2023.

Unstable beryllium-8 falls apart almost instantly into two nuclei of which noble gas?

Helium nuclei, also called alpha particles, are so stable that a beryllium-8 nucleus behaves like a loose cluster of two of them that are very easily separated.

In aging stars, short-lived beryllium-8 can capture one more alpha particle to forge which element vital to life?

Carbon is built this way only in stars far hotter than the Sun's core, where alpha particles collide fast enough to beat the rapid decay of beryllium-8.

Beryllium is toxic partly because it displaces which element, its neighbor below in the periodic table, from enzymes?

Magnesium keeps many enzymes working, and they malfunction once beryllium takes its place; worse, the body has no means of removing the intruder.

Spor Mountain, one of the world's largest deposits of beryllium ore, lies in which western US state?

Utah's Spor Mountain, in the Thomas Range, is mined for bertrandite, which along with beryl is one of the two main ores of beryllium.

In the fatal 1946 demon core accident, Louis Slotin held two beryllium half-shells apart using which everyday tool?

A screwdriver blade was all that kept the beryllium shells from closing around the plutonium; when it slipped, a burst of radiation followed and Slotin died nine days later.

Early atomic bombs were triggered by 'urchin' initiators pairing beryllium with which element discovered by Marie Curie?

Polonium was held between a beryllium pellet and a beryllium shell at the very center of the bomb, and the implosion mixed them to set off the chain reaction.

Bomb-disposal teams use non-magnetic beryllium tools when working on or near which weapons?

Naval mines commonly have magnetic fuzes, so the military teams that disarm them carry tools made from beryllium-based materials that cannot trigger one.

Beryllium alloys ring so consistently that they are used for triangles and which other percussion instruments?

Tambourines get their shimmer from small metal jingles, and makers prize the beryllium alloy for its consistent tone and resonance.

Red beryl is so rare that only one is found for every 150,000 of which famous gemstones?

Diamonds are plentiful by comparison: red beryl has been reported from only a handful of locations, all in the south-western United States.

From about 1500 BC, green beryl gems were mined at Mount Smaragdus in which ancient land?

Egypt's mines were later worked on an industrial scale by the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and only ruins remain there today.