12-5-97
Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum News
This is Our Newsletter. What shall we make of it? It will probably not regain any of it's past glory until I learn how to use this Desktop Publishing software, and you all send me a little story or tall tale about some aspect of your mineral interest! Tell us about your favorite mineral specimen, or collecting locality, or just about your fascination with little lumps of homogenous chemicals with a definite crystal structure. I am curious about your first collecting trips, our Grandparents that gave us pretty rocks, and that person who showed you how to polish opals without power tools. We have a lot to talk about!
Steve
I was thinking about a Field trips Wanted column . . .
The Octahedral Crystal
by Mike Howard Illustrated by Darcy Howard
Let's look at an octahedron (fig. 3). The octahedron is a form composed of 8 equilateral triangles. These triangle-shaped faces intersect all 3 crystallographic axesat the same distance, thus the form notation of {111} (fig. 3). Minerals commonly exhibiting the simple octahedral form are magnetite, chromite, franklinite, spinel, pyrochlore, cuprite, gold, and diamond. Sometimes fluorite, pyrite, and galena take this form. All the crystal faces present are the expression of the repetition of a single form having the Miller's indices of {111} about the three crystallographic axes . Each face on a natural crystal (octahedral galena or fluorite are examples), when rotated to the position of the {111} face in the drawing, would have the same shape and orientation of striations, growth pits or stairsteps, and etch pits, if present. The presence of these features is true whether or not the crystal is well formed or distorted in its growth.
Visit Mike & Darcy's website at:
http://members.aol.com/ARrockinfo/index.html
It is full of info about Crystallography and rockhounding in Arkansas, digging Quartz, and also Darcy’s Technical Illustrations... Darcy's images are great !
Color this Logo neatly and creatively, (add to it if you want) and bring it to the Arrow Gem and Mineral tables at the Flagg Show at Mesa Community College this January. You will receive a free rock or mineral specimen just for entering our contest! The Logo judged best by our members will receive an extra nice specimen, and Your Winning Entry may be used to make Foundation Tee Shirts (I want one!) All entries will become the property of the Foundation, so make a copy for your Grandma’s refrigerator.
Steve’s Colorado Camping Vacation
Last August the Decker clan went camping in Colorado. 10 days and 2453 miles of fun, traveling through some of the most beautiful country on Earth. We went to the Buena Vista and Lake George rock shows. The Buena Vista show was a lot of fun, but the weather was not cooperating. It would cloud up and rain for a half hour, then clear up, the sun would shine, the Dealers would uncover the lovely minerals, and it would rain again! Personally, I love the rain, but I felt sorry for the trouble it was making for the show. At Lake George, we were able to collect some specimens of Amazonite and Smoky Quartz, thanks to our new friends Greg and Carolyn Tunicliff. Nice specimens of Smokey Quartz were collected by visitors within walking distance of the dealer’s tables! We also met Tom and Melissa Gressman at this fun little show. Tom is the President of the Board of Directors of the Mineralogical Record (my favorite magazine). Tom and Melissa had beautiful minerals for sale, some with considerable historic interest. One Wulfenite from Tiger, AZ, had been collected by Ed Over! I acquired a blue Barite from the collection of Sharpe Osmundsen, a noted collector who Melissa knew personally. I hope we see these new friends in Tucson this winter!
Nomination Committee
Members are needed for the nomination committee. This is a fairly easy job which amounts to making a few phone calls. We need to have the recommendations of the committee by the end of November. There are five Trustees Positions and the four officers to be filled. So, let me know if you are interested in being on the Nominations Committee or have your name placed in nomination for one of the open positions. I can be reached at 892-0779. Thanks.
Les Presmyk.
Chairman's Corner
I would like to start by thanking Lois Splendoria for all of her hard work for the past 18 months on our newsletter. She will be missed but I hope she will continue to be involved with the Foundation and submit articles to help Steve. Steve Decker has graciously consented to take on the daunting task of being the newsletter editor.
I would like to ask everyone to consider submitting articles. As you will see in this issue, there are articles on collecting trips and a "what I did on vacation" type article. This is the type of personal touch we can add to our newsletter to inform our members of opportunities and just keep in touch with other members. It does not seem like ten months ago we were ushering in the new year of 1997. Now, 1998 is just around the corner. The Foundation has seen a few changes this year. We have supplied significant financial support to the museum with the purchase of the famous "Rock Meal" (hey, anything featured in the National Enquirer has to be considered famous)and the purchase of a microscope/video camera/monitor to allow public viewing of the micromount collection. A fine Red Cloud wulfenite specimen was purchased for the display collection and a second, large San Francisco mine wulfenite is being acquired. We have also received several donations of minerals and several hundred issues of Mineralogical Record that will ultimately benefit the Foundation collection and the Museum library. We have added new members and all three of our functions are doing well. The January Flagg Tail-gate Show, the March Symposium and Sale, and the October Museum Family Day Sale continue to produce funds and recognition for the Foundation. Ben Benham has volunteered to be available on Saturdays to act as a tour guide for the Foundation Gallery.
Work continues on the collection. The database is available for access by members. The appraisal of the collection has begun. Now, catalog numbers need to be affixed to each specimen. Once that is accomplished, permanent labels can be printed and placed with each specimen. Temporary labels should be on all displayed specimens by the end of the year. The treasure trove at the trailer is about done. We now have to turn our attention to actively soliciting donations and other fund raising efforts. The next few years should be exciting ones for the Foundation, if we are to grow both in size and importance to the Museum.
Dave Shannon requested copies of the By-Laws and Articles of Incorporation at our last annual meeting. We have a member who has volunteered paper and the use of his copier to make copies for all of our members. You will receive your copies with this or the next newsletter or at the annual meeting in January.
Coming Events
Would anyone like to show off our collection to the Mining History buffs at the Rendezvous?
Sammy Dog Mine
Saturday, September 20th, was a dandy day for a field trip. On that fine morning, Ray and Cynthia Grant, Darrell Dodd, Larrey Dodd, and your new Editor-in-training, Steve Decker, got down to the Sammy Dog Mine, not too far from the Silver Bell Mine, in Pima Co. It was a cool morning, and traffic was not bad at all! About an hour and a half after our rendezvous at Ray Road and I-10 we were pulling off at the Red Rock exit to make our way down 17 miles of rough road to the small claim. After one false turn (or exploratory venture, depending on who is telling this story) we made our way to the mouth of the adit. The mineralized vein, containing Mimetite, Cerussite, Galena, and at least one Wulfenite crystal is exposed at the surface in the mouth of this mine. The rock is fractured and easy to work, but very few of the colorful crystals stay attached to this matrix. Some look like little sheaves, some are hexagonal prisms with mushroom heads. Larrey found a pocket with a 1 cm Wulfenite, red as the best of them. Darrell and I found several small pockets that contained tiny yellow and orange acicular crystals of Mimetite, and one special specimen with sheaves of red-orange crystal clusters. Early in the digging, as I was tapping on the fractured west wall of the adit, I saw a large clump of rock begin to fall from the roof. "Uh-oh" was barely out of my mouth before it fell to the floor, scratching my arm on the way down. No-one was hurt, but we were certainly a lot more cautious and observant the rest of the day!
Field Trip Announcement
The Foundation will host a field trip to the Red Cloud mine on March 21, 1998. Only Foundation members and their immediate families will be eligible for this trip. More information will be available at the annual meeting in January. So, be sure to renew your membership and let your friends know about this opportunity.
Fieldtrips Wanted
I would like to take a trip to Amethyst Hill with someone who knows where the nice Cerussite twins were found. I have been collecting there many times, but was not aware of these little treasures till recently. Where would you like to dig? Maybe we can get together in little (or BIG) groups, as our busy schedules permit. We could have some fun, find some stuff to clutter up our houses, maybe even something we could sell at the Foundation's tables this January! At the very least, it will be something to write about in the Newsletter :>) This could be BIG!
Of Special Interest...
At our October meeting Glenn Miller brought us an interesting request. He asked for a video camera and microscope system to view the micromount collection! The Foundation voted to give the Museum funding for this purpose, and I saw it in action at the Museum Family Day! It works dandy, and will certainly be a popular addition to the Museum’s bag of tricks! Glenn will have a turntable made so that many specimens can be staged at the same time, and easily viewed without too much handling. I have heard that the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum has such an arrangement, without the video feature. This seems to me to be a perfect example of the sort of help the Foundation can provide to the Museum. Here is something that will interest the general public, as well as provide enjoyment to our members and families. Let's all pester the heck out of Glenn to get that turntable built!
Editorial:
This mineral stuff isn’t any fun unless I can show it off to Kids!
It is the most fascinating thing to see understanding light a young persons face when you point out the symmetry of a crystal. Don’t you love the Question, no matter how many times you hear it...”Did you cut it that shape?” For me, this small grandeur of a crystal’s natural perfection points out how God’s hand, using his Mathematics, created our Universe tiny piece by orderly piece. Somehow children seem to be able to see the magic in that much easier than adults.
So we have to show them while they are young!
Our membership dues cover our whole families, you know. The members of our Foundation and the honorable volunteers at our Museum have always treated my darling girls with hospitality and respect. I think they enjoy having interested youngsters around. Let’s try to think of ways to make our organization more inviting and friendly for our whole families. We probably wouldn’t want to start the kids off cleaning and labeling our Tsumeb Azurites, but someday before too long, a pair of younger, clearer eyes will be needed for that work. (I can’t hardly reach out far enough in front of me to hold my newspaper, anymore.) Many of our longest established Mineral clubs are lamenting the dearth of young faces at their meetings. Some of them are no longer in existence, as membership dwindles and the older mineral lovers are no longer able to bear the burden of keeping them going. What can we do to encourage our young family members and friends to participate? I think we should give anyone under 18 a free space to sell minerals at our Shows and sales. Making a few bucks is a terrific incentive to learn about minerals, and is almost always spent right there at the show on some treasure found on one of our other dealers tables! What are your ideas? This one should be easy.
CAP Donates $50 to Our Foundation
As some of you may know,the Central Arizona Water Conservation District operates and maintains the Central Arizona Project canal system, which supplies Colorado River water to agriculture and cities from Lake Havasu to Tucson. Recently, the CAP offered to reward volunteers in our community by making donations to the non-profit organizations that they have served. Steve applied for a donation for the Arizona Mineral and Mining Museum Foundation, and this was approved. The award was presented, along with several others, Thursday, October 30th, at a special Luncheon at the Arrowhead Country Club. Darrell Dodd, representing the Board of Directors of our Foundation, accepted the donation. The Foundation gives a Hearty “Thanks!” to the CAP for this donation, which will help us provide opportunities for learning about our mineral and mining heritage to Arizona’s citizens.
E-Mail your article or comments
I have a portable computer (several, actually) available to members who will write an article for our Newsletter! Articles submitted on disk as ASCII text files (.txt), or by e-mail , will save me a lot of time & typing. However, I am anxious to see anything you will share with us, anyway you want to do it!! salty@doitnow.com
1997 EFMLS TROPHY AWARD ORIGINAL EDUCATIONAL ARTICLES "ON THE SCHEELITE TRAIL, THE X-RAY CONNECTION, AND OTHER SURPRISES" by Howard Heitner from "The Vug Examiner," Stamford Mineralogical Society, April, 1996
Scheelite (calcium tungstate) is one my favorite fluorescent minerals. It is one of the few minerals that always fluoresces, although the color is not always the same. Back in the early sixties I found my first book on fluorescent minerals, "The Ultraviolet Guide to Minerals"(1) by Sterling Gleason. He told how prospectors used portable UV lamps in the 1940's to find valuable tungsten deposits in the American West. These replaced the supply of tungsten ore from China which was cut off during World War II. The stories inspired me to build a UV lamp in my high school shop class and I took off for Trumbull, Connecticut, the nearest scheelite deposit to my home in New York City. I did actually manage to find a few pieces of massive quartz rock with some specks of scheelite. Many years later, my first job was with Dupont, a company which made medical X-ray film. I had no background in that field and, over time, I learned many things about medical X-ray technology. I soon found out that X-ray film is not very sensitive to X-rays! The film, which is usually coated with a silver bromide emulsion on both sides, is sandwiched between two fluorescent screens. Calcium tungstate is a commonly used phosphor in these screens. In order not to lose resolution, the screens must be pressed firmly against the film. This is done by a device called an X-ray cassette. Several years ago I was fortunate enough to find one which had been discarded by the company's medical department. When I give talks on mineral fluorescence the cassette illustrates some of the practical uses of fluorescent materials. About a year ago I gave a talk on fluorescence, which was illustrated with slides and exhibits. Afterwards I thought of what additional slides might be used to improve the presentation and in the back of my mind was an X-ray photograph of a human hand showing clearly the bones and also numerous shotgun pellets. It was famous for being the first X-ray taken with a fluorescent screen.(2) I combed the local libraries for all their books on X-rays and at last found one book which had the picture.(3) It was taken at Columbia University on Feb. 2, 1896 by Prof Michael Pupin. The original is in the Burndy Library at M.I.T. I contacted them in search of some more historical information and was referred to Pupin's autobiography.(4) Since none of the local libraries had the book, they sent photocopies of some of the relevant pages. I later found two copies of this fascinating book in a used book shop housed in a barn in upstate Connecticut. The story of Pupin's photograph is closely connected to the story of the discovery of X- rays. Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays on November 9, 18953,(5). He noticed that a fluorescent screen coated with barium platinocyanide fluoresced whenever he turned on a nearby electric discharge (sometimes called a Crookes or Hittorf) tube. Roentgen did not disclose his discovery immediately, but carefully checked his facts before publishing an account in January 1896. One of the things he published was a picture of a human hand (his wife's!) showing the individual bones. This caused a level of high excitement in the medical community. Recent developments in anesthesia and antiseptic techniques made surgery much safer. But where should one operate? The ability to see inside the human body, as a preview to surgery, would be of tremendous value. The Crookes tube had been around for years and was to be found in many physics labs. X-rays had also been around for years, but no one noticed them! By mid-January 1896, using Roentgen's description his experiments, scientists all over the world were making X-rays. Michael Pupin was one of these early experimenters. He was besieged by local doctors to X-ray their patients. One surgeon, a friend of Pupin, had a particularly urgent case-a man who had been wounded in his hand by a shotgun blast. An X-ray picture of the hand would be of immense value to the surgeon. Pupin knew Roentgen's first picture of his wife's hand required an exposure of 15 minutes, but this patient was in such pain that he could not possibly hold his hand still for that long. Knowing that the photographic plate was much more sensitive to light than to X-rays, Pupin placed a fluorescent screen over the plate and was able to produce a sharp picture with a four second exposure. Guided by this picture, the surgeon was able to remove all the pellets. But where did Pupin happen to get such a good fluorescent screen? Across the Hudson, in West Orange, New Jersey, was America's first industrial research lab, run by and for Thomas A. Edison. Edison immediately saw the many potential uses for Xrays and had quickly duplicated Roentgen's work.(6) However, Edison did not like barium platinocyanide because it did not fluorescence brightly enough. So, he had some of his chemists test a few thousand compounds to find one which was more brilliant. And the one they finally selected was--calium tungstate, a.k.a. scheelite. They immediately coated some flat screens with this material and Edison, who was friendly with Pupin and knew of his X- ray work, gave him one. Now this story is fascinating enough, but I haven't yet reached the end. Edison, of course, is best known for his invention of the light bulb. But Edison's invention was not the first bulb containing an incandescent filament heated by electricity, others had the idea before him. What Edison invented was the first light bulb in which the filament would last long enough to be a practical light source. Edison had another idea which is not widely known. On May 16, 1896 Edison filed a patent [US 865,367] for a fluorescent light source. It was basically an X-ray tube coated on the inside with calcium tungstate. The device was highly dangerous and impractical because it gave off X-rays, the dangerous effects of which were made clear when one of Edison's assistants died of X-ray exposure. It was also impractical because X-ray tubes require a very high voltage and convert most of the electric power supplied to them into heat. Edison patented it anyway but soon ended his X-ray work. Neither Roentgen nor Pupin patented their inventions, both of which have been of immense value to mankind over the last one hundred years. Now, what about the fluorescence of the natural mineral, scheelite? It was also found to fluoresce under X- rays.(2) But what about UV fluorescence? In 1910 A. N. Winchell. a prominent mineralogist, published a paper on Montana tungsten ores.(7) He described how to recognize scheelite by its specific gravity and optical properties but makes no mention of its UV fluorescence. This was apparently discovered sometime later. Greenwood (8) states that the first published study of scheelite fluorescence under UV was in 1930.(9) This supports the supposition that the availability of good sources of short wave UV probably delayed the discovery and application of UV for finding and identifying scheelite.
References
Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum News is published by the Arizona Mineral and Mining Museum Foundation.
Editor: Steven Decker salty@doitnow.com
Foundation Trustees (Term ends)
Administrative Office:
4413 N. Saddlebag Trail, Suite 1
Scottsdale, AZ 85251-3411
Arizona Mining & Mineral Museum
News Vol.6 No.8 Winter 1997