Mischmetal is a mixture of a some rare earth metals, mostly cerium and lanthanum. The cerium, when finely divided, is pyrophoric - it burns.
When you mix mischmetal with some iron and magnesium oxides, it's a lot more brittle, and you can chip off little flakes, which give sparks. That's your lighter flint.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
When you peer into a fractal, you're seeing the edge of chaos. If you sift through enough Julia or Mandelbrot sets, you might catch a hint of fractal fever. When you find that point, where order is filtered out of randomness, and glimpse a familiar pattern, you might feel tempted to shout "Eureka…
It's the 4th of July, and here in the U.S., that usually means fireworks.*
What could be better than explosions in pretty colors? Maybe a few details of how firework makers get those colors into the fireworks.
If you've taken a chemistry course with a lab, you may remember having done "flame tests…
The term "rare earth metal" is a misnomer that's just stuck around. They haven't been rare for years - take this ad material from about 50 years ago at Theodore Gray's excellent Periodic Table Table site.
Didymium is a mixture of rare earth metals, which, when compounded with glass, imparts some…
At long last, we review a book to which we have alluded in at least two previous posts.
The book: The Periodic Table: Elements with Style, written by Adrian Dingle, illustrated by Simon Basher. (Boston: Kingfisher, 2007)
The format:
The book introduces several representative elements from the…
Very interesting. How does this compare with traditional flint and steel?
The "Forever Match;" another reason why Homeland Severity is an ass.
Is it just the natural LREE mix, or do they actually seperate the metals and then remix them to a specific formula?