The alphabet can be so cruel.

In the dark, ancient times before the glorious, humanity-saving invention of The Internet, when you needed anything from a plumber to pizza delivery you would consult a giant tome known as The Yellow Pages. Because people tended to look at the top of the listings, businesses back then would bend over backwards trying to register their companies with names bound to appear at the top. This led to a spate of listings like AAA Plumbing Inc. and Aandy’s Pizza. For a small business back in the day being stuck with a leading Z in a name was a surefire way to bankruptcy.

Shopping on the web has greatly evened the playing field thanks to the random nature of search and listings sorted by ranking feedback from the public. However, sites that depend on listing their wares alphabetically still run into the Z curse which finds shopper exhaustion towards the bottom of the page. Unless you needed zirconium for some reason there’s a good chance you didn’t start your session way down at the end of the options. It’s not how we do things!

None of this is zirconium’s fault, of course. The metal was named after the mineral zircon (from which comes zirconia, the much-ridiculed diamond wannabe) the etymology of which is rooted in ancient times. Now as for the metal itself it is similar to titanium in many ways and is in fact mined from the same ores. It is even more similar to hafnium to the point where it is nearly impossible to separate the two from each other using conventional methods. Even in this nominally 99.9% pure sample there’s a footnoted caveat on the certificate of analysis provided by the refining lab stating “excluding hafnium” which is estimated to contain as much as 1%. Purer, near hafnium-free samples of zirconium can be prepared (see zirconium crystals elsewhere on this site) but the pieces are large and given the hardness of this metal chopping it up into little pieces that may fit would likely quadruple the cost. Zirconium’s had it rough enough without added contrivances.