The great difficulty of extraction of this metal coupled with the very high cost of machining it safely all but guarantee that beryllium will remain a name unknown to just about everyone. This is unfortunate as it combines properties that would make it an ideal material for many different applications.

When we inquired about the source of these rods we received a matter of fact answer that they came from a closed Soviet factory which bult them for ICBMs. Wasn’t quite sure if that was a joke but a bit o’ Googling coughed up that, indeed, rockets used beryllium in the gyroscopes that controled their flight paths (presumably obsoleted by GPS). While there’s obviously no way to verify that these are in fact bits of the innards of the nukes that were meant to turn us to cinders it at least makes for a plausible and very interesting story!

Each dome has an uncountable number of closely packed pure beryllium pegs. Net weight of the metal is 80 grams.