Whoaa! Gas cubes, really? Yep. One of the most asked-for emails that have been cluttering the Luciteria inbox has been a variant of “Can you guys make like a box with sealed gas?” And now it’s finally a reality.

While we’ve had gas ampules on offer for years these are a poor choice for the collectors who are putting together a set of pure elements in cubic centimeter format. The cheap and easy way often suggested - Hey! great idea why don’t you fill up one of your little plastic boxes with ____ gas? - is not really workable. Just as a helium balloon goes flat after a few hours your plastic box would soon be replaced with air and there goes your investment. Yes, you can glue the lid shut but these are very small, fast-moving atoms that will happily tunnel out of even impossibly small cracks and pores - right through the glue, in fact.

We knew the only effective option had to be glass. But glass makers, the type that provide glassware for laboratories anyway, do not make convenient little 10mm glass boxes. Sure would be nice if they did but unless we were willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a custom size we had to improvise. And the result is…. actually pretty nice! We’re not actually sure how it was done but we suspect the solution involves taking off-the-shelf borosilicate glass test tubes which are heated to the point of being pliable then quickly stuffed into a square hole. The cube is then back-filled with the target gas exactly the same way as the ampules.

The result isn’t perfect as this un-retouched photo and linked video clip shows: the glass walls are not perfectly straight and the top has a nipple that is not flush with the other sides. But this is nitpicking. They’re quite attractive little pieces that fit perfectly in our 14mm case. The 2mm-thick glass walls provide strength to spare so that if they should accidentally fall there’s a good chance they won’t break. The killer of course is that these can be made to light up, each in its own signature color the same as with all the other ampules.

Each glass cube comes with a sticker on the bottom to avoid confusion and all gases are 99.99% pure.

Please note the fluorine cube is a bit wider and will not fit in any of our current display cases.