And if great-to-the-nth-power grandma hadn’t forgotten her nut those many years ago, Larry wouldn’t have a tree to live in.
Pretty easily. I’ve got some (pretty nice) photos taken without a flash at night around a ‘campfire’ that was actually burning strips of magnesium. I don’t recall it was especially difficult to get it burning, either.
Even without the fire risk, be careful. You can easily damage your eyes.
They’re in the original packaging from when I ordered them as element samples. I think they’re bagged in nitrogen and then closed in a plastic jar with screw lid, but I’m not 100% sure. It’s been a few years.
I have a dime sized rounded blob of freaking beryllium. I’m a little cautious about it, but the only thing I’m really careful about is not creating dust from it. The big problem with beryllium is breathing its aerosol, from foundry fumes or finishing operations.
By the way, beryllium copper tools are fairly common and don’t carry warnings. They’re a few percent beryllium, and it’s just mixed with the copper, it’s not some new compound. And yes of course I have a sample of that, a 1/4" rod about a foot long…
Beryllium copper I’m not too worried about. No dust hazard or anything. But as a pure sample in an element collection, something that people can pick up and handle, I’m more concerned. It’s brittle and if it falls it could conceivably fracture and create fine dust. At least for the large samples I want.
I wonder where I can acquire a beryllium sphere, roughly three foot diameter?
Rock! Rock! Rock!
A couple of beryllium hemispheres and a screwdriver will do it for me.
Nah, all the Cool Kids get beryllium spheroids.
My argon laser (long story) has a beryllium laser tube. I was advised to avoid cracking it.
Some very high end tweeters use beryllium domes. The metal’s properties really do seem to make a measurable difference to the performance of the driver, pushing a lot of the vibrational modes out past audibly. Something competing materials have trouble doing. Usually tweeters need to use internal damping in the dome material balanced against stiffness and keeping mass low. Beryllium seems to just sneak past all this.
How much this is actually audible is another matter. Especially if your hearing struggles past 15kHz.
Another place I remember being impressed seeing beryllium used was in some external panels of the Mercury (or maybe Gemini) spacecraft. I’m guessing application in such extreme use cases is more common than we might think.
The James Webb Space Telescope primary mirror segments are made from beryllium. Stiff, light, and has good cryogenic properties.
Gawd, that one slipped my mind. Yes, a really high profile use. Cryogenic properties must matter a lot here as well.
If it wasn’t such an evil element it might have been quite popular for making stuff.
In first-year engineering we were warned about beryllium-bronze springs. The lecturer claimed that if you cut yourself on this material, the wound would not heal, or would heal very slowly, for reasons I can’t remember.
Right. This is berylliosis, a sensitivity disease that usually involves the lungs after inhaling beryllium particles, but can also occur in wounds. I don’t think it always happens if you cut yourself on the stuff, just that it might.
Something you used to be able to buy in your local friendly electronics parts store was beryllium oxide heat conductive paste. It was - at the time - the good stuff. But it came with all manner of warnings, especially about using gloves and never allowing it into even the tiniest of wounds. I haven’t seen it about in many decades, and it has probably been supplanted by diamond based pastes. The other warning was about handling the ceramic packages of high power transistors and integrated circuits. These were (still are?) often a beryllium ceramic. Basically, don’t mess about with them, and sure as hell don’t try grinding into the packages.
In John D Clarke’s Ignition!, the describes a long series of experiments with high performance rocket fuels based on metals, one metal investigated being beryllium. This being taken seriously despite the well understood toxicity of the exhaust. Given some of the ridiculous things being worked with, perhaps this isn’t as surprising as is might seem. Thankfully the gains didn’t justify the problems. He ends the chapter suggesting that a liquid lithium, liquid fluorine pair seemed like the good combination. 
Copper beryllium alloy is not super uncommon. For example, I think it’s also used for more conventional speaker drivers for the little pair of wires that move with the speaker cone.
If that’s the same as “beryllium bronze” I think it’s used in springs, in particular small springs such as might be used in watchmaking.
Oh, darn.
What does that last part mean in the context of mirrors and lenses?
When it heats up and cools off, it doesn’t warp the reflecting surface too much. (Or it warps in predictable ways that you can compensate for.)