Cleveite [not Clevite] and helium
By Wendy L Kirk, on 11 January 2013
Curating one’s office always brings to light something interesting, and recently I came across an article written by one of our Geology graduates, Danny Howard, who stayed on for a period in Earth Sciences to work on the Johnston-Lavis collection of minerals and rocks. However, he found time to write for UCL News “Private View”, a series of articles about objects in the UCL collections. For the 2004 issue, he wrote about the specimen of cleveite in the labelled glass jar shown here. I remember finding this specimen a year or two previously in the Geology sub-basement store – as you do – when burrowing through the collections with Jayne Dunn, currently the UCL Collections Manager. Quite how it came to be there, I don’t know. Many years previously – maybe a decade or two – the store had belonged to the Chemistry department, but it had long been cleared out and shelved to receive geology specimens. Nonetheless, there it was on a shelf that day, neither of us having knowingly seen it before. (more…)