The rhinestone

What is a rhinestone? The easiest way to find out is if you compare a piece of rock crystal and the same piece of glass. Both are similar in their color and transparency. On the fracture they will have equally sharp, cutting edges. But the rock crystal will remain cold for a long time in your hand, the glass will soon become warm. All because the rhinestone much better conducts heat than the glass - the heat of the hand quickly disperses throughout the stone, and only the surface of the glass heats up. Therefore, they use it where it is necessary that the heat be transferred quickly. Secondly, rock crystal has special electrical properties, and they use it in a wide variety of instruments, and especially in radio engineering. It is also irreplaceable in the thin production of various precision optical instruments. Here its big hardness, and very high refractoriness, and remarkable purity, and the fact that it does not decompose with acids.

What is a rhinestone? The easiest way to find out is if you compare a piece of rock crystal and the same piece of glass

Rock crystal is a clear, pure crystalline variety of quartz, whose crystals reach enormous sizes, and samples of 15-20 kilograms are not uncommon. Therefore, whole crystals can be cut from one crystal, and the purity and transparency of rock crystal have long made it an excellent material for cutting or preparing prints and various knick-knacks. For example, in Ural live handicraftsmen who quickly, on simple sticks, grind quartz pebbles and prepare beads. Drilled through, 50-70 beads string together - and a beautiful, sparkling necklace is ready, as if made from diamonds.

If you heat the rock crystal in an electric oven to almost 20000 C, it will melt and flow like glass, and it can be used to make glasses, tubes, plates, etc. Such quartz glasses can be hot, in the icy water, - they will not change and will remain intact. If a hot glass of simple glass is thrown into cold water or, conversely, poured boiling water into a cold glass, it usually bursts. Another remarkable property of rock crystal - the ability to produce the finest quartz filaments, almost invisible to a simple eye: you have to stack five hundred such threads to get a thickness of matches. Such strings are obtained by shooting drops of molten rock crystal from special devices.

Very widely used rock crystal in our lives, in industry and technology, so man learned to receive it artificially and replaced nature with his laboratory. If scientists successfully receive artificial rubies and sapphires, if they so well learned to prepare hundreds of different salts and minerals, is it really not will they be able to produce in their laboratories simply crystallized quartz? After all, one-sixth of the entire surrounding earth's crust consists of quartz. But everything was not so simple. Get a crystal for a long time chemists could not. But the scientists coped with the problem and found a clue. The first crystalline crystals of rock crystal, no more than one and a half centimeters in length, were grown in Italy in a very difficult situation, in special crystallizers.

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