Invisible beauty

 As a little boy I liked to collect rocks. Stories of lost gold mines, buried gems and priceless rubies whetted my appetite for stones. Of course, the pebbles I picked up were just pretty rocks, smoothed by a distant stream and ending up in my grubby pocket.

As a teenager I once visited the Natural History Museum in New York and was fascinated by the opal wedding rings collection. The world's largest crystal ball, a replica Hope diamond, and an opal weighing over a hundred pounds all found their way into my dreams. A few years later, I chose geology as my undergraduate major.

In my twenties, while browsing a government surplus store, I came across a three-hundred-watt ultraviolet reflector with a high-voltage transformer. It cost only five dollars and made me ask the owner what it could be for. He told me it was used to discover flaws in weapons manufacturing, but other than that, the only other use he could think of was to make certain fluorescent materials visible. I immediately remembered the mineral fluorite, which glowed under ultraviolet light. So I bought it.

A visit to the local library yielded a beautiful book on fluorescent minerals with wonderful pictures of mineral specimens glowing in pure iridescent colors under a UV lamp. Most of these rare minerals were found in mines around the world, but one source of these collectible rocks was just twenty miles from my house! The next day off found me happily going to the town of Franklin, New Jersey. When I saw a sign outside this small town advertising the Franklin Museum for Fluorescent Rocks, I screeched to a halt to find my way. He led me to a large Victorian house and an old man greeted me at the door. In his living room were several glass cases filled to the brim with greyish-looking, dusty stones, each carefully labeled. The collector explained that during the day the colors were too pale, but if I wanted to see the full effect I would like to see the collection in his basement. A series of creaking wooden stairs opened into a large, low-ceilinged room lined with shelves of the same gray stones as above. I still wasn't blown away. Then he turned on the ultraviolet tubes and turned off the normal white light. The fantasy of colors caught my eye. All tones of orange from peach to tangerine, deep yellows, azure blues and intense reds screamed from the walls in a melange of lacy patterns. As I crawled around and examined each specimen, the owner explained to me where each specimen came from, what price, and how rare.

Colorful images of opal rings for women spinning in my head, revealed by the invisible ultraviolet light. I asked him if it was possible to find some specimens himself for my own collection. He told me of several tailings of ore from the ancient mines near by, which doubtless contained many good specimens for collection, but it was too difficult to separate them from the mass of useless rock. I immediately thought of my powerful UV reflector and how it would allow me to easily discover rare specimens. The next weekend I took my searchlight into an old mine and as luck would have it, there was a small abandoned shack not far from the tailings. An old man came out and I told him about my quest. He understood immediately and offered to use his electricity to plug in my fifty foot extension cord. He advised me to wait until dark to start.

Later that night I returned to the location with a Good Samaritan waiting. A hum filled the air as the spotlight heated up. Then, when an invisible spotlight shined on the mountain of gray rocks, countless lights shone like distant galaxies in the void of space. I climbed the steep slope and picked the brightest and most colorful sample until I had more than I could bear. Like the hidden talents of ordinary people, my collection never ceases to amaze our science-minded visitors with the amazing and eerie light emanating from ordinary, gray, ordinary-looking rocks.