January 2003 Newsletter
I am so excited about 2003. It is a year full of promise and opportunities. Whatever happens with the worlds politics I have made a decision to not let my circumstances control my destiny. So what is happening this year and why am I so excited? The year starts off by me and Annalie going to Tucson, USA  for the first time. Not as a seller but as a visitor. I intend to meet as many of my friends as I can. I invite all of you who will be there during the first week of February to send me your contact details and we will make a plan to meet you. I have partnered with suppliers in Tanzania for faceting rough and will get supply on a continual basis once I am back from Tuscon. I have plans to market some minerals from Kuruman on an exclusive basis. It will be worth the wait. I have several trips lined up into Africa to buy material. I am opening two diggings for exotic quartz, I am not saying any more on this until I have the goods in hand. This will happen in March 2003. I have invested in several people in the Orange river to give me constant supply of hematoid quartz. And so I can carry on. The only thing that prevents me from doing more is the limited hours that we have in a day. I often work late because there is so much to do. I invite anybody who is looking for wholesale supply of minerals or rough to write to me. Every week we buy whatever minerals we can lay our hands on. At the moment I have over 18 tons of rough lying in my yard. All export quality rough at very competitive prices. Let us make 2003 a prosperous year. Gerdus   This month we cover the following Make your site fast Collecting minerals by Gerdus Bronn South African Overview. Platinum Series on minerals. Tourmaline Lastly we have our regular Silver Hills Mineral Gallery link to our updates page. Be blessed as you read this newsletter. Gerdus

Make your site fast

Heavy, elaborate graphics, lots of Java and Shockwave, scrolling marquees, gratuitous animations are all sure ways to lose your visitor. Your visitor wants info, delivered clean and crisp. That's all. Worse still, while designers are still wowed by moving stuff, it seriously distracts your visitor from what's important... the words. And it's annoying -- your visitors can't concentrate on the content! Remember, your visitors want info, not "cool." "Usability research shows that page down load has to be faster than 10 seconds for users to keep their attention on the site," says Jakob Nielsen, THE Web page usability guru. So compress graphics maximally, even if you have to give up a bit of quality in the image (you'll notice, but your visitor won't). Maximum total download of any page should not exceed 30K, preferably 20K. Graphics and animations don't make the sale... they kill it... unless you're selling video games. If your visitor wanted high bandwidth entertainment, she would turn on the TV! Just give her the info that she is looking for... and make it sharp and neat. Remember these two facts about your customers... 1) They want enough info to make a stay-or-leave, buy-or-not decision. They are not "surfers" - they just want info, and they want it fast, fast, fast. 2) Not every one is surfing with the newest and coolest browser. Research has shown that users need response times of less than one second for optimal info-gathering. Of course, that's impossible, for now and the next few years. Your goal should be ten second downloads - that's the limit to keep people's  attention focused while waiting. Info-seekers beg for speedy downloads. Give the visitor a screenfull of useful Information to read... immediately. Here's how... 1) Provide all the data that browser software needs to draw the top of the page fast. Include WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes for all tables and graphics. If you don't provide these specs for the browser, it has to download the graphics and lay out the tables, and then flow the words onto the page! 2) Use the inverted pyramid design. with strong, interesting text to hold attention. This keeps your visitor's attention nailed to the screen while your graphics and tables download. 3) Put only a small logo and navbar at the top -- do not take up the critical "first screen" with huge corporate or product logos, fancy graphics, tables, etc. Fill it with riveting copy. Other important speed Ups... · Keep graphics to a minimum. Small graphics, creative use of color in table cells, and a well-designed style sheet (linked, not embedded) with creative use of fonts will present an attractive and professional, yet speedy, page. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein In all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow There is nothing quite so complicated as simplicity. -- Charles Poore

Collecting minerals by Gerdus Bronn I would not call myself the worlds foremost expert on the field of collecting minerals. There are many people who are more knowledgeable and more qualified to write about this subject. But I have decided to put down some thoughts on the subject of collecting and displaying minerals. Why collect minerals? Mineral collecting is like collecting art. Art made by God and nature. A perfectly formed mineral is as collectable as a very good sculpture. The same criteria that counts for collecting art applies to collecting minerals. For me it has to be aesthetic. It must move the senses. It must make a statement. People have different taste. Some might collect for rarity. This means that what appeals to the one will not necessarily appeal to the next person. You might like the expressive visual appeal of quartz or the more intricate minerals that can only be appreciated by viewing through a microscope. . I personally collect for beauty and not for value.  You might buy minerals as a hedge against inflation,  thus buying them as a source of investment. I have no problem with that. I belief that a collection should be displayed well and appreciated by many to help keep awareness high and get the youngsters interested in mineral collecting. Make a traveling display case and display at the local public buildings. Change the collection now and then. Have open days where people are invited to come and see your collection. What should you collect? I say you must collect anything that appeals to your visual senses. You might have limited space. So sell what you do not want on www.ebay.com  and get some more minerals. Attend a local club and so expose yourself to new views. The main criteria for a collectable is that it should be undamaged. I have thousands of trays in my storeroom filled with damaged specimens. Worthless items for the serious collector. It must represent the mineral specie well. That means that it should look like the mineral that you have it labeled as. Lights make all the difference. Display is very important. A well displayed collection is a work of art. Do not clutter. Allow every mineral to be seen on it's own. Here the old saying goes. Less is more. I think this was said by Le Corbusier one of the founders of modern architecture. Rather have twenty good pieces than 500 poor ones. More on collecting later. I appreciate your views on this.

South African overview: Platinum Platinum is sometimes known as white gold from its appearance - brilliant white ranging to blue-grey - is found in small quantities in the Witwatersrand gold-bearing reefs. Apart from jewellery, platinum has considerable use as a catalyst in refining petrol and in the purification of exhaust fumes. Small quantities were extracted from the Witwatersrand reef and from lodes found elsewhere, but without very profitable results. Then, in May 1924, a prospector named A. F. Lombard panned platinum from a dry watercourse near Lydenburg. The samples were sent to Dr Merensky for analysis and he began substantial prospecting. In 1924 he and his group, including A. F. Lombard, found platinum in what was named the Merensky  Reef. The reef was traced to several parts of the Transvaal, especially the Rustenburg district.( I stay close to Rustenburg - Gerdus)  It is a remarkable reef - really a platinum horizon, or level, contained in a basin-shaped layer of a rock called norite. The platinum in the reef is of low concentration, but distributed so uniformly over so vast an area that the deposit is by far the largest in the world. One of the modern mines working it, the Rustenburg Platinum Mine, is the world's most extensive underground working. Some copper, iron, nickel and gold are recovered from the same reef.   Platinum is also a beautiful metal.
Tourmaline The chemical composition of tourmaline is given as "complex silicate" in the table. Ruskin in Ethics of the Dust concurred with this when he described it as: "A little of everything, there's always flint and clay and magnesia in it; and the black is iron according to its fancy; and there's boracic acid, if you know what that is, and if you don't, I can't tell you today, and it doesn't signify, and there's potash and soda; and on the whole, the chemistry of it is more like a medieval doctor's prescription than the making of a respectable mineral." If "lithia" is substituted for "potash" Ruskin's description is not inaccurate. A scientific description of the chemistry of this remarkable mineral would excel Ruskin's in precision but hardly in eloquence. Black Tourmaline or schorl tourmaline. Tourmaline is usually in elongated crystals with a cross section resembling a spherical triangle and it is coal-black due to the presence of iron. Transparent tourmaline When lithium enters into its structure, tourmaline becomes transparent and variously colored, most commonly green. If rose-pink to red, it is called rubellite,  if green, elbaite,  and if blue, indicolite.  A rare colorless tourmaline is achroite.  A most remarkable feature of some gem tourmalines is a color zoning indicating a change of chemical composition during growth of the crystal. "Watermelon" tourmaline is the name appropriately given to a crystal with a red center and green "rind." Elongate crystals may show a color zoning from base to tip, as in one collected by the authors from the famous Gillette quarry near Haddan Neck, Connecticut. It is deep green at the base, shading into lighter green above, then into rose-pink and finally colorless tourmaline at the tip. Individually, cut tourmalines make superb gem stones in rings and pendants, and joined together into a necklace, form a jewel of barbaric splendor. The discovery of most gem minerals from pegmatites in the United States has been incidental to the mining of feldspar and mica. One of the noteworthy exceptions was the mining of gem tourmaline at Mt. Mica, near Paris, Maine. The discovery of this deposit was made by two boys, Elisha L. Hamlin and Ezekiel Holmes, who had for some time been interested in the minerals that commonly occurred in the fields and ledges near the Hamlin home. One day in the fall of 1820, while hunting for specimens, they were attracted by the gleam of a green crystal caught in the roots of an upturned tree. They secured the mineral, but a heavy snow prevented a further search for minerals until the following spring. By that time, the green crystal had been identified by Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and mineralogy at Yale University, as tourmaline, and with the first thaw the boys returned and secured many fine gems. For more than one hundred years, the locality was worked extensively, and some of the gems from the quarry have found places in the crowns of kings. There is still occasional activity at Mt. Mica, but the great days of gem mining there seem to be ended. Many of the finest specimens of the collection of tourmaline assembled by Augustus Hamlin, son of the co-discoverer, are on view in the Harvard University Museum.   October's  Birthstone If you were born in October, you are one of those people who has a choice for your birthstone. Opal was originally the gem trade's recognized birthstone for October but in 1952 the Jewelry Industry Council suggested that pink tourmaline be an alternate stone to opal. These changes were accepted and approved by the American Gem Society and the National Retail Jewelers Council. Although the original designation for tourmaline was pink tourmaline, the practice has become that many people accept tourmaline of any color for October's birthstone. Tourmaline comes in nearly every shade one can find on a color chart or color wheel---therefore, tourmaline has become a popular stone in recent years. Tourmaline derives its name from the Singalese word tourmali, which means "mixed stones." Ruby, sapphire, peridot and spinel have all been found together in the gravel of localities such as Sri Lanka and Burma. The early gem traders who had no idea about the optical and physical properties of gems, other than color, probably called red tourmaline ruby; blue tourmaline sapphire; green tourmaline peridot, etc. Tourmaline's many color variations make it an example for another kind of mis-labeling. For example, one will sometimes see the usage of names such as Brazilian sapphire or Brazilian emerald for blue and green tourmaline respectively. Such names confuse the potential buyer into thinking the stone is something other than what it really is. Tourmaline is fairly easy to identify. Finished stones have a soft luster and the two refractive indexes, 1.620 and 1.640 allow for some doubling of back facets and inclusions in the stone. Tourmaline may also show some long tubes that are oriented parallel to the c-axis of the crystal. The typical tourmaline crystal is long and sub-triangular in cross section and the outer surface is usually deeply striated. The lapidary must orient the stone such table of the stone is parallel to the c-axis of the crystal. Tourmaline absorbs light along the c-axis of the crystal and if the table is perpendicular to that axis, the stone will develop a very dark body color. If you have a transparent tourmaline crystal available, look at it from directions that are perpendicular to the c-axis and parallel to the c-axis. The effect will be striking. Tourmaline may show a couple of different phenomena: watermelon tourmaline and particolor tourmaline. In the former, the outer layer of the crystal is green and the inner part of the crystal is red and there may be small black inclusions that resemble black seeds similar to a cross section of watermelon. The distinction is now used for any tourmaline that has an outer layer of the crystal with one color and an interior of another. These color variations may be brought about by varying concentrations of metallic cations that that were favored in crystallization of tourmaline from a solution or melt. Minerals and man - Hurlbut
UPDATES	Visit our updates page to see what we have been up to, we do a daily update when we are not out hunting down rocks. www.mineralgallery.co.za/updates.htm or write to me at gerdus@mineralgallery.co.za Gerdus Brönn