American kerosene oil is exported to all parts of the globe. Crude oil is also exported as well as other petroleum products.
=Platinum= is a rare metal found with gold, iridium and other rare metals in placer mines. It comes chiefly from Russia. Smaller amounts from Colombia, California, Canada and Australia.
It is used in the terminals of incandescent electric lamps, and also employed by chemists, jewelers and dentists.
=Potash= (or potassium) is an alkaline metal. Chlorides, sulphates, etc., are found in Germany. Wood ashes and sugar beet refuse furnish much of the world’s potash. Stassfurt, Germany, possesses the only known large deposit of natural potash salts. These salts are the source of potash in many chemical industries and in fertilizers. It is exported in large amount from Germany to England, France and America.
=Quartz= (silica) is of many varieties, crystalline to amorphous.
_Rock flint_ is mined in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and also comes from the chalk cliffs of England and France.
_Sandstones_ are quarried and used for building in almost all parts of the world. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York supply the greatest quantities in the United States. _Honestones_ and _whetstones_ are mostly sandstone, and in this country are largely quarried in Arkansas, Michigan and New Hampshire.
_Rock crystal_ is employed for lenses. Many semiprecious stones are varieties of quartz, as _agate_, _moss agate_, _onyx_, _sard_, _chalcedony_, _chrysoprase_, _jasper_, etc.
_Rock flint_ and _quartz sand_ are used in making glass and pottery.
Outside of building stones, quartz is used in greatest amount in making glass and pottery. For glass it is melted with alkali (soda ash) and either lime or lead oxide. Glass is either blown or molded. Belgium, Austria, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States manufacture glassware. Pennsylvania, Indiana and New Jersey are the leading states.
=Radium= is the most characteristic of those substances which possess the property of radio-activity--i.e. have the power of producing photographic or electric effects by a process identical with or analogous to radiation. The property was first observed in _uranium_ by Becquerel in 1896--hence the name “Becquerel rays.” In 1898 Schmidt and Madame Curie discovered almost simultaneously that the compounds of _thorium_ had the same radio-active property; and further elaborate investigations led to the discovery of _polonium_, _radium_, and _actinium_, as new substances with radio-active properties. Polonium was the name given by M. and Mme. Curie to the radio-active component of bismuth separated from pitchblende. Its activity is transient. In the new field of research thus opened up important work has been done by Rutherford, Crooks, Ramsay, Soddy, Huggins, and others.