What is the softest stone in the world?

What is talc? Talc is a silicate that has a layered structure, is greasy to the touch and has a pronounced pearlescent luster. It has a white color with various shades, which are determined by the impurities included in the composition (nickel, manganese, chromium, iron and aluminum). The intensity of the color is determined by the degree of purification. Depending on the structure and existing impurities, the following types of talc mineral are distinguished:

1. Agalite. It has a needle-like structure. The crystal fibers are located almost parallel, in the same direction.
2. Minnesotaite. The presence of iron (it replaces magnesium) gives it a brownish tint.
3. Steatite. Characterized by a dense structure. It is also called wen.
4. Willemseit. Due to the presence of nickel, it has a bluish or greenish tint.
5. Noble talc. A translucent stone with high density. Well processed.
6. Soapstone chlorite. Contains chloride.

According to the degree of grinding, talc powder, microtalc and coarse grinding are distinguished. It has a standard hardness of 1. That is, it is the softest mineral. It was first discovered and described by Michael Faraday while studying dielectrics. It is mined in America, Canada, China, France and other countries. In Russia, the largest deposits are located in the Urals and Krasnoyarsk Territory.

Properties of the mineral

Not everyone knows what talc is and what its physical and chemical characteristics are. It is a chemically complex composition of hydrogenated magnesium silicate. The approximate chemical formula of talc looks like this: Mg3Si4O10(OH)2. It may vary slightly due to the replacement of some impurities with others. We list the main properties of talc:

1. Odorless.
2. Does not dissolve in water.
3. It does not react chemically with acids and settles to the bottom of the container.
4. It is a good adsorbent. Perfectly absorbs moisture and odors.
5. Has poor thermal conductivity.
6. Characterized by low hardness equal to 1.
7. It has a low density (2,75 kg/m³). It has no jewelry value.
8. Fireproof. When heated strongly (800-900°C), it turns into a very solid substance.
9. Has good dispersibility. Finely ground powder forms a suspension with water.
10. Is a dielectric.

It is also credited with magical properties. The powder was used for all kinds of potions designed to restore youth and beauty. These were mainly creams and poultices made with talcum powder. The stone has positive energy. It is very useful to keep solid talc products in the house.

This mineral has been used by mankind since ancient times. Ancient craftsmen used it quite widely because of its softness and easy workability. Even in Ancient Egypt, amulets and necklaces were made from it. Russian stone cutters made icons. In China, colored talc was passed off as valuable jade. The Sumerians carved seals.

Areas of use

What is talc and what is it used for? Let’s look at the most famous areas:

1. In medicine. As a powder for the treatment of bedsores and skin diseases. It is also used as a binder in tablets.
2. In technology. Used as a solid lubricant and as an additive for motor oils.
3. In the food industry. It is used to sprinkle chocolate products, and it is used to make molds for the production of liqueur candy shells. Food grade talc has a code – E553b.
4. At home. Various rubber products (gloves, shoes, etc.) are sprinkled with it to prevent sticking.
5. In construction. They are used for cladding bathrooms and saunas, and also as stones for stoves.
6. In cosmetology. It is used to produce baby powder, liquid body talc and massage powder.

Let us analyze the use of talc in cosmetology and dermatology in more detail. It has been finding its consumers for more than 100 years and is still an indispensable component of many cosmetics. As the softest mineral, it is most often used in powder form. It is definitely included in powder and eye shadow. Scented talc is used as a deodorant and applied to areas of increased sweating. Using it during the depilation procedure prevents ingrown hairs. Liquid talc is very effective in caring for rough heels. It is added to shaving cream because it promotes easy glide. It is due to this quality that talc powder is used for massage.

What is talc? The first thing that comes to mind for many is baby powder. Good absorbency makes it suitable for children. It also has anti-inflammatory properties. Used to treat and prevent heat rash in infants. Talc is the main component of powder. In addition, the composition includes extracts of medicinal plants, zinc oxide and starch.

Pure ground talc is sold in pharmacies. Release form: powder for external use. Available in jars and small bags.

When working with talc, you need to be careful and try not to inhale it. There is even an occupational disease – talcosis, which is usually detected in mining workers and medical personnel. Without constant contact with the powder, it is impossible to acquire this disease.

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Soft stone

Friedrich Wilhelm and his wife

Swamp tuff. In Italy – travertine. In Russia – the Pudost stone. A natural oxymoron is a stone that, when mined, is cut with a knife or saw and then hardens. A stone that looks ancient, ancient, and if so, then. more monumental than others – both granite and marble. In Rome, the Colosseum and St. Peter’s Basilica were built from it. In St. Petersburg – Kazan Cathedral, statues at the Rostral columns. In general, a lot of things were built from this stone in the former capital of the Russian Empire and around it. An oxymoron (or paradox) lasts and smolders: what seems ancient and monumental (no demolition) deteriorates most quickly, especially in our non-Roman climate. And this stone also changes color.

A boiling title and a non-existent cenotaph

Driving along the highway along the Gulf of Finland towards Oranienbaum, I often glanced at the sign: Kipen, so many kilometers. I liked this name. In it, violent boiling, singing and a mossy, motionless stump collide gloriously. This is how it turns out. a pile of meanings in one sound: a boiling, singing stump. Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte would have done a good job depicting this stump.

Then I became completely interested in Kipenya, which is just a few kilometers away from Strelna (according to the sign). Reader helped. I wanted to find out what kind of Kippenhof it was, in which the husband of the future Russian Empress Anna Ioannovna, niece of Peter I, Duke of Courland Friedrich Wilhelm, died. A 17-year-old girl was forced into marriage. She tearfully asked the almighty king not to pass her off as a foreigner. This plea broke through into a folk song: “Don’t give me, uncle, Tsar-Sovereign Peter Alekseevich, to a foreign land, non-Christian, / marry me, Tsar-Sovereign, to your general, prince-boyar.” Don’t talk, don’t talk! Step down the aisle!

It is curious that in Russian historiography, Empress Anna Ioannovna is listed as an evil Russophobe and a representative of the German party, although she was no more Russophobic than her uncle, whose policy she continued faithfully and strictly. So, two months after the wedding, the young husband of the young wife died on the way from Russia to Courland. There was a ceremonial farewell, at which Peter played one of his favorite games with Friedrich Wilhelm: “Do you respect me?”

Yes, yes, this is a drunken saying from there, from Peter’s assemblies. Soldiers with a huge vat of vodka and a very large glass are wandering around the assembly, looking out from the crowd of guests for those whom the emperor points out: “Do you respect the king?” – “I respect you. ” – “Drink. ” Do this several times. If the guest feels that everything. can’t and honestly says: “I respect you, but I won’t drink – I can’t. ”, the owner of the ball and the organizer of performances himself emerges from the crowd with a menacing question: “Do you respect me?” Out. Such an offer cannot be refused.

In a word, at the farewell to his new young relative, Peter intoxicated the poor fellow to the gravest state. So the Duke died before reaching Courland. The place where he ended the short days of his life is called Kippenhof. You guessed it right: the German colony of Kipen, which the colonists Germanized: Kippenhof. This local (endemic) toponym was not established anywhere in official papers and reference books. Only once did it surface in the name of the place of death of the Duke of Courland.

When I found out about this, I suggested (I don’t remember, out loud or to myself) that it would be nice to decorate the now abandoned village of the Leningrad region, Gatchina district, with a luxurious cenotaph. You can contact Latvian specialists (Courland – Kurzeme – now a region of Latvia), you can also attract German professionals, and jointly put a tombstone over a non-existent grave, that is, a cenotaph. Let’s say a sculptural group: the Russian Emperor Peter the Great is drinking twenty-less years (for history – three minutes) of the Russian Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm (how would his two names be Russified? – Fyodor Vasilyevich?) to death. The sculptural group could be carved from local stone: swamp tuff, also known as travertine, also known as Pudost stone.

Explanation of the toponym and quarry

The toponym is explained simply and without any fuss. He means what his singing is about – boiling. The Strelka River, which flows near Kipen, the lakes and swamps are full of boiling springs gushing out of the ground, which is why this village is nicknamed Kipen. Here is a geological transition to a natural oxymoron, soft stone, swamp tuff. It is beyond my strength to make this transition, not according to my geological knowledge. Take my word for it, thanks to these very keys, this stone is formed by some trick.

Its deposits are very large in the area between Kipenya and Pudost. Most of it was near Pudost. Hence the name: Pudost stone. Today the Pudost quarries are abandoned. Firstly, almost everything has been worked out. Secondly, we repeat: the stone is beautiful, but, alas, perishable. Especially in our cold, damp climate. Thirdly, its heyday occurred in the last years of the reign of Catherine II, Paul and the first years of the reign of Alexander. The first wave of Empire (classicism), imperial, Roman art.

The antiquity of Rome, the empire, and therefore the stone used was the same as in imperial Rome, so that it would be unshakable, archaic, Roman. Then it turned out that the material quickly loses its appearance and requires renovation. And they switched to Rossievsky (yellow-white) plaster decor. And then they became completely interested in new building materials. So the quarries of soft stone were abandoned. Not really though. In 2008, there was an incomprehensible scandal with the restoration of the Kazan Cathedral, when it turned out that the restorers used Pudost stone from an abandoned quarry, just near Kipeni, broken without a license. The scandal died down – go prove that the Pudost stone came from there.

And it is quite possible to obtain a license for a cenotaph made from local travertine. It will be an international affair! With foreign partners. By the way, another cenotaph can be erected at the other end of the village. A simple tombstone with the first name, patronymic, last name: Vladimir Osipovich Lichtenstadt, and dates of life: 1887–1919; the same as on his grave on the Champ de Mars.

City of Light

He was lucky with his surname: Lichtenstadt is the city of light, the city of the sun. A frantic utopian who fought all his life for a world without oppression, without rich and poor, this is how he was marked by fate. He was generally lucky. In 1906, he, a Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalist, participated in the assassination attempt on Stolypin and in a rather large “ex” (in other words, a robbery). Could have been sentenced to death. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Shlisselburg fortress. From 1906 to 1917, 11 years, he was there.

He is one of the main characters in the book “Flowers of Shlisselburg” by the wonderful writer Alexandra Brushtein. The book is dedicated to his mother, Marina Lvovna Lichtenstadt, Russian and Soviet translator of Dode, Maupassant, Zola, Spielhagen, who died in 1937. Vladimir Lichtenstadt was a translator himself. He translated into Russian “Sex and Character” by Otto Weininger, “Artificial Paradise” by Charles Baudelaire (the poet’s prose about his psychedelic experiences), large fragments from Goethe’s natural philosophical works, included in the book of Lichtenstadt himself: “Goethe. The struggle for a realistic worldview.” The book was published a year after the author’s death, in 1920.

And even in his death he was lucky. I understand: lucky, lucky, but not very lucky. But what to do: the path he chose could not but end in death. As Gorky’s cynic Klim Samgin quipped: “Revolutions are needed to kill revolutionaries.” There are people whose path, which was cut short early, can be mentally continued with almost one hundred percent accuracy. Not because they are so simple, but because they are integral, integral, if you like – total. If the commissar of the Red Division, crushed to smithereens, Comrade Lichtenstadt had not died on August 7, 1919 near Kipenya, then after the civil war he, like his friend Victor Serge (Viktor Sergeevich Kibalchich, nephew of the Narodnaya Volya member Kibalchich), would have joined all party oppositions. This means that from 1927 he would not have left exile and concentration camps and would have ended his days in the Kolyma camp as a participant in the Trotskyist camp resistance. About which Solzhenitsyn (whom you would not suspect of sympathizing with the Trotskyists) writes in “The Gulag Archipelago” with undisguised, mournful respect.

In Shlisselburg, Lichtenstadt enjoyed unquestioned respect from both the prisoners and the authorities. Therefore, during the days of the February Revolution, the head of the prison summoned him and asked him to compile a list of all political prisoners. (Rumming through personal affairs is a chore, but Vladimir Osipovich remembers everyone, not the head – the House of Soviets, however, such a phrase did not exist then. ) Vladimir Osipovich compiled a list. The political prisoners were released. Then, at the head of the demonstration, Lichtenstadt returned (across the March ice separating the prison from the town of Shlisselburg) and demanded that the head of the institution release ALL prisoners. The commandant sighed heavily and. released him. Before the liberated people, Vladimir Lichtenstadt made a passionate speech about the fact that now you are not bandits, thieves, murderers, but citizens of a free Russia. Will you be worthy of this high title? – “We will, we will!” – the citizens of the now free Russia shouted joyfully.

Until the beginning of 19, Lichtenstadt worked in the children’s commune he created in Ulyanka. When Yudenich launched an attack on Petrograd, Vladimir began to rush to the front. He left the commune to his deputy – and to Zinoviev. Zinoviev first appointed Lichtenstadt as editor of the still defunct journal Communist International. Lichtenstadt published five issues – and all one. to the front, to save Red Peter, the cradle of the world revolution. Appointed division commissar. The division was (I repeat) defeated. The commissar fired back to the last bullet. He was captured and shot immediately. Thrown into an unnamed, quickly filled hole. After the failure of Yudenich’s offensive, Lichtenstadt’s body was exhumed and reburied on the Champ de Mars.

Agree, the location of two cenotaphs made of soft stone that changes color depending on the lighting at different ends of the Kipen village would have some difficult to formulate (or, on the contrary, too easily formulated) symbolic meaning. The entire not very happy history of the Russian Empire would be located between these two cenotaphs. Here is a failed emperor, and here is a failed builder of the city of light, the city of the Sun. The kingdom of heaven to them. AND HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU!

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