Friedrich Mohs introduced a popular hardness scale to quantify hardness, mainly to help in identification of minerals and gems.
| Mohs’ Scale | Rosiwal-grinding-hardness | Material for comparison |
| Graphite | ||
| 1 Talcium | 0.03 | |
| Lead, tin | ||
| 2 Gypsium, rock salt | 1.25 | |
| Aluminium, zinc, magnesium, copper, silver, gold | ||
| 3 Calcite | 4.5 | Marble, brass, iron, nickel |
| 4 Fluorspar | 5 | |
| Steels unhardened | ||
| 5 Apatite | 6.5 | |
| Window glass | ||
| 6 Feldspar | 37 | |
| Low-carbon steels, hardened | ||
| 7 Quartz | 120 | |
| 0.9% C steel, hardened; tungsten | ||
| 8 Topaz | 175 | |
| Special Steels | ||
| 9 Corundum | 1000 | |
| 10 Diamond | 14000 |
There are pictures of Moh’s scientific instruments on the phase transformations group web page. Prof. Harry Bhadeshia photographed the equipment which is on display in Graz.
Filed under: Hardness, Material, materials science, metallurgy, Rocks |
Its hard to make a comment on this.
Heh, I wanted to compare other hardness scales but the table would become too complicated for this format.
I learnt that Mohs’ name has an ‘S’ so it’s Mohs’ hardness rather than Mohs.
A different hardness scale was used in a question on University Challenge last night. Diamond was 1.
Sounds like it was a hard question.
All the people that left comments below me are retarted,why would you leave a comment about a scale!
I saw a paper about the meaning of hardness measurements by Tabor. (He also had a book). Reference is: D. Tabor, A physical meaning of indentation and scratch hardness, British Journal of Physics, Vol 7, p159, May 1956.
Still no idea about hardness scale with diamond as “1”.
i need to know where zinc is on this scale. can anyone help me?