What is the Mohs Scale?
The Mohs scale is a system of testing the hardness of a mineral, designed by Friedrich Mohs in 1812. Mohs was a mineralogist from Germany who wanted a simple way of testing the “scratching” ability of each mineral. What the mineral could scratch, or what could scratch the mineral determines its position on the Mohs scale. Mohs designed the Mohs scale to work with relatively ordinary devices. For example, one tested the hardness of a mineral with things like a fingernail, a penny, glass, or a knife. Even having access to only a few of these things in the field could help determine a mineral’s placement on the Mohs scale. On the traditional Mohs scale, the hardest mineral is the diamond. It cannot be scratched by another mineral and can scratch every other mineral. Its hardness is measured as the number 10. However, some minerals fell in between the numbers of 1-10, and scientists proposed a revised Mohs scale, which rates hardness up to 15. This allows some minerals that fell into grey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Mohs scale of mineral hardness characterizes the scratch resistance of various minerals through the ability of a harder material to scratch a softer material. It was created in 1812 by the German mineralogist Friedrich Mohs and is one of several definitions of hardness in materials science. Mohs based the scale on ten minerals that are all readily available. As the hardest known naturally occurring substance, diamond is at the top of the scale. The hardness of a material is measured against the scale by finding the hardest material that the given material can scratch, and/or the softest material that can scratch the given material. For example, if some material is scratched by apatite but not by fluorite, its hardness on the Mohs scale is 4.5. The Mohs scale is a purely ordinal scale. For example, corundum (9) is twice as hard as topaz (8), but diamond (10) almost four times as hard as corundum. The table below shows comparison with absolute ha
