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I thought niobium was exotic, very expensive, and very hard to get. Ha! Turns out you can find some stuck on or into a good fraction of the teenagers you see on the streets. Niobium is used in "body jewelry", the stuff you see stuck into young people's lips, noses, tongues, ears, eyebrows, foreheads, and God only knows where else. This is sensible since it is completely non-reactive with human tissue, and it can be colored beautifully by oxidation.
I know for a fact that genuine solid niobium jewelry exists, because I have tested one by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. And it turns out the stuff really isn't very expensive, so there's no particular reason not to use it even for inexpensive ornaments. Maybe when the current fad for piercings passes there will be a huge market for surplus used niobium pins, and I can buy a bucket full to melt down into ingots.
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Powder, 99.98%.
Kindly donated by David Franco, who sent many elements after seeing the slashdot discussion, and this one after I sent him some Mathematica t-shirts.
Source: David Franco
Contributor: David Franco
Acquired: 11 June, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.005"
Purity: 99.98%
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 Barbell (Enslaved).
Niobium is used for jewelry because it's non-reactive and can be colored by oxidation (the color depending on how long you heat it for). This one is meant to be stuck in some part of your body, I'm not sure which. It came with a gold-colored coating, which I removed using a rotating brass wire brush. I was afraid that might have been all the niobium and that the core was some other metal, but analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439) indicates that the barbell is virtually pure niobium, within the detection limits of the machine. Score one for the accuracy of descriptions on eBay.
Source: eBay seller pinta-beads
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 10 July, 2002
Price: $10
Size: 1"
Purity: >80%
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Tiny cylinder.
Ed bought half a dozen different tiny metal cylinders from David Franco, intending to make some kind of puzzle out of them (Ed's a puzzle person). But they turned out to be too irregular, so he donated them to the table.
Source: David Franco
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 19 August, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: 99.98%
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Wah Chang commemorative coin.
This pure niobium coin was issued by the large specialty metals refiner Wah Chang, presumably to show off that they can do it. Click the Source link below for details about ordering one for yourself from Wah Chang.
The contrast in weight between this coin and my similarly-sized titanium coin is dramatic. This was the 200th sample added to the Periodic Table Table.
Source: Wah Chang
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 10 September, 2002
Price: $30
Size: 1"
Purity: 99.9%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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