“That was not the right place for any collection,” he says, gesturing to what is the right place – a wall-sized periodic table in the second-floor atrium of the Chemistry Building, lit from inside with strings of LED lights that can be manipulated to highlight groups of elements like the noble gases or to talk specifically about a single element and the things contained in its cubby. Some boxes hadn’t been opened for several decades. The collection amassed to more than a thousand pieces, some valued at only pennies and others much more, all taking up space in his office, laboratory, and home. Later on in academia, a retiring colleague gave him an antistatic brush once charged with polonium. He came upon a tungsten carbide tool used to draw heavy wires from a thick diameter to a thinner one during a summer job as a student. Christian Brückner started collecting more than 45 years ago when he was a young teenager in Germany and his father a metallurgist who’d bring home laboratory leftovers to feed his son’s growing interest in crystals and science.įrom an early 19th century bottle of a mercury salt to manganese nodules scooped from the bottom of the Pacific, Brückner’s childhood collection grew piece by piece through the decades.
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