Pb in my tea?

So, today was a field trip day. We went to Geller MicroÅnalytical Laboratory, Inc.  to get my mom's teacup analyzed for lead. The founder of the company, Mr Geller, is one of my mom's friends and offered to analyze the cup when he heard that she thought it had lead in it. At about 9:15 am we entered into the Laboratory, teacup in hand, and met with Mr Geller. First off we had to chip off a piece of the teacup  in order to analyze it.

 When the Titanium-Carbide pliers failed, it was my turn...

 To smash it with a hammer!

After we got a small chip off from the cup, we brought it over to the optical microscope. It looked like this. The darker patch is the glaze, the lighter the ceramic.

In order to capture different angles, we put it on a ball bearing that was cut in half.

Once we were finished with the optical microscope, off to the  scanning electron microscope (SEM) for a preliminary scan. The scan turned up distorted: the electrons sent by the microscope bunched up because the negatively charged couldn't go anywhere on the non-conductive surface, therefore creating lots of noise. In order to fix this problem, we had to coat  the piece of ceramic in a very thin coating of carbon.

 This is the machine to do it.

The way it works is that two touching carbon rods in a vacuum above the sample are charged with electricity. The electricity makes the carbon rods spark and they release tiny particles of carbon which then coat the sample. The vacuum was powered by a 56... Thousand! RPM Jet engine motor.

This is what a sheet of paper looks like coated in particles of carbon.

After we coated the ceramic with Carbon, we brought it back to the SEM for a second scan. The electrons bombarded the piece of ceramic which released x-rays. these were picked up and put into a graph   This one showed, with much relief, that it had no traces of lead in it.

 These are what it looked like under the SEM.