Great Grandads hafnium bar.
I found this in my grandfatjers drawer over the weekend with a note saying " Dads, Hafnium bar, wah chang." After a quick bit of research I realized this was something special. When I asked my grandfather about it he said, "That's Dads hafnium bar". I asked how his dad got it and he said, "Well, Dad had a lot of clients and sometimes they gave him stuff". He's 90 years old so I didn't press him further.
After associated searches of 'hafnium' and 'wah chang', I quickly found out that Wah Chang was the original name of the first labratory in the United States to seperate hafnium from zirconium with high tempature fractional crystallization for the purpose of producing controll rods for nuclear reactors.
After doing even more research but only finding few photo examples, mostly silver/grey, I found 1 video of a larger bar that was mostly purple. I have since found 1 more photo of a crystal which is also mostly purple. A bit more research led me to find that the metal bars could be anodized or heat treated to make a silver bar colorful. This bar is every color which indicates that it has not been heat treated or anodized. The tag Wah Chang and the fact that it belonged to my great grandfather, (my grandfather was born in 1937 so his father's age and the timeline of the Wah Chang lab matches up), it seems that this has been has been naturally oxidized over the course of 60-80 years in ambient tempatures and atmospheres.
I would love to hear from anybody with some historical knowledge on this material, or be able to match this specimen to another with similar coloration.