Green and Blue Mica Marbles?

[Plutonianfire]

Please see attached photos maybe showing mica marbles.

[Carowill]

Definitely “loved” by someone or as they say in Texas, “They were rode hard and put up wet!”  
I don’t see any mica, but with that surface wear, hard to be absolute about that.

[Plutonianfire]

16 minutes ago, Carowill said:

Definitely “loved” by someone or as they say in Texas, “They were rode hard and put up wet!”  
I don’t see any mica, but with that surface wear, hard to be absolute about that.

I’m guessing that the mica would be all mixed in

 

This is fuchsite (chrome mica) from my mineral collection

 

 

Also: https://www.marblecollecting.com/marble-reference/online-marble-id-guide/all-other-handmades/

 

[Steph]

I don't see signs of mica in the marbles.  As Bill said though, that damage is quite effectively obscuring the interior.  Hard to be definitive.

[cheese]

Right, that's loads of damage, not mica. Probably old slags beat to heck. They have been to battle a lot!

[Plutonianfire]

51 minutes ago, Steph said:

I don't see signs of mica in the marbles.  As Bill said though, that damage is quite effectively obscuring the interior.  Hard to be definitive.

It’s very hard to get photos of the mica layering pattern without interference from the superficial damage. However, a large chip broke off the green marble and I was able to get some photos showing the open undersurface of the green marble sitting on my green mica mineral specimen for comparison.  Photos aren’t great. FWIW.

 

 

[Steph]

10 minutes ago, Plutonianfire said:

It’s very hard to get photos of the mica layering pattern without interference from the superficial damage. However, a large chip broke off the green marble and I was able to get some photos showing the open undersurface of the green marble sitting on my green mica mineral specimen for comparison.  Photos aren’t great. FWIW.

 

 

I clicked through on one of your earlier photos to get the most enlarged version and my current best guess is that the green is a cat's eye. 






Do you see it there in the middle?  Looks like a cat eye with narrow vanes or a banana with ridges.  So now I'm wondering if the surface contains green as it appears to do, or if that's all very complicated reflections from the green shape inside.  





 

[Fire1981]

Here’s the best I can do with some old handmades. Mica looks like glitter just like it does in nature when it’s pulverized and is mixed in the sand on the river banks out here. Pics are hard to take. You’re not seeing kiln brick or bubbles here. Just flakes of Mica. Hope this helps🔥

RAR

[Chad G.]

Mica in marbles should look like this. The mica is added onto the cane, not mixed w/ the base glass, this being the reason it usually only appears near the surface. There are some rare examples of floating mica throughout such as in a "Blizzard" but a true blizzard is rare. All these are over one inch, so the chunks of mica are, or can be larger. The smaller handmades tend to have smaller chunks but can have larger ones. There is usually an exception to every rule. Seeing no mica in the OP pix, multiple fractures impacts, maybe a hammer or something, doesn't look like marble hits, both in the OP look machine made IMO.

                        

                                             

[Fire1981]

Sometimes busting up marbles like this can still have a little something left in the Matrix  I call them crumbs🔥

RAR

[Tommy]

If you break it with a hammer you will know for sure.😄

[Plutonianfire]

11 hours ago, Chad G. said:

The mica is added onto the cane, not mixed w/ the base glass, this being the reason it usually only appears near the surface.

 

10 hours ago, Fire1981 said:

Sometimes busting up marbles like this can still have a little something left in the Matrix  I call them crumbs🔥

RAR

 

Excellent points. 

Now that Chad told me where to look, and Fire1981 suggested looking for remnants, I can see what look like pieces of mica on the periphery of both marbles. They are light off-white tannish in color. Please see photos. 

As Chad pointed out, the damage doesn’t appear to be marble hits. Damage looks too uniform across the entire surface of both marbles to have been a hammer. This suggests a natural process. I found both marbles while metal detecting the site of a circa 1900’s - 1910’s house that had been demolished.  Probably some sort of erosion occurred while the marbles were buried underground for over a century.  Not inconsistent with the possibility of mica marbles.

[Steph]

Being buried can do odd things to the surface of glass.  Give it a matte finish sometimes. Give it an abalone sheen other times.  For example.  

 

[Jeff54]

1 hour ago, Plutonianfire said:

 

 

Excellent points. 

Now that Chad told me where to look, and Fire1981 suggested looking for remnants, I can see what look like pieces of mica on the periphery of both marbles. They are light off-white tannish in color. Please see photos. 

As Chad pointed out, the damage doesn’t appear to be marble hits. Damage looks too uniform across the entire surface of both marbles to have been a hammer. This suggests a natural process. I found both marbles while metal detecting the site of a circa 1900’s - 1910’s house that had been demolished.  Probably some sort of erosion occurred while the marbles were buried underground for over a century.  Not inconsistent with the possibility of mica marbles.

Glass doesn't get beat up like that even if 100's of years buried.

It can grow an iridescence which if you have not seen that in your digging it's of Tiffiney's early claim to fame by imitating ancient glass iridescence.

However, I have seen many pieces and bottles begin to grow it in as little as 50 years. In fact I have several German Handmade Cane pieces, dug-up at old factory sites that grew it just like old bottles I've dug up in the past. Yet buried, some being well over 100 years, are just as they were before trashed.

I have 100's of dug-up marbles and surprising enough, they don't get beat as one might think. Not by dirt and miscellaneous rocks, nor winter's underground frost, frozen. 

Marbles, for the most part, get scratched when falling and swept on the floors at factory and scrapped while being trashed at dumps or rolling around at waste sites, otherwise, if mint when buried, it will usually be dug-up that way or very, very minimal damage.

I don't see that or mica rather, simply a couple of beat marbles. Try putting them in water to see if anything is visible.

[Steph]

28 minutes ago, Jeff54 said:

Glass doesn't get beat up like that even if 100's of years buried.

It can grow an iridescence which if you have not seen that in your digging it's of Tiffiney's early claim to fame by imitating ancient glass iridescence.

However, I have seen many pieces and bottles begin to grow it in as little as 50 years. In fact I have several German Handmade Cane pieces, dug-up at old factory sites that grew it just like old bottles I've dug up in the past.

I have 100's of dug-up marbles and surprising enough, they don't get beat as one might think.

I don't see that or mica rather, simply a couple of beat marbles. Try putting them in water to see if anything is visible.

Thanks for this.  I didn't want to discount the possibility that being buried could somehow have resulted in this epic damage but I was surprised by it.

Summary so far of what I'm seeing:

The marbles are clearly glass.  They appear machine-made.  No signs of mica flakes in the parts of the interior that we can see.  There's a mineral-looking effect on the remaining surface, which may be a combination of the strange pulverization of the outer layer plus some iridizing effect from being buried plus complicated reflections coming from glass which has been so thoroughly fractured.  

[Jeff54]

53 minutes ago, Steph said:

Thanks for this.  I didn't want to discount the possibility that being buried could somehow have resulted in this epic damage but I was surprised by it.

Summary so far of what I'm seeing:

The marbles are clearly glass.  They appear machine-made.  No signs of mica flakes in the parts of the interior that we can see.  There's a mineral-looking effect on the remaining surface, which may be a combination of the strange pulverization of the outer layer plus some iridizing effect from being buried plus complicated reflections coming from glass which has been so thoroughly fractured.  

I should clarify iridescence growth. You're not going to find it like ancient iridescence after about 50 or 100 years rather under the right conditions it will produce an oily looking surface. Otherwise, it takes a thousand years or more and certain chemicals native to the areas to etch glass and grow. Whenever Tiffany imitated it, in the late 1880s or so, ancient glass, King Tut, Greek and Roman times and all that was super popular. The ancient glass that wasn't broke remained stable with and without irradiance. That's why test tubes and many medical types of glass is used, unless there's a unique compound in it, Acid can't penetrate it. {Correction, I knew better than that, Acid can etch Glass. IDK, just the other day something on U-dope-Tube, said it could not and was why used for medical glass and test tube in science.}