Busacca Gallery

Magnificent antique crystal quartz, eight inch flat finished ruler was originally meant for the engineer's desk. This beautiful hand-crafted drafting tool is a superior aid in measuring, drawing straight lines, and cutting and scoring with a blade; but maybe as important, the quartz is said to bring good fortune. Regarded as a lucky amulet, clear quartz exudes mystic beauty. The eight-inch ruler has a variety of sided scales. Crystal quartz rulers are rare and much preferred over the wooden ones -- for accuracy as well as for luck.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz

Encyclopedia Article The ideal crystal shape is a six-sided prism terminating with six-sided pyramids at each end. Pure quartz is colorless or white, colored varieties include rose quartz, amethyst, smoky quartz, milky quartz, and others. Quartz goes by an array of different names. Quartz is the most common material identified as the mystical substance maban in Australian Aboriginal mythology. It is found regularly in passage tomb cemeteries in Europe in a burial context, eg. Newgrange or Carrowmore in the Republic of Ireland. The Irish word for quartz is grian cloch, which means 'stone of the sun'. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder believed quartz to be water ice, permanently frozen after great lengths of time. (The word "crystal" comes from the Greek word for ice.) He supported this idea by saying that quartz is found near glaciers in the Alps, but not on volcanic mountains, and that large quartz crystals were fashioned into spheres to cool the hands. He also knew of the ability of quartz to split light into a spectrum. This idea persisted until at least the 1600s.