Mohs was a German chemist and mineralogist born in the late 1700s. He developed the Mohs scale to rank materials based on scratch resistance, specifically whether one material can scratch another. The scale runs from 1 to 10 and is ordinal, meaning the numbers show order, not proportional strength. A material rated 8 is not twice as hard as a material rated 4, and two materials with similar Mohs ratings can behave very differently in real world use.
Because of this, the MOHs scale should be viewed as a surface level comparison rather than a complete measure of performance. It does not account for tensile strength, toughness or durability, or electrical conductivity.
