RADIUM.
New York Times (Feb 1903)
Much popular interest has of late been excited by the mention in cable dispatches and mail advices from England of experiments with the newly discovered metal radium, which has such surprising properties that Lord Kelvin was moved to say of it that it threatened to overthrow the law of the correlation of forces. It seems already to have overturned, or at least unsettled, the accepted theory of light, and when the experiments of Profs. Mendeleiff, Yegoroff, and Borgman of the Electro Technical Institute at St. Petersburg are completed, the results may be to give us a new science and a new nomenclature.
Radium is a rare metal, and extremely difficult to procure. It is a constituent of pitchblende, which is found in many places, but only in a very small way. All that has so far been segregated has come from a mine in Cornwall. A ton of pitchblende carries about 15½ grains of radium, and it is difficult to extract. This quantity, a gram by the metric scale, is at present estimated to be worth about $2,000, and a kilogram (2.2046 pounds) is theoretically worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000,000. It has many curious and' as yet inexplicable properties, and also entails many dangers to those who handle it carelessly. Prof. William Crookes, in describing it recently, said; “Probably if half a kilogram were in a bottle on that table it would kill us all. It would almost certainly destroy our sight and burn our' skins to such, an extent that we could not survive. The smallest bit placed on ones arm would produce a blister which it would need months to heal.” This would seem to indicate that it emits something more than light. Heat and actinic energy must make up a large part of its radiation. It also emits electrons with a velocity so great that, according to Prof. Crookes, “one gram is enough to lift the whole of the British fleet to the top of Ben Nevis; and I am not quite certain that we could not throw in the French fleet; as well.” This is popular rather than scientific, but it warrants the conclusion that radium will always be a laboratory metal, and that efforts to recover it in large quantities will not meet with much commercial encouragement, perhaps the universal solvent might have been found long ago if there had been anything to keep it in.
Radium was discovered by M. and Marie Curie in France, after they had familiarized the remarkable properties of uranium and polonium. Its influence upon the development of electrical science promises to be very important. A quarter of a century ago it might have been said that electricity had a property somewhat resembling inertia. Now it looks as if Sir Oliver Lodge had a substantial basis for the assertion that the inertia of matter will have to be explained electrically, since there is no inertia but electricity. This concept of electric inertia was first expressed in a magnificent mathematical paper by J. Thompson of Cambridge in 1881, when it was regarded as a mathematical curiosity. Radium promises to establish the Thompson hypothesis, and in so doing will possibly open the way to new and yet more important discoveries in a field in which the future doubtless has many surprises in store for even the present generation.
