TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”
more quiz questions >>
Title - Radium - Phosphorescent green glow - Original art by todayinsci

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.

In 'Radium', New York Times (22 Feb 1903), 6.


Nature bears long with those who wrong her. She is patient under abuse. But when abuse has gone too far, when the time of reckoning finally comes, she is equally slow to be appeased and to turn away her wrath. (1882) -- Nathaniel Egleston, who was writing then about deforestation, but speaks equally well about the danger of climate change today.
Carl Sagan Thumbnail Carl Sagan: In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) ...(more by Sagan)

Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” ...(more by Einstein)

Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. ...(more by Feynman)
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)

Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.