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The minute particles of two of the substances for many years classed as elements give off electrons; uranium and thorium are radio-active. Electrons are produced by sending an electric discharge through very small traces of different gases, using electrodes of different metals.
More and more general becomes the belief that the Daltonian atom is really a compound radical, and that back of the seeming diversity of the alleged elements is a single form of primordial matter. Indeed, in very recent months, direct experimental evidence for this view has at last come to hand, through the study of radio-active substances.
The continued study of the properties of the minute particles of radio-active substances a new name is needed for those most mutable of material grains must lead to discoveries of great moment for chemistry and physics.
It is described by her as a white, hard, metal-like solid, which reacts with water at the ordinary temperature, as barium does. Since the discovery of radium compounds, many radio-active substances have been isolated. Only exceedingly minute quantities of any of them have been obtained.
Radio-active substances are stores of energy, some of which is constantly escaping from them; they are constantly changing without external compulsion, and are constantly radiating energy: all explosives are storehouses of energy which, or part of which, can be obtained from them; but the liberation of their energy must be started by some kind of external shock.
If Professor Thompson's view be correct, the amount of potential energy inherent in the atom must be enormous. But whatever the source of the energy displayed by the radio-active substances, it is pretty generally agreed that the radio-activity of the radio-elements results in the disruption of their atoms.
Radium gives off three distinct types of rays named after the first three letters of the Greek alphabet Alpha, Beta, Gamma besides a gas emanation as does thorium which is a powerfully radio-active substance. The Alpha rays constitute ninety-nine per cent, of all the rays and consist of positively electrified particles. Under the influence of magnetism they can be deflected.
Conditions may be arranged so that an explosive remains unchanged wet gun-cotton is not exploded by a shock which would start the explosion of dry gun-cotton in other words, the explosion of an explosive can be regulated: the explosive changes of a radio-active substance, which are accompanied by the radiation of energy, cannot be regulated; they proceed spontaneously in a regular and definable manner which is not influenced by any external conditions such as great change of temperature, presence or absence of other substances so far as these conditions have been made the subject of experiment: the amount of activity of a radio-active substance has not been increased or diminished by any process to which the substance has been subjected.
Investigations proved radio-activity to be a property of the very minute particles of certain substances, and each radio-active substance to have characteristic properties, among which were certain of those that belong to elements, and to some extent are characteristic of elements.
In this form it costs $5,000 a grain and could a pound be obtained its value would be three-and-a-half million dollars. Radium, as we understand it in any of its compounds, can communicate its property of radio-activity to other bodies. Any material when placed near radium becomes radio-active and retains such activity for a considerable time after being removed.
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