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Updated: June 17, 2025
There are stories of puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they overtook. And the first conflagrations from the Paris centre spread westward half-way to the sea.
But, as I have said, one of the committee was in the room during the whole experiment. The sole possibility of fraud was for the subject to have come prepared with a cross painted with radio-active paint, and to have held this against the envelopes whilst the Committee was off its guard. But the character of the subject is sufficient guarantee to all of us that such was not the case.
It is remarkable that we owe the discovery of this wonderful element to a woman, Mme. Sklodowska Curie, the wife of a French professor and physicist. Mme. Curie began her work in 1897 with a systematic study of several minerals containing uranium and thorium and soon discovered the remarkable fact that there was some agent present more strongly radio-active than the metal uranium itself.
The electrons become subject to accelerations which produce a radiation towards the exterior of the atom; and certain of them may leave the body, while the primitive stability is, in the end, no longer assured, and a new arrangement tends to be formed. Matter thus seems to us to undergo those transformations of which the radio-active bodies have given us such remarkable examples.
If our spectator could have got permission to enter it, he would have entered also a zone of uproar, a zone of perpetual thunderings, lit by a strange purplish-red light, and quivering and swaying with the incessant explosion of the radio-active substance.
The radiations, or emanations, of the radio-active substances, on the other hand, are given out spontaneously, pass through substances opaque to ordinary light, such as metal plates, act upon photographic plates, and discharge electrified bodies. The substances uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, and their compounds are radioactive, radium being by far the most active.
He used to tell me that he often wondered why he hadn't taken up this line before the world of energy he now set out to explore, waves in that tremendous range between those we hear and those we see. It was natural that he should then come to the most prominent radio-active elements, uranium, thorium, and radium.
But when he broke the seal and unscrewed the little glass tube in the butt, he discovered that it was empty. The gray, synthetic radio-active material from which it drew its power had been removed. Murray grinned at this discovery, without mirth. It was conclusive. At the first opportunity he jostled one of the soldiers, knocking his neuro-pistol to the floor his own, too.
On the very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active substances than all the rest of the world.
At the time of the discovery of radio-activity, about seventy-five substances were called elements; in other words, about seventy-five different substances were known to chemists, none of which had been separated into unlike parts, none of which had been made by the coalescence of unlike substances. Compounds of only two of these substances, uranium and thorium, are radio-active.
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