CORRESPONDENCE.

Bush Advocate, Volume XXI, Issue 300, 23 June 1909, Page 7

CORRESPONDENCE.

RADIUM No. 4. (To the Editor.) Sir, — It will be .seen radium is creator, for I cannot say a man.il'at tu rev, of three kinds of ray--'.. >'iz. alpfia, beta, gamma rays, call, i Iron the first three letters of the (.'reel alphabet. Our word alphabet : .me from alphabet (a). Tlie alph rays do not penetrate much — a sbee of notepaper stops them. They carv. positive electricity. Experi men note : A magnet held against a shee of glass will hold up a nail on th opposite side, thus showing magnet ism passes through glass. This i important, for Rontgen showed how ; • bullet could be photographed i inches of flesh lay between. Th beta rays penetrate much deep© than alpha rays. They are chargei with negative electricity. Tbe gam ma rays penetrate deeply. Tliey ar thought to bo identical with th Rontgen rays or X rays. They seer to have no electricity. Besides, radium gives off an emana tion (always). Fancy a bottle of sod water opened. The atmosphere o carbonic acid gas it will be sur rounded by. This -emanation is sup posed to be the vapor of a new met a called helium, in honor of the sun Goodness alone knows if radium is i be the creator of a new metal, whicj we will never see, unless wo can pre duce a cold - pressure, perhap 1,000,000 time* greater than a present. The gas hydrogen is th vapor of a metal we will never se either. ~~ So vadium is a. reformer, a pei vertor of all that we gave ourselve credit for knowing, and we only knoi it as a compound of bromine an< radium. According to the 'atomic theory o Dalton! (1801), Curie gives radium combining quality of 225. Rung makes it 257; 240 is the mean; brom me is 79.35* in bromine of radium (al we have got).; there would be 75 pc cent of radium and it even combined Now, in table salt we have sodiur 22.83 combined with chlorine 35.19 and both constituents entirely chang cd. We have water made of oxygen an< hydrogen and so on. . There is a suspicion three new ele ments radium, polonium and actin . ium are all mixed vp — radium is sup . posed to be the. largest. Fifteei - grains of this or these have been go from eight tons of pitch blende, and i - is calculated only 37_- grains are in al Europe. Thirty-seven and a-hal grains are tho weight of 6d in silver The compound of pitch blende h uranium 81.5, lead 4, iron .5. Barinn calcium traces and other element make up 100. The price of radiun chloride is £25 os per grain, 300( times dearer than gold. — I am, etc. H. M. LEVINGE.