WORLD ACHIEVEMENTS

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXVII, Issue 12729, 29 April 1939, Page 2

WORLD ACHIEVEMENTS

A MIRACLE AT NEWCASTLE How often do we think that achievements our fathers could never have dreamed of are commonplace to-day? Take, for example, this amazing thing done at Newcastle-on-Tyne: Eight ' milligrammes of radium were found. A milligramme is almost a microscopic amount. When we remember tthat it is little more than a hundredth of a grain; and that 437 grains go to make an ounce, we realise that eight milligrammes are more difficult to find than a needle in a haystack. What happened at Newcastle was that eight milligrammes of radium, worth about £ 200, were accidentally thrown into an incinerator, and afterwards scattered along with cinders on a cinder track at the Royal Infirmary. . There they lay for eight years. Newcastle had its share of weather in those eight "years—rain and sun and wind and snow. The track was trodden by thousands of feet, the cinders being crushed close together, and all the time the radium was lying there, and giving off energy. One day a year ago it was found. It is an amazing story. If we could ever have been sure of anything we could have been sure that those long-lost milligrammes would never be seen again, but a newly invented radium-finding instrument was brought into play, a curious apparatus which gives out .an odd sound the nearer it is brought into touch with radium. Taken to the cinder track by experts from the Radiological Department of the infirmary, it was moved about till in less than half an hour it had detected the radium.