WONDER WORK CHEMISTS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 172, 21 April 1928, Page 26

WONDER WORK CHEMISTS

RADIUM FROM PAINT SPECS

Tucked away in a passage flanking the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand—so inconspicuously that few of the tens of thousands of people who pass the doors daily can have any knowledge to what they lead—is the wonderhouse of British Government departments. It is the headquarters of the Government Laboratory, where a trained team of 200 men and women guards every chemical interest <f the public from the condition of their food to the condition of their telegraph poles (says the “Daily Mail”). Sir Robert Robertson, the Chief Government Chemist and captain of this team, derides any suggestion by a visitor to the laboratories that the achievements of the establishment are remarkable. “Nonsense,” he said to a reporter who was permitted to inspect these rooms of romance, and who described them as such to him. “We are only chemists, not magicians.” Nothing comes amiss to the Government’s staff of chemists. In one room the reporter found a group of them variously engaged in testing samples of butter and margarine, condensed milk, cheese, eggs, and pepper. A specialist in cattle foods was studying the results of an analysis of what exactly resembled and had been offered to millers as a wheat by-product. His test had thwarted a scandalous fraud because he had found the stuff to be merely a mixture of fine sawdust and plaster of Paris.

There would be fewer cases of arson if the culprits were aware of the skill and resource of these chemists. After suspicious fires they are presented with pieces of debris or paper found in the burned building, and by steam-distill-ing, even if the spirit has mainly evaporated or has been absorbed in the materials, they can say whether petrol was used to stimulate the flames. A triumph of their detective work was the discovery of a case of arson from the evidence of a few minute fragments of what proved to be burned celluloid. Although the premises in which the particles were found were gutted, the Government chemists were able to declare that the celluloid had been in contact with petrol. They thus revealed the most ingenious fire-raising device ever used.. The owner of the building, before setting it alight, had strewn the floors with celluloid balls, each filled with petrol, but the ruse by which the fire was intended to destroy the evidence of the fuel it

had fed on was not so cunning as the ability of the Government chemists. Prom an array of soda water bottles on the shelves of the laboratories a visitor would judge that the chemists have a prodigious thirst. But these bottles contain salt water from the seven seas, and from the salinity found by the chemists deductions are made which show whether or not fish will be found at different parts of the oceans at, say, this time next year. Day by day the bottles arrive from the seas, marked with the exact latitude and longtitude of the areas from which their contents were taken. The Government chemist determines ths quantity of salt in the water, and somebody else from this knowledge determines the drift of the currents, how far and fast the spawn of the fish is being carried. ,

The Admiralty is one of the most generous subscribers of soda water bottles to the collections in the laboratories, but the reason for the Navy’s curiosity about the changing composition of salt water throughout the world, is understood to have some connection with the Official Secrets Act. An immense amount of new work has been caused to the laboratories by the safeguarding of industrial duties. Some 6000 fine chemicals, from patent medicines to motor-car lacquers and enamels, are subject to duty, and have to be examined. The chemists have to be arbiters also of what is and what is not artificial silk.

One achievement of the staff of the Government laboratory has been to recover much of the radium that was used by Great Britain during the war. At comparatively small cost they have succeeded in restoring to its original state 98 per cent, of 'the radium contained in the war equipment which was returned to them.

The value and quantity of the amount they have recaptured is a State secret, but it may be judged by the fact that early'in the war Britain acquired practically the whole of 'America’s output of radium. The chemists performed their tasks so thoroughly that they even extracted the radium from the tiniest remnants of luminous paint on gun and rifle sights, aeroplane indicators, and. compass cards. The recovered radium is kept in a specially constructed safe contained in a concrete chamber beyond steel walls. It nestles in an inner chamber of six inches thick lead.