DISCOVERING RADIUM

Taranaki Daily News, 18 August 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

DISCOVERING RADIUM

The last of the scientists who helped Madame Curie in her work on radium has passed away. „ He was Mr. Henry’Koenig, and he may be numbered among the martyrs to science, for he died from a disease of the hip caused by his work as a radiologist The story of Madame Curie’s discovery of radium in 1898 is one of the fairy tales of science. Desperately poor, she and her husband worked in. a tumbledown shed with old sacks thrust into its gaping cracks and opening? as their laboratory, living in a tiny cottage in a squalid neighbourhood. From a ton of uranium residues they managed to extract a grain or two of radium salts. Not long after they had placed this treasure in a phial her husband accidentally dropped it on the floor- and scattered all the known radium in the world. They set to work and collected every speck of dust arid boiled and baked and crystallised all they collected in order to recover the lost treasure. Mr. Koenig’s great - contribution was that he evolved a system of ; radium extraction cheaper than any hitherto known, and thus made this most expensive element available to more of the world’s sufferers than it would otherwise have been.