Pure Radium at Last.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 5, 1 March 1911, Page 575

Pure Radium at Last.

The announcement is made that Madame Curie and M. Debierne . reported on Sept. sth to the Paris Academy of Science that they had at last succeeded in obtaining metallic radium. What has been called "radium" ever since its discovery is not the pure metal but some one of its salts, generally the bromide. Says The Lancet (London) commenting on the news:— "It is interesting to record that it is a little over a hundred years ago (1807) when a similar announcement was made, in regard to the isolation of the two now familiar metals, potassium and sodium, by Sir Humphry Davy, and apparently Madame Curie and her colleague have isolated radium by the same agency, namely, electricity. They prepared ,an amalgam of mercury by the electrolysis of a radium salt. The resulting amalgam was next placed in a quartz tube and distilled in hydrogen under pressure and high temperature. The mercury was then found to have left a thin coating of brilliant metal behind which proved to be radium. As might be expected, the metal acts with great energy; it decomposes water, oxidizes rapidly in air, is attracted by iron as though by some magnetic property, and burns paper when placed in contact with it. Radium is thus no longer a hypothetical metal.''