Word: boron
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the word was out that the books would have to change their tune, as the result of four years' patient work by bulky, plural-chinned Harold Simmons Booth and his co-workers at Western Reserve University. Early in their experiments it appeared that in boron trifluoride, the boron "accepted electrons" (i. e., was the go-between) in forming compounds with certain other elements. Why not with aristocratic argon...
...Paris last year the Curie-Joliots were firing alpha particles at another light element-boron. Neutrons leaped out. But after the bombardment stopped, the boron continued to emit positive electrons as though the attack had stirred it into a sort of radioactivity. This unlooked-for discovery made necessary a new phrase: artificial radioactivity (TIME...
...Joliot and Irene Curie-Joliot, son-in-law and daughter of the late Marie Sklodowska Curie. A vast and totally unforeseen field of research was opened last year when the Curie-Joliots discovered the phenomenon of artificial radioactivity. The young couple obtained a continued emission of positrons from boron, magnesium and aluminum by bombarding those elements with alpha particles (TIME, Feb. 12). Since then their results have been reproduced and extended in dozens of laboratories in a half-dozen countries, notably England, Italy, the U. S. Italy's Professor Enrico Fermi and his aids have coaxed radiations of beta...
Last January the Curie-Joliots of Paris pegged alpha particles (helium nuclei) into boron nuclei and got nitrogen. Similarly magnesium became silicon; alumi-num-phosphorus...
This, according to the researchers, is probably what happens: The attacking alpha particle joins a boron atom to form a neutron (which flies off) and an unstable nitrogen atom which in a few seconds or minutes changes to a carbon atom with the release of a positron. Hence, just as the spontaneous radioactivity of radium turns it finally into lead, the end-product of boron's artificial radioactivity is carbon. Not only boron but magnesium and aluminum became radioactive under similar treatment...