Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Every molecule of pure "heavy water" contains two atoms of deuterium, which is hydrogen of the double-weight form identified in 1931 by Columbia's Harold Clayton Urey. Deuterium is not rare in nature. It is present in ordinary water to the extent of one part in 4,500.* Thus when suitable methods for separating it were worked out, high concentrations of heavy water became common. Nowadays one or two chemical manufacturers list and sell heavy water 99.5% pure...
Operation of this theoretical submarine depends on a fact familiar to high-school chemistry students-that water separates into its component gases when an electric current is passed through it, hydrogen collecting on the negative pole, oxygen on the positive. While under way on the surface the submarine's engines burn a mixture of oil and hydrogen, have enough reserve power to drive an electric generator. This generator furnishes current to an electrolyzer which turns water into hydrogen and oxygen under pressure. The excess hydrogen and all the oxygen are stored in steel tanks...
When the ship dives, the oil supply to the engines is cut off and they are fed from the tanks with oxygen and hydrogen. The explosive recombination of oxygen and hydrogen into water releases energy. Because of the engine temperature this exhaust water is in the form of superheated steam. All the steam is condensed inside the submarine. Hence no gases leave the ship to betray it by telltale bubbles on the surface...
...technique of approach is a complicated cycle of cooling, compression, magnetization, demagnetization. Liquid air cools compressed hydrogen until it liquefies, the liquid hydrogen cools com- pressed helium until it too liquefies. The last stage depends on the fact that magnetization heats matter, demagnetization chills it. The substance is powerfully magnetized and the heat generated drawn off; then a step farther down the scale of cold is obtained by demagnetization, and the cycle is repeated. The temperature is read by a system, of delicate balances, using the principle (discovered in the Curie laboratories of Paris) that the magnetic force...
Every molecule of pure "heavy water" contains hydrogen of the doubleweight kind identified by Columbia's Harold Clayton Urey in 1931. Long before Dr. Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery (TIME, Nov. 26), experimenters were finding that heavy water did strange things to small animals and plants. It killed guppies, tadpoles, flatworms, prevented tobacco seeds from sprouting, dimmed the light of luminous bacteria, made mice appear tipsy and terribly thirsty. Then Professor Ingo Waldemar Dagobert Hackh of San Francisco's College of Physicians & Surgeons guessed that a slow, steady increase in the amount of heavy...