Word: iridium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ways are found to give bigger radiation doses more safely to hard-to-reach parts of the body. Examples: cobalt-60 "bombs," a new cesium-137 unit at M. D. Anderson Hospital, higher-powered X-ray machines and linear-particle accelerators, ingeniously refined ways of implanting radioisotopes such as iridium 192 and yttrium 90 in tumors...
LITTLE Del Northway, 4, his parents and his dog Peggy were social outcasts in Houston last week. For a cruel situation that may become commonplace in the Atomic Age, see SCIENCE, Plague of Iridium...
...trouble began March 13 when H. E. Northway, Del's father and manager of the Houston plant of M. W. Kellogg Co., was opening a shipment of intensely radioactive pellets of iridium 192, which Kellogg's nuclear division uses to take X-ray pictures of heavy metal objects. Helped by Jackson McVey and two other men, and working with remote-control apparatus from behind a thick shield, Northway opened the 800-lb. shipping container, took out the sealed metal canister full of deadly pellets and put it on a remotely controlled lathe. When the lathe's tool...
Among science's most sacred relics are the standard "meter bars" of platinum-iridium that lie in an underground shrine at Sèvres, near Paris. Replacing a babel of medieval units, they originated in the spurt of innovation that followed the French Revolution. The newfangled meter was intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the earth's equator and the North Pole, but difficulties of measurement made the exact length hard to determine. So the meter that was finally accepted (39.37 in. in length) was almost as arbitrary a unit as the ells, feet...