Word: polonium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Radium E is the seventh and last stage of radium disintegration before it turns into polonium. Its atomic weight is 210. Atomic weight of bismuth is 209. Dr. John Jacob Livingood figured that if he hurled billions of particles of atomic weight i at bismuth, some of them might plow into the nucleus and stick, turning the bismuth into Radium E. Actually, the best particles for his purpose were deuterons whose atomic weight is 2. When the deuterons got close to the bismuth nucleus, they broke into protons and neutrons. The protons recoiled. But the neutrons, of atomic weight...
...leachings, precipitations, crystallizations with apparatus at which a modern physicist would sneer. Much of the time Mme Curie spent stirring a cauldron with an iron rod as thick as one of her thin arms. At last they had a thimbleful of a white salt. In it they found first polonium, finally radium...
...repeated experiment it is known that any electrically charged form of matter will penetrate paraffin, for example, more easily than lead. Bombarding lithium with alpha particles from polonium, the Curies found they were knocking out a ray that penetrates lead more easily than paraffin. By empirical reasoning, the ray produced must be a new kind of ray, since it breaks all known rules. The Curies concluded their ray "cannot be of an electronic or electromagnetic nature." It is probably a ray of neutrons. Irene Curie-Joliot and her husband did much of the preliminary work in radiation that helped Neutron...
...tiny laboratory in the Latin Quarter in Paris, working from ten to 20 hr. a day with uranium oxide to find out more about that queer radioactive family which begins with uranium and ends as lead. Since she knows most about radium she is now studying uranium and polonium, which she discovered in 1898 and named for her native Poland...