Word: radiumator
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...Rudolf Walter Ladenburg, 53, and Research Associate Cletus Clinton Van Voorhis, 50, were so interested in their atom-smashing experiments that they had come back to the physics laboratory to work after dinner. For bullets they used neutrons. The neutrons were knocked out of beryllium by alpha particles from radium. The beryllium and 200 milligrams of radium sulphate, worth $4,000, were in a metal tube. One of the scientists started to solder a loose cap on the tube over a flame. The cap blew off. Some of the radium compound spurted into the faces, nostrils and mouths...
Since the Curie-Joliots of Paris discovered artificial radioactivity two years ago (TIME, Feb. 12, 1934), some 40 substances, including salt and copper, have been made radioactive by bombardment with atomic particles. But, unlike radium, these substances are not radioactive in nature. Last week another milestone in the galloping progress of atomic transmutation was marked by the disclosure of a few atoms of Radium E created in the laboratories of the University of California...
...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...
...Livingood identified the created element by the fact that it began shooting out fast electrons which dwindled by half in about five days. This is exactly the behavior of Radium...
Heavier than any other element except uranium, protoactinium is radioactive. It is 25% rarer than radium in pitchblende. One ton of that mother ore was reduced to extract a half gram of protoactinium oxide. In a phosgene chlorinating bath this was transposed to a chloride. Using the method evolved by General Electric's famed Irving Langmuir. Dr. von Grosse spread the chloride on a tungsten filament in a vacuum, heated the filament, boiled off the chlorine, obtained his bit of pure protoactinium...