Word: radiumator
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Theodore Roosevelt: "My brother, Kermit, lost his left thumb when, last week, a Manhattan surgeon amputated it to rid him of a persistent infection. The infection was apparently the result of radium treatment which my brother underwent six years ago to remove from his left thumb a wart...
...orange rind and scrap of paper, until he found a tiny bit of blackened bandage. Twentyfour hours after this find, a tiny silver tube was found in the litter and restored to its owners, Dr. E. S. Lain and Dr. M. M. Roland. The tube contained a grain of radium, worth $4,000; had been thrown away by a careless nurse and located approximately in the dump heap by use of a mineralogist's divining instrument for radioactive substances. During the five-day hunt, a hog whose headquarters were at the dump ground was kept under observation...
Since cathode rays are identical in nature with the beta rays of radium, computations were made showing that Dr. Coolidge had invented the equivalent of a ton of radium (2,000 times the world's present supply), worth a hundred billion dollars. But these computations were misleading. It is the gamma rays (ether vibrations) of radium that are most potent and healing. Radium's beta rays (streams of electrons) are screened off during most applications of radium to diseased tissue; their effect is superficial, while gamma rays penetrate deeply, cause more violent atomic changes...
...lowering them to a considerable depth in the pure waters of a high-altitude lake.* And their conclusions, announced last week, paralleled Dr. Millikan's: bombarding the earth from the surrounding universe are some hitherto unknown rays, of submicroscopic wavelength, which far surpass even the gamma rays of radium in their power to penetrate matter. They will pass through a block of steel three feet thick, through six feet of lead...
...These experiments must be made as far as possible out of reach of known sources of radioactivity, such as radium ores in the earth's crust, water and atmosphere...