Word: raying
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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There had been a premature announcement of Dr. Coolidge's ray and tube, saying that they were so powerful they would completely disintegrate the body of a mouse in a fraction of a second's exposure. Dr. Coolidge did not verify this report, but the Franklin Institute members heard of or witnessed the following...
Acetylene gas in a sealed tube was reduced to a surprisingly large quantity of yellow powder, resembling varnish, which resisted all chemical reagents and a heat of 4000°. The powder was a substance utterly unknown to chemists. Precipitated by the ray upon an aluminum disc, the powder became an enamel which could not be removed...
...lump of fused quartz, clear as water, turned purple; a lump of feldspar glowed blue, amber, ruby, amethyst, with patches of brilliant green, successively; a lump of limestone burned angry orange. After exposure to the rays, these minerals looked searing hot but were not. Their fluorescence was without rise in temperature and in some cases persisted for hours after the exposure (as displaced electrons worked slowly back to their places in the atoms). The application of heat and cold (liquid air) altered the speed and intensity of these effects. Diamonds were only temporarily affected by exposure to the ray...
Fruit flies and other insects withered under a fraction of a second's exposure, soon died. A rubber-plant leaf oozed white latex from millions of tiny punctures at one short dose of the ray...
Problems. Dr. Coolidge knew that the changes wrought by his tube and ray were accomplished, basically, by electronic dislocations and rearrangements. He had experimented with as much as 350,000 volts. What effects might be obtained with, say, two million volts, remained to be seen. How and why these effects came about were a whole volume of problems...