Word: strawboard
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...occasional spots, the postwar world looks as good as advertised. The current issue of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects tells about a new building material called Pyrok. When sprayed from a special gun, Pyrok sticks to almost any surface (from strawboard to steel) and rapidly builds up a wall of any desired thickness. A sledgehammer ,blow dents but does not crack it. It is waterproof, weatherproof, fireproof, and an excellent insulator, but can be sawed and nailed like wood...
Last fall Eastman discovered that some of its photographic film had been fogged by mysterious radioactive particles in strawboard packaging. It shifted to a new source of strawboard 500 miles from the first; both were in the Middle West. The new supply also turned out to be radioactive. Apparently a large area had been peppered with fission products from the atomic bomb explosion...
Wind & Rain. To make sure it was not jumping at sensational conclusions, Eastman analyzed the strawboard. Chemists cut out bits of it which fogged X-ray film, and burned them. The ashes were strongly radioactive, shooting out beta rays (streams of electrons). They gave out no alpha rays (helium nuclei), thus proving that they were not the naturally radioactive elements: radium, uranium, or thorium. The only remaining possibility was that, the guilty particles came from the atomic bomb, were carried to the Middle West by the wind, and washed down by the rain. Six months after the explosion, they were...
...time ago. A batch of film had been spoiled by packing it in cardboard made partly of waste paper from a factory using radium paint. Since then, the company had tested all packing materials for radioactivity. For a long time no trouble showed up. But recently, a shipment of strawboard proved to have 1,000 radioactive specks per sheet. The batch of strawboard had been discarded. The company preferred to say no more...
Where had the radioactive strawboard come from? Dr. Robley D. Evans of M.I.T. offered additional clues. It was made, he said, of straw cut in Illinois on Aug. 6, just 21 days after the explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. Straw cut before the explosion proved entirely harmless. This coincidence suggested, thought Dr. Evans, that radioactive residues, carried into the upper atmosphere in New Mexico, had fallen with the rain on Illinois. The only other apparent possibility was that the Wabash River, whose water was used in the strawboard factory, carried radioactive silt...