Word: thorium
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...Bureau of Standards, Washington, thorium oxide, most resistant to heat of all known substances, was melted (for the first time in history) by C. O. Fairchild and C. G. Peters. Platinum melts at a temperature of about 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit, but that does not begin to phase thorium oxide. Its melting point is probably over 6,000 degrees, which, of course, no thermometer can measure. It is used commercially in gas mantles. A gas flame does not affect it, but an electric arc may. The oxide does, however, shrink in volume at high temperatures. Thorium oxide has been utilized...
...form a saga of heroism. Not long after her marriage in 1895, Marie Curie, became interested in the experiments of Henri Becquerel on the salts of the rare metal, uranium. He had found that they emitted certain penetrating rays. Marie Curie took up this work, found that another element, thorium, behaved similarly, and that certain complex minerals also showed radioactivity, which was not, however, proportionate to the quantities of uranium or thorium in them. Pierre Curie, whose main researches up to that time had been on the physics of crystals (as was the early work of Louis Pasteur), became...
...German gynecologist announced that a fluid prepared by Professor von Weniger, of Rio de Janeiro, tested in a Berlin sanatorium, has been found a specific for tuberculosis. The fluid contains thorium, uranium, manganese and various acids, and is said to dissolve the fatty covering of the tuberculosis bacilli. Colleagues of the sponsor are sceptical of his claims...
...unexpected discovery, however; the work of Sir Ernest Rutherford, Dr. F. W. Aston and others has paved the way for its ready acceptance. Uranium, thorium and radium split up of their own accord. Moreover, many astrophysicists have long believed that the sudden appearance of vast quantities of hydrogen and helium in new stars might be due to an elemental cataclysm of this kind on a gigantic scale...
...from radium minerals is supposed to come from the decomposition of radium. Why its atomic weight is different from that of ordinary lead, whether ordinary lead may not itself prove to be a mixture of lighter lead with a heavier variety, perhaps due to the disintegration of the element thorium, and whether other elements, hitherto supposed to be final and invisible, may not also prove to be mixtures and thus open up a whole series of new problems as to the composition of mater, are questions to which the answers are being eagerly sought all over the world today...