Word: tritium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Like many another elderly and distinguished scientist, Britain's Lord Ernest Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's electrical structure, has a way of having his way. Few weeks ago he published an article in which he referred to the tripleweight atom of hydrogen, generally called tritium, as "triterium." When this verbal goblin reached the eye of Dr. Kenneth Claude Bailey, professor of physical chemistry and authority on chemical etymology at University of Dublin, Dr. Bailey promptly took pen in hand and wrote a letter of protest which appeared in Nature last week. Excerpt: "The word 'deuterium...
...case of tritium, triple-weight hydrogen, is different. Its discovery was foreshadowed by the somewhat dubious magneto-optic method which anticipated the identification of deuterium. Then, in England, Lord Rutherford bounced deutons (deuterium nuclei) together, got protons and something of mass three which he thought was either an unknown form of helium or triple-weight hydrogen. Cautious Lord Rutherford took his time ascertaining that the new particles were both helium and tritium. Meantime Dr. Merle Antony Tuve and his associates at the Carnegie Institution of Washington had identified tritium particles by measuring their mass as indicated by the curvature...
...repeated electrolysis and selective evaporation. The tons shrank to hundredweights, the hundredweights to pounds, the pounds to ounces. Last week Chairman Hugh Stott Taylor of the Chemistry Department announced that Dr. Selwood's final residue is ten drops (half a gram) of heavy water containing one part of tritium in 10,000- richest sample of triple-weight hydrogen in the world, possibly rich enough to reveal something of its properties...
...recent, rapid discoveries of particles in the atom have sent physicists back to their Greek dictionaries. Hydrogen No.1 (most common) is beginning to be called protium, Hydrogen No. 2 deuterium. Hydrogen No. 3 will therefore have to be tritium. Protium's nucleus is the proton, deuterium's the denton, and tritium's (probably) the triton. After them, in Nature's system of elements, comes helium (atomic weight approximately 4). The helium atom's nucleus is the alpha particle which, in the full round of substances, again appears during the disintegration of the heaviest...