Word: uranium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Antoine Henri Becquerel of France left some uranium salts lying in the dark near a photographic plate. When he developed the plate he found that some sort of rays from the uranium, passing through a metal container and several other obstacles, had left an image on the plate. Thus by accident Becquerel, who shared a Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie, discovered radioactivity...
Heavier than any other element except uranium, protoactinium is radioactive. It is 25% rarer than radium in pitchblende. One ton of that mother ore was reduced to extract a half gram of protoactinium oxide. In a phosgene chlorinating bath this was transposed to a chloride. Using the method evolved by General Electric's famed Irving Langmuir. Dr. von Grosse spread the chloride on a tungsten filament in a vacuum, heated the filament, boiled off the chlorine, obtained his bit of pure protoactinium...
...Polish language. While studying in Paris she lived in a bare garret, ate meals that cost half a franc a day, met a brooding, handsome young physics instructor whom she twitted for expressing astonishment at her learning, and then married. Becquerel's accidental discovery of radioactivity of uranium compounds in 1896 excited them greatly. They obtained a ton of pitchblende from the Austrian Government, began a long series of crushings, pulverizations, leachings, precipitations, crystallizations with apparatus at which a modern physicist would sneer. Much of the time Mme Curie spent stirring a cauldron with an iron rod as thick...
...elements Professor Fermi played with last spring was uranium. Uranium, discovered in 1789, is the mother stuff of radium, and the heaviest element on earth (twice as heavy as tin). Astronomers believe that elements heavier than uranium must exist in the interior of the sun. Geologists admit that perhaps near the core of the earth may be something heavier than uranium. But there certainly has been none anywhere near the earth's surface where man can lay his hands on it-until possibly last week...
...King of Italy and a group of Fascist physicists, one of Professor Fermi's admiring colleagues reported that, after wiping away a flood of electrons, he had smashed a batch of neutrons upon a piece of uranium which weighed 92 atomic units. For 13½ min., while it sputtered electrons, the uranium weighed 93 units. According to the Mendeleyeff Table it had no scientific business weighing more than uranium. During that period, reasoned Professor Fermi, the substance must have been not uranium, but hypothetical Element...