the found radium story (1929)

We have a story in my family about the time when my great-grandfather John H. Ransom (jqmold's father; "Bampi" to us) found a lump of radium in the trash at Caltech. My dad recently found the following article, published in The Reporter of Le Grand, Iowa on March 1, 1929 (He explains that it was probably published first in the Los Angeles times before being picked up elsewhere):

Cosmic ray finds radium in ashes

Millikan machine picks it out of last barrel

Pasadena, Calif--When one of Dr. Robert A. Millikan's electroscopes, developed in connection with his cosmic ray experiments, was enlisted as a detective, a problem as difficult as "looking for a needle in a haystack" was solved within two hours.

Through the use of the delicate instrument $4,000 worth of radium [that's $46,000 in 2006 dollars--TF] which was accidentally thrown out with some ashes at the Pasadena hospital was recovered.

John Ransom, California Institute of Technology technician, was sent to the hospital with one of the cosmic ray machines and, after barrel after barrel of ashes had been brough in front of the electroscope the instrument indicated that radium was present in the last barrel.

( Read more... )

Apparently lost radium capsules were a recurring problem in those days; I just found a paper titled "An electroscope arrangement for the detection of lost radium" (A S Eve et al 1931 J. Sci. Instrum. 8 20-21).

Wikipedia tells me that Le Grand is a tiny town in the middle of Iowa with only 883 residents!

The other stories on that newspaper page are pretty funny. You can look at the full size scan either on flickr, or via PDF.