the found radium story (1929)

[nibot]

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.

While hospital officials anxiously watched the proceedings in the basement of the institution the barrel cfontaining the capsule filled with fifty milligrams of the most precious substance in the world was emptied into small boxes. It was only when the observers were about to give up hope that the brass tube, about the size of a match-end, was discovered in the last box.

The electroscope, it was stated, picks up the radium emanations, being so sensitive that it can record them from a radiolite watch. Two quartz fibers that are suspended almost together are charged with electricity, which repels them. When the fibers are exposed to radium, which absorbs electricity from the air, they are brought together, the speed with which they approach each other indicating the amount of radium in the vicinity. No matter how minute the radium particles, the instrument is said to be capable of detecting them at a distance of 100 feet.

The radium which was recovered is the property of Dr. Paul Ferrier, and is one of the two largest supplies of the precious substance in this city.

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.

Comments

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

Wow. Crazy stuff. (("Baby of no cash value, Ontario court decides"!))

Also interesting to see "Bees buzz busily for 800,000 in U.S."

A lot of cool stuff, really. Teaching frogs geometry, for instance. ;)

Earthquake detection...

LOL @ the news about the minister: "The new chaplain will have charge of the education of the children of the island, who are contented prisoners on the little area of 16 square miles."

Thanks. :)

[lert.livejournal.com]

Oh, awesome! There is a whole collection of these in a book called Radium Lost and Found. They called the electroscopes "radium hounds," which is pretty adorable. My favorite story from the book is one in ... North Dakota? (I think. A Minnesota physicist was dispatched to the site, wherever it was.) where some radium had been dumped into the garbage and sent to the dump. This was fairly common, but in this case they had trouble finding the pile of trash where the radium was, until a herd of pigs wandered by and their electroscope went off. One poor pig had eaten the radium and had to be killed -- but the radium was retrieved!