Music Sheet Has Radium Notes for Television Artists

TELEVISION performers, working in almost complete darkness, except for the flying spot, have found difficulty in reading music when they were broadcasting a program. To remedy this difficulty and enable the performers to see better the music manuscripts from which they are singing, Elliott Jaffee, a New York recording artist, has devised a luminous manuscript on which the characters are painted on black paper with radium paint. This invention eliminates one of the greatest difficulties the performers have encountered. Now, however, the music is as plain in the darkness as the figures on a radium watch.

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Finding Radium Inside a Pig

RADIUM, used in hospital work inside tiny “needles,” may easily be mislaid; and a thousand dollars’ worth is almost invisible to the eye. Recently a tube disappeared from a hospital at Sioux Falls, S. D., and, though only 3/4″ x 1/16″, represented $3,000 value. A couple of scientists promptly improvised a radium finder from a glass flash and a strip of gold leaf and went over to the dumping ground. Strong indications of radioactivity —the leaf of gold in the homemade electroscope collapsing—were found whenever a certain pig was approached. So the pig was converted into sausage material, and in its stomach was found the little radium capsule— to the surprise of the pig’s proprietor.

The principle of the electroscope is that when it is charged, the same electrical polarity—whether positive or negative—is on the insulated metal rod through the stopper of sulphur, or other high insulator, and on the gold leaf attached to the rod. The gold leaf is repelled, and stands out at a high angle, until the electroscope is discharged. But if ultra-violet light, or radium rays, fall on the flask, the air inside it becomes ionized (electrified) and conductive; the charge immediately leaks off the rod and the leaf falls.

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The Epic Story of Radium
RADIUM was discovered by Madame Marie Curie, who with her husband found the secret four years after being assigned the task in 1892. Gilbert La Bine found vast fields of pitchblende, from which radium is extracted, in Canada in 1930, thus assuring the world of a steady supply of the deadly life saver at considerably lower cost than had been possible before. There radium is mined in the largest quantities known. More than 12,000 tons of pitchblende ore have to be blasted and put through various processes before a full ounce of radium can be obtained. On these pages is the story of radium, from the mines near Eldorado, Canada, through the refineries 1,500 miles away.

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Ah yes, the curative properties of radium.

Spring in City’s Park Spouts “Radium Water”
America’s third-biggest metropolis may possess a valuable radium mine. Its city fathers recently learned to their surprise that Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, contains the country’s most radioactive spring, when Dr. J. Lloyd Bohn, Temple University physicist, tested the water that gushes from it. What interests him about the spring is not the curative powers sometimes claimed for such waters, but the possibility that a rich natural deposit of radium may be found near-by.

London Hospital Constructs $200,000 Radium Mercy Bomb

CONTINUING the work begun by the late Madame Curie, eminent French pioneer in the use of radium for healing, physicists at the Westminster Hospital in London are now engaged in the construction of a $200,000 radium bomb which will greatly extend the mercy work of the beneficial rays. The 4 grammes of radium, worth $200,000, will be encased in a new tungsten alloy shell, the alloy having 1-1/2 times the density of lead. Within the shell will be a solid gold collar to further confine the Gamma rays of radium, thus preventing injury to the operators from spreading rays.

The employment of so great a quantity of radium within a single bomb permits operation at a greater distance from the patient, and at the same time produces a more effective treatment at greater depths below the body surface.

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Radium - Boon or Menace?

By HUGO GERNSBACK

Member, American Physical Society; Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• RECENTLY the press reported the case of a wealthy man who died from the direct use of radium, in a way that made it necessary for the authorities to step in and investigate the so-called “radium cures”. The victim, Eben M. Byers, an iron manufacturer, died in a New York hospital from the effects of radium absorbed by drinking “radithor”, a radioactive water manufactured by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, East Orange, New Jersey. In this case, the radium-charged water was put up in small bottles; and it has been ascertained that Mr. Byers drank a number of bottles a day for a long time. Eventually, the active radium settled in his bones, where it set up necrosis (death of the

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Precious Radium is Medicine’s Treacherous Helper

Rare metal is teamed with common lead to become an ally of science.

Weird masks impregnated with lead shield this doctor from the withering rays of radium held in the tiny vial. These same rays become healing agents when they are properly directed.

Left—-This solid lead container protects hospital attendants who transport radium. Above——Guarded by a lead shield containing thick lead glass, a nurse restores a vial of radium to its holder. Right—Lead vaults for radium. Box marked 100 contains one-tenth of a grain of radium. It is worth $7,500.

Lead is the only thing radium rays will not penetrate and without a lead shield, this interne must work at a distance. Right-—Radium is now valued at $1,000,000 an ounce. It looks like a white salt, and each grain must be well guarded.