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53 Bull. Pan Am. Union 29 (1921)
The Source of Radium

handle is hein.journals/bulpnamu53 and id is 55 raw text is: THE SOURCE OF RADIUM By HAMILTON FOLEY. WHEN $100,000 is raised by popular subscription in all parts of the country to pay for a thimbleful of radium to be presented by the President of the United States at the White I-louse to Madam Curie, the discoverer of radium, as a gift-from the women of America, the story of how this material is obtained, why this material has such a high value, and what makes it, of present and of future importance to the civilization of the world can not be without interest, even to the non-technical reader of the BULLETIN. Moreover, just how the United States became the foremost radium-producing country, and how it owes this preeminence to the work of one man, Joseph M. Flannery, of Pittsburgh, as distinctly as France owes to Madam Curie the honor of first making radium known to the world, are details that make an interesting chapter in the history of the development of America's natural resources. That Mr. Flannery gained much of the mining experience and no small part of the money he put into his production of radium, while developing the vanadium deposits of the Peruvian Andes, is a detail that will be of direct present interest to Hispanic America and of permanent interest in the full story of how the greatest supply of radium was made available for the benefit of the world. In 1895, soon after the discovery of the X rays, Prof. Henri Becquerel, of the University of Paris, undertook an exhaustive study to ascertain whether some metals after exposure to sunlight would shine when brought into a dark room and, if they did, whether that light would, like the newly discovered X rays, have the power to pass through heavy and light proof paper. By good fortune Prof. Becquerel used some uranium in these studies. and quite by acci- (lent he found that this uranium was sending forth rays that appeared to act as the X rays in penetrating both thick and thin proof paper and, after such penetration, to affect a photographic plate as sun- light does. He found that his uranium did this whether or not it was first exposed to sunlight: in other words, that the sunlight could not in any way be said to be the cause of these rays. Now, uranium had been known to the world for over a hundred years, but that it possessed the power to emit, rays of this penetrating nature was something as new as astonishing. For years uranium had been used to color glass, especially the fine qualities that consti- tute much of the specialized handiwork of the glassmakers of Bohemia. 511501-21-Bull. 1-3 29

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