OCR Text |
Show IS IT MYSTERY OR MIRACLE? Scarcely have we begun to realize ihe possibilities possi-bilities of electricity, when we are startled by another an-other discovery which even the dreamy Marie Corelli never wove into fiction. The discovery is called "radium" a word we find neither in dictionary dic-tionary nor encyclopedia, but 'is easily reconciled with the word radiate when applied to heat. If radium fulfills all that scientists predict, then perpetual motion is not far off, although heretofore here-tofore deemed an impossibilty. How many brains have grown weary burning the midnight oil in vain attempts to solve it, will never be known. Keely, it will bo remembered, induced capitalists to sink' vast sums in his proposed invention, or rather idea which he sought to evolve into unceasing motion through mechanism; but he died and the motor died with him. This idea of radium with its power is akin to the power of electricity in its operations to succeed steam, only a great deal more so if we put faith in the predictions of somei scientists. One of the most interesting lectures delivered at the meeting of the British association was by Vernon Boys, the president-of the mathematics and physics section, relative to radium. We find a synopsis of the lecture in last Sunday's daily papers cabled from London. Boys thought that the term "mystery of radium" was inadequate, and the , miracle of radium was the only expression that could be employed. "The discovery," he said, "of what seems to be au everlasting production of heat in an easily measurable quantity by a miute amount of radium compound is so amazing that even now that many of us have had the opportunity of seeing with our own eyes a heated thermometer, we hardly are able to believe what we sec This, which can barely be distinguished from the discovery of perpetual motion, which it is ,un- axiom of science to call im- possible, has left every chemist and phwicist in a state of bewilderment. Added to this, Sir William Crookes has devised an experiment in which a particle of radium keeps a screen bombarded forever, for-ever, so it seems, each collision producing a microscopic micro-scopic flash of light, the dancing and multitude of which forcibly compel the imagination to follow fol-low reasoning faculties and realize the existence of an aomic tumult. "Radium in some respects has behaved in a manner contrary to that of all proper chemicals. Thorium and uranium, whjch have acted in the same kind of a way as radium, but with far less" vigor, would last a milion years before there was nothing left, or, at least, before they were worn out, while radium, preferring a short life and a merry one, could not expect to exist for more than a few thousand years. In that time one gram of radium would evolve 1,000,000.000 heat units, sum- ' cient if converted into work to raise 500 tons a mile high, whereas -a gram of hydrogen, our best fuel, j burned in oxygen, has only yielded .'54.000 heat j units, or one thirty-thousandth part of the output of radium." |