Blue Glass at Spring Startles Ohio Doctor

1915

Fears Vanish When Radium is Found in Water

Benjamin Marshall of Paw Paw, Mich., is spending his leisure time in reading automobile catalogs and pricing Persian rugs.

The reason he engages in this pastime is because radium has been discovered in his back yard, according to a doctor from Ohio, who claims to know something about the stuff that sells for thousands of dollars per amount as big as a pinhead.

Two years ago Marshall and his mother came here and purchased a fruit farm on the outskirts of this village. On the property is a spring of sparkling clear water. Prior to their coming here, Mrs. Marshall was a chronic dyspeptic, subsisting only on the simplest of diets.

Helps Mother's Appetite

They had been here only a short time when Marshall noticed his mother's appetite had increased astonishingly and that she could eat anything with keen relish.

A glass was always left at the spring and always turned a light blue after slight use. One day when the Ohio doctor was visiting the Marshalls he noticed the blue glass and said:

"Marshall, you don't drink this water, do you?"

"Yes, we're really intemperate with it."

"And doesn't it make you sick?"

"I don't look seriously ill, do I?" asked Marshall, with a chuckle, as he exhibited his tongue.

Does a Little Probing

Then the doctor did some investigating and declared that the water contained radium.

"I thought it was cobalt at first," he said, "but if it were cobalt it would make you sick."

The doctor took several samples of the water back with him to test, and Marshall took to reading auto catalogs and pricing Persian rugs.

Radio-activity and Life

1906

European Scientist Speculates on Some interesting Analogies

J. J. Laudin Chabot makes, in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, some striking speculations on certain analogies shown by the phenomena of radio-activity with ebullition on the one hand, and with the decomposition as accompanying, say, the life of albumen, on the other.

The atoms of radio-active substances are in a state of unstable equilibrium. Some of them every now and then pass abruptly into the next state. The passage amounts to an explosion, although it differs from ordinary explosions in not necessarily tending to the simultaneous explosion of all other atoms around. A somewhat similar phenomenon is presented by a boiling liquid.

Some striking analogies to the behavior of the emanations and the rare gases such as argon and helium are offered by nitrogen, which is a constituent of nearly every explosive substance. Among the compounds of nitrogen, cyanogen (carbon plus nitrogen) deserves special consideration on account of its importance in the decomposition of albumen. All the nitrogenous compounds resulting from the decomposition of albumen contain syanogen. This has a high internal energy, and it is therefore extremely unstable. Pflueger believes it to be a constituent of all living matter, and calls cyanic acid a "semi-living" molecule.

The presence of oxygen compounds increase the instability of the cyanogen compounds, so that, as in the case of the emanations, the least impulse suffices to make the living molecule explode and produce helium. The transformation of albumen takes place according to the same mathematical law as does the decay of radio-activity. Like the radio-active substances, albumen has a limited and predetermined life.

The phenomenon of life would thus become in principle identical with those of radio-activity, by an equally necessary result of known causes, but of a much wider scope in nature.