Boys' Second Book of Inventions

CHAPTER I

THE MIRACLE OF RADIUM

No substance ever discovered better deserves the term "Miracle of Science," given it by a famous English experimenter, than radium. Here is a little pinch of white powder that looks much like common table salt. It is one of many similar pinches sealed in little glass tubes and owned by Professor Curie, of Paris. If you should find one of these little tubes in the street you would think it hardly worth carrying away, and yet many a one of them could not be bought for a small fortune. For all the radium in the world to-day could be heaped on a single table-spoon; a pound of it would be worth nearly a million dollars, or more than three thousand times its weight in pure gold.

Professor and Madame Curie, who discovered radium, now possess the largest amount of any one, but there are small quantities in the hands of English and German scientists, and perhaps a dozen specimens in America, one owned by the American Museum of Natural History and several by Mr. W. J. Hammer, of New York, who was the first American to experiment with the rare and precious substance.

And perhaps it is just as well, at first, not to have too much radium, for besides being wonderful it is also dangerous. If a pound or two could be gathered in a mass it would kill every one who came within its influence. People might go up and even handle the white powder without at the moment feeling any ill-effects, but in a week or two the mysterious and dreadful radium influence would begin to take effect. Slowly the victim's skin would peel off, his body would become one great sore, he would fall blind, and finally die of paralysis and congestion of the spinal cord. Even the small quantities now in hand have severely burned the experimenters. Professor Curie himself has a number of bad scars on his hands and arms due to ulcers caused by handling radium. And Professor Becquerel, in journeying to London, carried in his waistcoat pocket a small tube of radium to be used in a lecture there. Nothing happened at the time, but about two weeks later Professor Becquerel observed that the skin under his pocket was beginning to redden and fall away, and finally a deep and painful sore formed there and remained for weeks before healing.

It is just as well, therefore, that scientists learn more about radium and how to handle and control it before too much is manufactured.

But the cost and danger of radium are only two of its least extraordinary features. Seen in the daylight radium is a commonplace white powder, but in the dark it glows like live fire, and the purer it is the more it glows. I held for a moment one of Mr. Hammer's radium tubes, and, the lights being turned off, it seemed like a live coal burning there in my hand, and yet I felt no sensation of heat. But radium really does give off heat as well as light – and gives it off continually without losing appreciable weight. And that is what seems to scientists a miracle. Imagine a coal which should burn day in and day out for hundreds of years, always bright, always giving off heat and light, and yet not growing any smaller, not turning to ashes. That is the almost unbelievable property of radium. Professor Curie has specimens which have thus been radiating light and heat for several years, with practically no loss of weight; and no small amount of light and heat either. Professor Curie has found that a given quantity of radium will melt its own weight of ice every hour, and continue doing so practically for ever. One of his associates has calculated that a fixed quantity of radium, after throwing out heat for 1,000,000,000 years, would have lost only one-millionth part of its bulk.

What is the reason for these extraordinary properties? Is it not "perpetual motion"? All the great scientists of the world have been trying in vain to answer these questions. Several theories have been advanced, of which I shall speak later, but none seems a satisfactory explanation. When we know more of radium perhaps we shall be better prepared to say what it really is, and we may have to unlearn many of the great principles of physics and chemistry which were seemingly settled for all time. Radium would seem, indeed, to defy the very law of the conservation of energy.

The practical mind at once sees radium in use as a new source of heat and light for mankind, a furnace that would never have to be fed or cleaned, a lamp that would glow perpetually – and the time may really come, the inventor having taken hold of the wonder that the scientist has produced, when many practical applications of the new element may be devised. At present, however, the scarcity and cost and danger of radium will keep it in the hands of the experimenter.

Another astonishing property of radium is its power of communicating some of its strange qualities to certain substances brought within its influence. Mr. Hammer kept his radium tubes for a time in a pasteboard box. This being broken, he removed the tubes and threw the pasteboard aside. Several days later, having occasion to turn off the lights in the laboratory, he found that the discarded box was glowing there in the dark. It had taken up some of the rays from the radium. Nearly everything that comes in contact with radium thus becomes "radio-active" – even the experimenter's clothes and hands, so that delicate instruments are disturbed by the invisible shine of the experimenter. Photographs can be taken with radium; it also makes the air around it a better conductor of electricity. And still more marvellous, besides being an agency for the destruction of life, as I shall show later, it can actually be used in other ways to prolong life, and the future may show many wonderful uses for it in the treatment of disease. Already, in Paris, several cases of lupus have been cured with it, and there is evidence that it will help to restore sight in certain cases of blindness. I held a tube of radium to my closed eye and was conscious of the sensation of light; the same sensation was present when the tube was held to my temple, thus showing that the radium has an effect on the optic nerve. A little blind girl in New York, who had never had the sensation of light, began to see a little after one treatment with radium, and experiments are still going on, but cautiously, for fear that injuries may result.

We now come to the fascinating story of the discovery and manufacture of radium. It has long been known that certain substances are phosphorescent; that is, under the proper conditions they glow without apparent heat. Everybody has seen "fox-fire" in the damp and decaying woods – a cold light which scientists have never been able to explain.

To M. Henri Becquerel of the French Institute is generally given the credit for having begun the real study of radio-activity, although, as in every great discovery and invention, many other scientists and practical electricians had paved the way by their investigations. In 1896 M. Becquerel was conducting some experiments with various phosphorescent substances. He exposed some salts of the metal uranium to the sunlight until they became phosphorescent, and then tried their effect upon a photographic plate.

It rained, and he put the plate away in a drawer for several days. When he developed it he was surprised to find on it a better image than sunlight would have made. And thus, by a sort of accident, he led up to the discovery of the Becquerel rays, so called.

Uranium is extracted from a metal or ore called uranite by mineralogists, and popularly known as pitch-blende. Every young college student who has studied geology or chemistry has heard of pitch-blende.

Two years after Becquerel's discovery of the radio-activity of uranium Professor Pierre Curie and Madame Curie, of Paris, made the discovery that some of the samples of pitch-blende which they had were much more powerful than any uranium that they had used.

Was there, then, something more powerful than uranium within the pitch-blende? They began to "boil down" the waste rock left at the uranium mines, and found a strange new element, related to uranium but different, to which Madame Curie gave the name polonium, after her native land, Poland.

Then they did some more boiling down, and succeeded in isolating an entirely new substance, and the most radio-active yet discovered – radium. Shortly after that Debierne discovered still another radio-active substance, to which he gave the name actinium.

Thus three new elements were added to the list of the world's substances, and the most wonderful of these is radium. In a day, almost, the Curies became famous in the scientific world, and many of the greatest investigators in the world – Lord Kelvin, Sir William Crookes, and others – took up the study of radium.

Very rarely have a man and woman worked together so perfectly as Professor Curie and his wife. Madame Curie was a Polish girl; she came to Paris to study, very poor, but possessed of rare talents. Her marriage with M. Curie was such a union as must have produced some fine result. Without his scientific learning and vivid imagination it is doubtful if radium would ever have been dreamed of, and without her determination and patience against detail it is likely the dream would never have been realised.

One of the chief problems to be met in finding the secrets of radium is the great difficulty and expense, in the first place, of getting any of the substance to experiment with. The Curies have had to manufacture all they themselves have used. In the first place, pitch-blende, which closely resembles iron in appearance, is not plentiful. The best of it comes from Bohemia, but it is also found in Saxony, Norway, Egypt, and in North Carolina, Colorado, and Utah. It appears in small lumps in veins of gold, silver, and mica, and sometimes in granite.

Comparatively speaking, it is easy to get uranium from pitch-blende. But to get the radium from the residues is a much more complicated task. According to Professor Curie, it is necessary to refine about 5,000 tons of uranium residues to get a kilogramme – or about 2.2 pounds – of radium.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, considering the enormous amount of raw material which must be handled, that the cost of this rare mineral should be high. It has been said that there is more gold in sea-water than radium in the earth. Professor Curie has an extensive plant at Ivry, near Paris, where the refuse dust brought from the uranium mines is treated by complicated processes, which finally yield a powder or crystals containing a small amount of radium. These crystals are sent to the laboratory of the Curies where the final delicate processes of extraction are carried on by the professor and his wife.

And, after all, pure metallic radium is not obtained. It could be obtained, and Professor Curie has actually made a very small quantity of it, but it is unstable, immediately oxidised by the air and destroyed. So it is manufactured only in the form of chloride and bromide of radium. The "strength" of radium is measured in radio-activity, in the power of emitting rays. So we hear of radium of an intensity of 45 or 7,000 or 300,000. This method of measurement is thus explained. Taking the radio-activity of uranium as the unit, as one, then a certain specimen of radium is said to be 45 or 7,000 or 300,000 times as intense, to have so many times as much radio-activity. The radium of highest intensity in this country now is 300,000, but the Curies have succeeded in producing a specimen of 1,500,000 intensity. This is so powerful and dangerous that it must be kept wrapped in lead, which has the effect of stopping some of the rays. Rock-salt is another substance which hinders the passage of the rays.

English scientists have devised a curious little instrument, called the spinthariscope, which allows one actually to see the emanations from radium and to realise as never before the extraordinary atomic disintegration that is going on ceaselessly in this strange metal. The spinthariscope is a small microscope that allows one to look at a tiny fragment of radium supported on a little wire over a screen.

The experiment must be made in a darkened room after the eye has gradually acquired its greatest sensitiveness to light. Looking intently through the lenses the screen appears like a heaven of flashing meteors among which stars shine forth suddenly and die away. Near the central radium speck the fire-shower is most brilliant, while toward the rim of the circle it grows fainter. And this goes on continuously as the metal throws off its rays like myriads of bursting, blazing stars. M. Curie has spoken of this vision, really contained within the area of a two-cent piece, as one of the most beautiful and impressive he ever witnessed; it was as if he had been allowed to assist at the birth of a universe. Radium emits radiations, that is, it shoots off particles of itself into space at such terrific speed that 92,500 miles a second is considered a small estimate. Yet, in spite of the fact that this waste goes on eternally and at such enormous velocity, the actual loss sustained by the radium is, as I have said, infinitesimal.

We now come to one of the most interesting phases of the whole subject of radium – that is, the influence which its strange rays have upon animal life. Mr. Cleveland Moffett, to whom I am indebted for the facts of the following experiments, recently visited M. Danysz, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who has made some wonderful investigations in this branch of science. M. Danysz has tried the effect of radium on mice, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and other animals, and on plants, and he found that if exposed long enough they all died, often first losing their fur and becoming blind.

But the most startling experiment performed thus far at the Pasteur Institute is one undertaken by M. Danysz, February 3, 1903, when he placed three or four dozen little larvæ that live in flour in a glass flask, where they were exposed for a few hours to the rays of radium. He placed a like number of larvæ in a control-flask, where there was no radium, and he left enough flour in each flask for the larvæ to live upon. After several weeks it was found that most of the larvæ in the radium flask had been killed, but that a few of them had escaped the destructive action of the rays by crawling away to distant corners of the flask, where they were still living. But they were living as larvæ, not as moths, whereas in the natural course they should have become moths long before, as was seen by the control-flask, where the larvæ had all changed into moths, and these had hatched their eggs into other larvæ, and these had produced other moths. All of which made it clear that the radium rays had arrested the development of these little worms.

More weeks passed, and still three or four of the larvæ lived, and four full months after the original exposure one larva was still alive and wriggling, while its contemporary larvæ in the other jar had long since passed away as aged moths, leaving generations of moths' eggs and larvæ to witness this miracle, for here was a larva, venerable among his kind, that had actually lived through three times the span of life accorded to his fellows and that still showed no sign of changing into a moth. It was very much as if a young man of twenty-one should keep the appearance of twenty-one for two hundred and fifty years!

Not less remarkable than these are some recent experiments made by M. Bohn at the biological laboratories of the Sorbonne, his conclusions being that radium may so far modify various lower forms of life as to actually produce new species of "monsters," abnormal deviations from the original type of the species. Furthermore, he has been able to accomplish with radium what Professor Loeb did with salt solutions – that is, to cause the growth of unfecundated eggs of the sea-urchin, and to advance these through several stages of their development. In other words, he has used radium to create life where there would have been no life but for this strange stimulation.

So much for the wonders of radium. We seem, indeed, to be on the border-land of still more wonderful discoveries. Perhaps these radium investigations will lead to some explanation of that great question in science, "What is electricity?" – and that, who can say, may solve that profounder problem, "What is life?"

At present there are two theories as to the source of energy in radium, thus stated by Professor Curie:

"Where is the source of this energy? Both Madame Curie and myself are unable to go beyond hypotheses; one of these consists in supposing the atoms of radium evolving and transforming into another simple body, and, despite the extreme slowness of that transformation, which cannot be located during a year, the amount of energy involved in that transformation is tremendous.

"The second hypothesis consists in the supposition that radium is capable of capturing and utilising some radiations of unknown nature which cross space without our knowledge."

CHAPTER II

FLYING MACHINES 1

Among the inventors engaged in building flying machines the most famous, perhaps, is M. Santos-Dumont, whose thrilling adventures and noteworthy successes have given him world-wide fame. He was the first, indeed, to build a balloon that was really steerable with any degree of certainty, winning a prize of $20,000 for driving his great air-ship over a certain specified course in Paris and bringing it back to the starting-point within a specified time. Another experimenter who has had some degree of success is the German, Count Zeppelin, who guided a huge air-ship over Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in 1901.

Carl E. Myers, an American, an expert balloonist, has also built balloons of small size which he has been able to steer. And mention must also be made of M. Severo, the Frenchman, whose ship, Pax, exploded in the air on its first trip, dropping the inventor and his assistant hundreds of feet downward to their death on the pavements of Paris.

It will be most interesting and instructive to consider especially the work of Santos-Dumont, for he has been not only the most successful in making actual flights of any of the inventors who have taken up this great problem of air navigation, but his adventures have been most romantic and thrilling. In five years' time he has built and operated no fewer than ten great air-ships which he has sailed in various parts of Europe and in America. He has even crowned his experiences with more than one shipwreck in the air, an adventure by the side of which an ordinary sea-wreck is tame indeed, and he has escaped with his life as a result not only of good fortune but of real daring and presence of mind in the face of danger.

For an inventor, M. Santos-Dumont is a rather extraordinary character. The typical inventor – at least so we think – is poor, starts poor at least, and has a struggle to rise. M. Santos-Dumont has always had plenty of means. The inventor is always first a dreamer, we think. M. Santos-Dumont is first a thoroughly practical man, an engineer with a good knowledge of science, to which he adds the imagination of the inventor and the keen love and daring of the sportsman and adventurer, without which his experiments could never have been carried through.

It would seem, indeed, that nature had especially equipped M. Santos-Dumont for his work in aërial navigation. Supposing an inventor, having all the mental equipment of Santos-Dumont, the ideas, the energy, the means – supposing such a man had weighed two hundred pounds! He would have had to build a very large ship to carry his own weight, and all his problems would have been more complex, more difficult. Nature made Santos-Dumont a very small, slim, slight man, weighing hardly more than one hundred pounds, but very active and muscular. The first time I ever saw him, in Crystal Palace, London, where he was setting up one of his air-ships in a huge gallery, I thought him at first glance to be some boy, a possible spectator, who was interested in flying machines. His face, bare and shaven, looked youthful; he wore a narrow-brimmed straw hat and was dressed in the height of fashion. One would not have guessed him to be the inventor. A moment later he had his coat off and was showing his men how to put up the great fan-like rudder of the ship which loomed above us like some enormous Rugby football, and then one saw the power that was in him. Brazilian by nationality, he has a dark face, large dark eyes, an alertness of step and an energetic way of talking. His boyhood was spent on his father's extensive coffee plantation in Brazil; his later years mostly in Paris, though he has been a frequent visitor to England and America. He speaks Spanish, French, and English with equal fluency. Indeed, hearing his English one would say that he must certainly have had his training in an English-speaking country, though no one would mistake him in appearance for either English or American, for he is very much a Latin in face and form. One finds him most unpretentious, modest, speaking freely of his inventions, and yet never taking to himself any undue credit.

Santos-Dumont is still a very young man to have accomplished so much. He was born in Brazil, July 20, 1873. From his earliest boyhood he was interested in kites and dreamed of being able to fly. He says:

"I cannot say at what age I made my first kites; but I remember how my comrades used to tease me at our game of 'Pigeon flies'! All the children gather round a table, and the leader calls out: 'Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!' and so on; and at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out: 'Dog flies! Fox flies!' or some other like impossibility, to catch us. If any one should raise a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called 'Man flies!' For at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was."

Of course he read Jules Verne's stories and was carried away in imagination in that author's wonderful balloons and flying machines. He also devoured the history of aërial navigation which he found in the works of Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. He says, further:

"At an early age I was taught the principles of mechanics by my father, an engineer of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris. From childhood I had a passion for making calculations and inventing; and from my tenth year I was accustomed to handle the powerful and heavy machines of our factories, and drive the compound locomotives on our plantation railroads. I was constantly taken up with the desire to lighten their parts; and I dreamed of air-ships and flying machines. The fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century those who occupied themselves with aërial navigation passed for crazy, rather pleased than offended me. It is incredible and yet true that in the kingdom of the wise, to which all of us flatter ourselves we belong, it is always the fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfière was thought a fool until the day when he stopped his insulters' mouths by launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens."

Upon going to Paris Santos-Dumont at once took up the work of making himself familiar with ballooning in all of its practical aspects. He saw that if he were ever to build an air-ship he must first know all there was to know about balloon-making, methods of filling with gas, lifting capacities, the action of balloons in the air, and all the thousand and one things connected with ordinary ballooning. And Paris has always been the centre of this information. He regards this preliminary knowledge as indispensable to every air-ship builder. He says:

"Before launching out into the construction of air-ships I took pains to make myself familiar with the handling of spherical balloons. I did not hasten, but took plenty of time. In all, I made something like thirty ascensions; at first as a passenger, then as my own captain, and at last alone. Some of these spherical balloons I rented, others I had constructed for me. Of such I have owned at least six or eight. And I do not believe that without such previous study and experience a man is capable of succeeding with an elongated balloon, whose handling is so much more delicate. Before attempting to direct an air-ship, it is necessary to have learned in an ordinary balloon the conditions of the atmospheric medium; to have become acquainted with the caprices of the wind, now caressing and now brutal, and to have gone thoroughly into the difficulties of the ballast problem, from the triple point of view of starting, of equilibrium in the air, and of landing at the end of the trip. To go up in an ordinary balloon, at least a dozen times, seems to me an indispensable preliminary for acquiring an exact notion of the requisites for the construction and handling of an elongated balloon, furnished with its motor and propeller."