Helium radium

The experiment conducted by Rutherford and his co-workers involved bombarding gold foil with alpha particles, which are doubly charged helium atoms. The apparatus used in their experiment is shown in Figure 14-9. The alpha particles are produced by the radioactive decay of radium, and a narrow beam of these particles emerges from a deep hole in a block of lead. The beam of particles is directed at a thin metal foil, approximately 10,000 atoms thick. The alpha particles are delected by the light they produce when they collide with scintilltaion screens, which are zinc sulfide-covered plates much like the front of the picture tube in a television set. The screen... 

Fajans K, Gohring O (1913) Uber die komplexe Natur des UrX. Naturwissenschaften 1 339 Ramsay W, Soddy F (1903) Experiments in radioactivity and the production of helium from radium. Proc R Soc London 72 204-207... 

It is now accepted as a proved fact that the element radium decomposes with the formation of other elements, the simplest of which is apparently helium, and the experiments of Sir William Ramsay have indicated that the energy liberated by radium can effect the transmutation of other elements into one another but in such cases man can only watch the changes that go on, and cannot control or vary them. But in the building-up process that has apparently now been discovered, the energy for the change is artificially supplied and controlled, and the changes are thus of a different order from the radioactive decompositions of a decaying element. 

As the transmutation rush continued across 1913 and 1914, the Alchemical Society continued to engage with scientific research. The engineer Herbert Chatley, in his December 12, 1913, talk to the Society entitled Alchemy in China, discussed Ramsay s transmutations, presumably his radon-induced supposed transmutations from copper to lithium and his observed transmutations of radium to helium. Chatley opined that a more gradual change would produce gold as one of the descending steps (37). And the December... 

Ramsay, William, and Frederick Soddy. 1903. Experiments in Radio-Activity, and the Production of Helium from Radium. Nature (August 13, 1903) 354.—55. 

It had been observed already that the radioactive minerals on heating give off Helium — a gaseous element, characterised by a particular yellow line in its spectium — and it seemed not unlikely that helium might be the ultimate decomposition product of the emanation. A research to settle this point was undertaken by Sir William Ramsay and Mr. Soddy, and a preliminary experiment having confirmed the above speculation, they carried out further very careful experiments. "The maximum amount of the emanation obtained from 50 milligrams of radium bromide was conveyed by means of oxygen into a U-tube cooled in liquid air, and the latter was then extracted by the pump." The spectrum... 

Here, then, for the first time in the history of Chemistry, we have the undoubted formation of one chemical element from another, for, leaving out of the question the nature of the emanation, there can be no doubt that radium is a chemical element. This is a point which must be insisted upon, for it has been suggested that radium may be a compound of helium with some unknown element or, perhaps, a compound ofhdium with lead, since it has been shown that lead is probably one of the end products of the decomposition of radium. The following considerations, however, show this view to be altogether untenable (i.) All attempts to prepare compounds of helium with other... 

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