100 YEARS AGO

A copy of the Peterborough Advertiser of May 7 has been sent to us, containing the announcement that radium has been found in beds of Oxford Clay near Fletton, Huntingdonshire. No particulars are given, but a long descriptive article on the discovery suggests that it will make “brickfields better than gold mines.” These sanguine anticipations will perhaps be tempered by the following extract from a paper by Prof. J. J. Thomson, read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society on February 15:— “Radium was found in garden soil from the laboratory garden, in the Cambridge gault, in gravel from a pit at Chesterton, in still greater quantities in sand from the sea-shore at Whitby, in the blue lias at Whitby, in powdered glass, in one specimen of flour, and in a specimen of precipitated silica.”

ALSO

In the souring of milk the amount of lactic acid developed may reach 0.80 per cent. in three or four days when the milk solidifies. In view of Sir O. Lodge's suggestion (NATURE, October 1, 1903), I have made experiments comparing the rate of acidification, in two to three days, with and without the influence of radium rays... It therefore appears to me that under normal conditions radium rays have little or no effect on the functions of the lactic acid bacillus.

From Nature 19 May 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

Mr. A. R. Thomson, R. A., has completed a painting on astronomy to decorate a wall in the entrance hall of the Science Museum, London, near the well-known Foucault pendulum. Mr. Thomson was given carte blanche to depict the subject of ‘Astronomy’, and he has chosen as his main theme the invention and development of the telescope. On the left the small sons of Dutch spectacle-makers are playing with combinations of pairs of lenses... In the centre of the picture Galileo is using his telescope, ministered to by three rather bewildered ladies. On the right the distrust and suspicion of this early period is shown by figures of authority against a background of burning books. The whole picture is dominated by the great two-hundred-inch Hale telescope, and the sky behind is an animated representation of heavenly bodies among the figures of the constellations.

From Nature 22 May 1954.