Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 1946 FATE AND THE FINDER OF URANIUM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 58, 3 April 1946, Page 4

Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 1946 FATE AND THE FINDER OF URANIUM

UNTIL 150 years ago the world managed to get along without knowing anything about uranium the element which was the keystone of research on the atomic bomb. Several strange relationships are associated with the discovery and naming of this element. The German chemist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who detected its presence in pitchblende m 1789, named it after the planet Uranus, which had been discovered eight years before by his friend Sir William Herschel, who also made important observations of Mars. Klaproth had risen from apothecary in Berlin, Danzig and elsewhere to the post 'of Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Artillery, and so must have been intimately informed on the manufacture of bombs. His son, Heinrich Julius, however, was a scholar of an entirely different order. He became one of the foremost Orientalists of his time, served at the academy in St. Petersburg, and wrote a valuable work on the history of Japan. He could hardly have foreseen that a laboratory discovery by his father was destined 156 years later to leave its mark on Japan itself, as well as on the history of science and of the world.