NEW ELEMENT

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 183, 30 April 1940, Page 3

NEW ELEMENT

Lightweight Helium

Discovered

Discovery in the earth’s atmosphere of at surprise element, lightweight helium, was reported recently by researchers working with the University of California's atom-busting machine, the cyclotron.

Known heretofore only as a ghost element that appeared and disappeared like a lightning Hash incidental to certain transmutations, it turned out to be a stable substance in the air. This lightweight helium, known technically us helium 3, would be ideal for giving dirigibles and other balloons a combination of high lifting power and nou-intlammability, but it is extremely scarce and herd to get. Professor Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, who with Robert Cornog made the discovery, found that the lightweight stuff comprised only one ten-millionth of the already minute regular helium content of the atmosphere. Professor Alvarez and Mr. Cornog obiained only a few million atoms —not enough to be seen under a microscope if bunched together. But they established that it was a real substance existing in nature, and uot just a laboratory freak. Previously, Professor Alvarez said, physics laboratories bad taken it for granted that helium 3 did uot exist outside an atom-smashing chamber, and then for only a few millionths of a second. Thus it supposedly did not last long enough to be found in nature. The experiment, Professor Alvarez added, was undertaken in the expectation that it would fail and therefore support the correction of the suppositious.

But the experiment succeeded and surprised even the researchers. Virtually all the helium used by mini comes from wells in the earth, the most of it from Texas and other southwestern states. It is supposed to be a product of the natural disintegration of radium. This decay process is constant and very slow, and it also involves the formation of the metal lead as an “end product.” By determining the proportion of lead in an ore deposit containing radium, natural scientists have calculated the minimum age of the earth at several billion years. During that period, helium has been accumulating. But radium decay has been observed to produce only regular helium. Professor Alvarez and Mr. Cornog tested some of it, however, and found a tiny trace of light-weight helium in it. Ordinary helium is the second lightest of the conventional elements, hydrogen being lightest. Helium 3 is 25 per cent, lighter than the ordinary element but about three times as heavy as regular hydrogen. Nevertheless, the lifting power of lightweight helium is close to that of hydrogen. It was calculated that lightweight helium would lift 05.7 per cent, as much weight as hydrogen. Ordinary helium has only about 92.3 per cent, of the lifting power of hydrogen. Thus helium 3 would be ideal for lighter-than-air craft.—‘‘Christian Science Monitor.”