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Hokitika Guardian, 24 June 1932, Page 4

Great interest lias been aroused , in scientific circles by. the experiments in atomic disintegration carried out at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, by Drs. Walton and Cockroft, says “The Times.” Lord Rutherford, under whom tlio work Iris been done, stated that, valuable light bad been thrown on new and powerful methods of attacking the problems of atomic disintegration. The manner in which the atom was split in those experiments was by means o f a vacuum tube thromih which millions of particles a second were fired at a speed of 10,COO kilometres a second. The atom has lin n split before, but in tlnve experiments energies were procured from atoms as fhev trim nn 100 times gieater than that of the particles by which thr-v wore attacked (with a voltnog of 120.000). A second discovery of importance was that some of the hydrogen atoms nr - they "’ere bombarded broke into helium. A point cf interest in t’’> experiments was tile use of thyratro’s for the high-speed automatic counting of physical ..phenomena. Tn a pape” "omwinicatod to the Royal Society in 3\lav last year Lord Rutherford described the functions of this now device. The drawback of using a mechanical relay and a counting

metre, in conjunction with a valve amplifier, for counting physical events winch are repeated very 'rapidly is that a small but definite . time is required by the armatures to move to and fro in the process of counting, and, therefore, if a second particle arrives before til© recording of the first has been completed it. will be missed. This difficulty has been, overcome by the use of the thyratron valves instead of mechanical relays. These valves have negligible inertia and no moving parts, and there is not the small time lag which occurs in any mechanical relay. Experiments in tiiyratrons in connection with the counting of alpha particles were carried out at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1939. While the use of tiiyratrons lr’s been demonstrated in connection with the counting of alpha particles, research is proceeding on types which may he applicable to other problems requiring the counting of rapid repeatable phenomena.