Boys' Second Book of Inventions

BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS

BY RAY STANNARD BAKER Author of Boys' Book of Inventions, Seen in Germany
FULLY ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY MCMIX
Copyright, 1903, by McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. Published, November, 1903, N
BOYS' SECOND BOOK OF INVENTIONS

No substance ever discovered better deserves the term Miracle of Science, given it by a famous English experimenter, than radium. Here is a little pinch of white powder that looks much like common table salt. It is one of many similar pinches sealed in little glass tubes and owned by Professor Curie, of Paris. If you should find one of these little tubes in the street you would think it hardly worth carrying away, and yet many a one of them could not be bought for a small fortune. For all the radium in the world to-day could be heaped on a single table-spoon; a pound of it would be worth nearly a million dollars, or more than three thousand times its weight in pure gold.
Professor and Madame Curie, who discovered radium, now possess the largest amount of any one, but there are small quantities in the hands of English and German scientists, and perhaps a dozen specimens in America, one owned by the American Museum of Natural History and several by Mr. W. J. Hammer, of New York, who was the first American to experiment with the rare and precious substance.

M. Curie Explaining the Wonders of Radium at the Sorbonne.