Abstract
THE committee formed at the Brussels Congress of Radiology and Electricity in September, 1910, for the purpose of fixing an international standard of radium, of which a full account appeared in NATURE of October 6, 1910, met in Paris from March 25–28. There were present Mme. Curie, MM. Debierne, Rutherford, Soddy, Hahn, Meyer, and Schweidler. MM. Geitel, Eve, and Boltwood were unable to attend. The main purpose of the meeting was to compare the standard prepared by Mme. Curie with others prepared by Hönigschmid from the material in possession of the Académie des Sciences at Vienna, during the course of his new determination of the atomic weight of radium, referred to in NATURE of March 21 (p. 68). Mme. Curie's standard consisted of 21.99 milligrams of radium chloride specially prepared by methods similar to those used by her for atomic weight determination, and sealed up in a thin glass tube with every precaution against error. The Vienna standards consisted of three tubes, containing respectively 10.11, 31.17, 40.43 milligrams of radium chloride, which were sealed up in somewhat wider glass tubes, but of the same thickness of wall (0.27 mm.) as the other, and were prepared by methods based on those devised by T. W. Richards for weighing hygroscopic substances.
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The International Radium Standard . Nature 89, 115–116 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/089115a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/089115a0