Abstract
Grimmett became fascinated by artificial radioactivity when it was announced in 1933. He realized that an artificial radioactive isotope might be found to replace radium, and he suggested this in a paper in Nature in 1937 citing radio-sodium as a possibility, but the half-life was too short. But he continued to read the literature. Radioactive cobalt had been discovered in 1935, and several papers appeared over the next few years. By 1942, its main characteristics were known, and Grimmett realized that it was a candidate to replace radium if it could be made in large enough quantities. By 1946, this question was answered by the knowledge that it could be produced in nuclear reactors.
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Notes
- 1.
Arthur Stewart Eve (1862–1948) was born in England and graduated in Physics and Mathematics at Cambridge. In 1903, at the age of 41, he moved to Canada as Lecturer in Mathematics and Physics at McGill University. From 1904 to 1909, he worked with Rutherford on radioactivity. He also knew Harold Wilson who was on the faculty at McGill from 1909 to 1912 when he left to help start the Rice Institute in Houston. From 1919 to 1935, Eve was Chairman of the Physics Department at McGill and Dean of the faculty of Graduate Studies (1930–1935). When he retired, he moved back to England. Rutherford had been the first Honorary Physicist at the Radium Beam Therapy Research Unit. He died suddenly in 1937, and Eve took his place. Eve also wrote the official biography of Rutherford.
- 2.
In 1945, radioactivity was measured in terms of curies. One curie was defined as 3.7 × 107 disintegrations per second, which was the number of disintegrations per second from 1 g of radium. Therefore, 1 g of radium could be approximately considered as 1 curie of radium although that terminology was never used. Radium was always measured in terms of its mass; all other radioactive isotopes were measured in curies. The relationship between the activity and mass of a radioactive isotope was called its specific activity in terms of activity per unit mass.
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Almond, P.R. (2013). Replacing Radium, 1937–1949. In: Cobalt Blues. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4924-9_6
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