Arizona republican., 1907-08-26
ALASKA MAY PRODUCE
 RADIUM FOR WORLD
Recent Discovery in Rocks of North land-Soeiety of Scientific Research of Paris Has Sent Henri 6ertholet on Investigating Expedition.

Seattle. Aug. 22.-(Special Corre- spondence of The Republican.)-Wh naturally. the principal exhibit from Alaska at the Alaska Yukon Pacific
 Exposition. which will be held at Sea
 attle in 1909 will be the different
 golds produced by the north. there Is another far more valuable element that will also have a place in the mineral
 building.
 Radium, according to a leading Pa
 risian scientist can be produced in large quantities from certain of the rocks of the north, and this savant, Henri Bertholet. son of member of
 the French Gallery of Forty Immottals. | Is now in Alaska arranging for a ship
 ment of rock to Paris where it may be
 treated under the most favorable cir lcumstances and it's value as a radium producer ascertained.
 Gold is worth about three hundred dollars a pound. That is, it costs three hundred dollars to extract a
 pound of gold from the earth. Radium is worth about five million dollars a pound; at least it is figured it would cost that sum Q extract pound of radium from the pitchlends in which lit is found. Of course no one has yet succeeded in extracting pound of radium and the estimate of its val
 ue per pound is more or less approx innate.
 Radium, at the present time, is ob- tained only in one portion of the world. l. is extracted from pitchlendsN of certain kind found only in the Aus trian empire. It required that tons pf pitchlends to treated to produce a few
 grains of radium, and this is one of
 the reasons for radhm's enormous
 price. Recently Austria has forbidden
 the export of pitchends in quantity and as a result scientists experiment.
 ing with this newest, rarest and most valuable of the clements, have been at loss to know where to get a perma- nent supply. Now all eyes are direct ed to Alaska and Yukon, and great hopes ara held that not only will a
 permanent supply be obtained from the great white north, but also that this supply will be in such form that the cost of producing radium will be
 reduced from millions of dollars pound to thousands or even hundreds. When aluminium was first discovered its cost was prohibitive the process by which it was produced costing hum dreds of dollars a pound. But after years of experiments. a process was discovered which placed aluminium in the market commercially. It is hoped and believed by leading scientists that radium will also be produced in a short time commercially. and that thereby many of the industrial pro- cesses of the world today be greatly cheapened and simplified.
 Like so many other scientific dis coveries the knowledge that radium was present in the rocks of the north came quite by accident. The society for scientific research, of which Mir. Bertholet is a member. received sev- eraI rocks from Alaska for a purpose entirely disconnected with radium. One of these specimens happened toI be laid near a photographic plate. When the plate was developed there was found on it the outline of several instruments that were nearby at the time.
 The rock and the plate were in con- function This led to an investigation which revealed the fact that in all the rock from Alaska were traces of ra- dium. Hence Henri Bertholets trip from Paris to Fairbanks. The exact location of the mine from whose spec linens the radium was taken is not,