Evening star., 1941-06-12
OF Stors, Men
And Atoms
Notebook of Science Progress
In Laboratory, Field
And Study
Bu Thomas r. Henry.

By ThOMdS n. henry.
The fingerprints of iron and all its
family anywhere in creation now can be
identified almost instantaneously with
the closing of the last major gap by
Bureau of Standards physicist
The bureau announced today that DR..
William F. Meggers, head of its spec
troscopy laboratory, and DR.. Charlotte
E. Moore. Princeton University astr )n-
omer, have completed the laborious job
of determining the second spectrum OF
vanadium, the iron-like metal which
has become an essential war mineral be-
cause of the toughness, elasticity and
tensile strength minute amounts of 1t
add to the steel from which big gun
barrels are made Vanadium contamina-
tions are responsible for the unique value
of Swedish iron TO Germany.
While far from rare metal, vanadium
has not been known up to the present in
the absolutely pure form necessary for
scientific determinations. For the present
Job, however, Dr. Meggers was able to
obtain two almost 100 per cent pure
on the fact that every element when
made luminous emits light only of certain
Wave-lengths which can be identlfled
and which are duplicated by no other
element. DR.. Meggers has identified
altogether nearly 1000 different wave
lengths from the mineral the falntest
trace of any one of which in scrap from
,,i1a hn Gun nr
would be certain evidence OF the pres
ence of vanadium there. approximately
/, 100 of these lines are found only when
the atoms of the metal are stripped of
one OF their outer electrons.
Hitherto analysis of iron to determine
the valuable vanadium impurities has
been a long, tiresome job. With the
present system the analysis can be made
in about second with much more ac-
curate results than were possible from
chemical methods. 1t would be possible,
DR. Meggers said, to make the test OF
big gun in the field and much time may
be saved in the manufacture of essential
war implements.
The almost complete spectra of all the
other members of the iron family-1ron
itself, cobalt, nickel, titanium and CO.
lumbian-already are well known. Or.
Moore's interest in the problem was
because of the substantial amounts of
the metal which, in the form OF gas,
are present in the outer atmosphere OF
the sun. The element may also form
part of the gaseous envelopes of some Of
the stars.
DR.. Meggers found that the element,
heated in an electric spark to the point
where it becomes a glowing gas, emits
light of almost every known color in
addition to a good deal of radiation in
the invisible infrared and ultraviolet
portions of the spectrum. This may be
connected in some way with the multi
tude of colors which it forms in liquid
solution and which led its original dis
coverer to name it after Vanadia, the
ancient Swedish goddess of beauty.
Dr. Meggers has also nearly completed
the job of fingerprinting the element
thulium, perhaps the rareSt of all the
90 basic constituents which make up the
universe. This has been impossible in
the past because there was no thulium
in the world even remotely approaching
purity Any sample which was made
luminous would give out light of wave
lengths belonging to other elements
indisputable proof of the presence of
those elements in the sample.
A few months ago the Bureau of
Standards obtained from the estate of
the late Prof. c. James of the University
of New Hampshire, long the worlds fore
most authority on the rare earth group
of elements to which thulium belongs, a
tiny sample of the element which had
been put through approximately $4,000
fractional crystalizations in an effort to
eliminate impurities. DR.. Meggers found
that it still was highly contaminated,
but only with ytterbium, one of the
other rare earth elements. The spectrum
of this was we'll known and Dr. Meggers
had only to eliminate the easily recog-
nized ytterbium lines from the COM
pleted spectrum.
He found that luminous thulium emits
light of approximately 5000 wave
lengths, over the entire range of the
radiation spectrum. The result is a very
intense white light. This makes it pos
sible that thulium also will become an
essential war commodity for use in the
electrodes of high-power carbon arc
lamps used as searchlights to spot air
raiders.
The fingerprinting of creation is now
nearly finished job except for few of
the elements even rarer than thulium, of
which no pure samples ever have been
obtained. The complete spectras of all
the elements may be expected to elm
mate all uncertainty as to what the
universe iS made of