Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 February 1904 — Radium and Millennium. [ARTICLE]

Radium and Millennium.

There seem to lie no limits to the strange ideas which the new pi'ipciph’ of radio-activity may compel us to accept, says an English expert. Dr. Rutherford has recently shown that I’adlum 'CoinpoutKls project atoms into kurrounding space with a velocity of twenty thousand miles a second, a speed which no other form of matter has been known to reach. A train going at sixty miles an hour — a mile a ifiinuto—travels one-sixtieth of-ft mile per second,;-so that the' radium emanation flies one million two hundred thousand time’s as fast as an expx’ess train. Nevertheless, we are not yet prepared for the view that radio-ac-tive emanations from the sun give poor mortals on the planet headache. More likely are the causes business worries, want of fresh air and the fiscal question. public and private. But perhaps tho most advanced conception is that of M. Gustave le Boh, the French physicist, who, after discussing the "Energy Intra-Atomic” of atoms, forsees a millennium when “an illimitable source of |M>wer wilt bo placed at the sen Ice of humanity, without price, and man will no longer need to work for It. Tho poor will thin be equal to the rich, and the social xtuestion will trouble us no more" —unleiA, possibly, which le Bon seems to have over looked, some Yankee trust got hold of the whole supply. We fancy a few thousand years may (Japso before mankind lias yoked the atoms to his machines.