AETHER AND ELECTRICITY

Villard's radiation was called. Villard found that they-radiation is,

like the X-rays, not deviable by magnetic forces.
In 1898 Rutherford was appointed to a chair in McGill Uni­
versity, Montreal, and there with R. B. Owens, the professor of
electrical engineering, began an investigation into the radio-activity
of the thorium compounds. The conductivity produced by the
oxide thoria in the air was found 1 to vary in an unexpected and
perplexing manner: it could be altered considerably by slight draughts
caused by opening or shutting a door. Eventually Rutherford con­
cluded that thoria emitted 2 very small amounts of some material
substance which was itself radio-active, and which could be carried
away in an air current : this, to which he gave the name thorium
emanation, was shown to be a gas belonging to the same chemical
family as helium and argon, but of high molecular weight. 3
Meanwhile in Cambridge C. T. R. Wilson had been developing 4
his cloud-chamber, which was to provide the most powerful of all
methods of investigation in atomic physics. In moist air, if a certain
degree of supersaturation is exceeded (this can be secured by a sudden
expansion of the air) condensation takes place on dust-nuclei, when
any are present : if by preliminary operations condensation is made
to take place on the dust-nuclei, and the resulting droplets are
allowed to settle, the air in the chamber is thereby freed from dust.
If now X-rays or radiations from a radio-active substance are passed
into the chamber, and if the degree of supersaturation is sufficient,
condensation again takes place : this is due to the production of
ions by the radiation. Thus the tracks of ionising radiations can be
made visible by the sudden expansion of a moist gas, each ion
becoming the centre of a visible globule of water. Wilson showed
that the ions produced by uranium radiation were identical with
those produced by X-rays. J. J. Thomson in July 1899 wrote
pointing out the advantages of the Wilson chamber to Rutherford,
who henceforth profited immensely by its use. In this way the
track of a single atomic projectile or electron could be rendered
visible.
An important property, discovered for the first time in connection
with thonum emanation, was that the radio-activity connected with
it rapidly decreased. This behaviour was found later to be character­
istic of all radio-active substances : but in the earliest known cases,
uranium and thorium, the half-period (i.e. the time required for the
activity to be reduced by one-half) is of the order of millions of years,
so the property had not hitherto been noticed. Rutherford found 5
that the intensity of the ' induced radiation' of thorium falls off
1
Owens, Phil. Mag.(5) xlviii (Oct. 1899), p. 360
• Phil. Mag.(5) xlix (Jan. 1900), p. 1
• Soon after this, Friedrich Ernst Dom of Halle found that radium, like thorium,
produced an emanation: Halle Nat. Ges. Abh. xxiii (1900).
' Phil. Trans. c!xxxix(A) (1897), p. 265; Proc. Comb. P.S. ix (1898), p. 333
• Phil. Mag. xiix (Feb. 1900), p. 161
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