Then there is columbium, the American metal.  It is strange that an element named after Columbia should prove so impractical.  Columbium is a metal closely resembling tantalum and tantalum found a use as electric light filaments.  A columbium lamp should appeal to our patriotism.

The so-called “rare elements” are really abundant enough considering the earth’s crust as a whole, though they are so thinly scattered that they are usually overlooked and hard to extract.  But whenever one of them is found valuable it is soon found available.  A systematic search generally reveals it somewhere in sufficient quantity to be worked.  Who, then, will be the first to discover a use for indium, germanium, terbium, thulium, lanthanum, neodymium, scandium, samarium and others as unknown to us as tungsten was to our fathers?

As evidence of the statement that it does not matter how rare an element may be it will come into common use if it is found to be commonly useful, we may refer to radium.  A good rich specimen of radium ore, pitchblende, may contain as much, as one part in 4,000,000.  Madame Curie, the brilliant Polish Parisian, had to work for years before she could prove to the world that such an element existed and for years afterwards before she could get the metal out.  Yet now we can all afford a bit of radium to light up our watch dials in the dark.  The amount needed for this is infinitesimal.  If it were more it would scorch our skins, for radium is an element in eruption.  The atom throws off corpuscles at intervals as a Roman candle throws off blazing balls.  Some of these particles, the alpha rays, are atoms of another element, helium, charged with positive electricity and are ejected with a velocity of 18,000 miles a second.  Some of them, the beta rays, are negative electrons, only about one seven-thousandth the size of the others, but are ejected with almost the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second.  If one of the alpha projectiles strikes a slice of zinc sulfide it makes a splash of light big enough to be seen with a microscope, so we can now follow the flight of a single atom.  The luminous watch dials consist of a coating of zinc sulfide under continual bombardment by the radium projectiles.  Sir William Crookes invented this radium light apparatus and called it a “spinthariscope,” which is Greek for “spark-seer.”

Evidently if radium is so wasteful of its substance it cannot last forever nor could it have forever existed.  The elements then ate not necessarily eternal and immutable, as used to be supposed.  They have a natural length of life; they are born and die and propagate, at least some of them do.  Radium, for instance, is the offspring of ionium, which is the great-great-grandson of uranium, the heaviest of known elements.  Putting this chemical genealogy into biblical language we might say:  Uranium lived 5,000,000,000 years and begot Uranium X1, which lived 24.6 days and begot Uranium X2, which lived 69 seconds and begot Uranium