alone with the X-ray man, Marvin plied him with questions. He so fascinated the radiographer that presently he was rewarded with a mystery even greater than that of the subtle unseen light. He was taken into a dark closet and permitted to peer into a small instrument containing salts of radium.

He saw a flight of stars, a sheaf of rays, a faint fierce sparkling! The heavy metallic radium atom was exploding! It was bombarding a small black screen with cannon flashes!

Instantly the boy inquired why somebody did not capture the power of that explosion and set it to work. He was told that any such achievement was impossible. The show was not affected by heat or cold, and would continue for a thousand years or more till the radium was all used up.

What were those flashes? How could he learn more about them? He must wait till he had enough physics to follow the writings of a man named Rutherford.

He was sorry to wait, but he was glad that some human being was at work on the job. He went home full of wonder and impatience. He never forgot the marvelous show. All through the year he kept seeing those immortal fireflies charging the darkness and wasting energy. He no longer broke the law by helping his mates with their mathematics, but spent extra time each day in reading mathematics beyond the requirements.

And so his high-school years went by. Athletics and girls, Latin and French and German went far to divert his mind from the mysteries of radium.

It was not until 1911, when he was about to graduate and enter Yale, that he ran on an article by the mysterious Rutherford and found himself able to understand some of it.

He had long since learned that even solid iron is full of spaces, and that within the spaces are minute particles in constant motion. He was now to learn that the minute particles are themselves hollow—that an atom is a central nucleus of positive electricity which holds in its sky one or more moons of negative electricity.

In other words, the cheek of a girl, which feels so smooth to the lips, is really a starry sky full of electric suns and moons. The tension between each sun and its moons is all that keeps the cheek from exploding when you kiss it. And here he had been calling them all “darlin’”! Well, he might have known that girls were composed of electricity. He had often felt it thrilling up his arm.

An 

 Prev. P 5/206 next