THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

Section 1

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as
Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth
century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements
and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful
combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as
the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of
a century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties
prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the
essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a
minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy
gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the
course of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that he
was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release
of energy was gold. But the thing was done--at the cost of a blistered
chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible
speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew
that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might
still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the
strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that
particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and which
suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of
sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.