Bismuth

The chapel announcements at Mercer University (Macon, Ga.) were more interesting than usual one morning last week. They included the romantic story of a hardworking young professor suddenly grown rich. He was Palmer H. Craig, 29, head of the Mercer physics department, a doctor of philosophy only these seven months. While working up his doctor's thesis at the University of Cincinnati he had made an invention. Now the Westinghouse Electric Co. had offered him $100,000. The invention, simplicity itself, was designed to replace the batteries and vacuum tubes of the ordinary radio receiving set. It consisted of ten thin plates of bismuth,* piled one on another, with wires running between them, the whole protected by sulphur and contained in a box. It exploited bismuth's properties of rectifying alternating currents and of adding to any charges of energy it receives. . . . Dr. Craig temporized with the $100,000 offer.

*";bastard metal" element, brittle, reddish white, mined in the free state in Saxony, Bohemia, Cornwall. Bolivia. Its best known use is as bismuth subnitrate, a therapeutic for dyspepsia and diarrhea. Taken internally with water the white powder slowly forms nitric acid, a powerful antiseptic. Its physical properties make it astringent, good for nausea.