ABSTRACT
This chapter includes early papers written in New Zealand, at the Cavendish Laboratory and during the Montreal period (1894-1906), as well as an introduction to Rutherford's early work by Sir Edward Appleton, and some reminiscences of his time in Canada by Professors H. L. Bronson and Otto Hahn. The proportionality between the content of uranium and radium in radio-active minerals strongly supports the view that radium is a decomposition product of uranium. According to the disintegration theory, the amount of radium per gram of uranium present in a mineral should be a constant whose value can be approximately deduced if the relative activity of pure radium and pure uranium is known. The known weight of radium bromide was dissolved in water and solutions were successively made up which contained 102 and 104 milligram of radium bromide per cubic centimeter. One part of radium is therefore in radio-active equilibrium with approximately 1,350,000 parts of uranium.
