Helium

The U. S. Navy Department and the Bureau of Mines last week announced successful experiments anent a new use for helium. Faced with severe diffculties in diving operations to raise the sunken submarine S-51 from 128 feet of water off Block Island (TIME, Oct. 5, 12), experts designed a compression chamber wherein animals were supplied with various mixtures of oxygen to find a combination that did not give them "caisson disease" or "the bends," as divers call the dangerous condition produced when they are brought too swiftly out of high-pressure depths. The basis of this dangerous condition is the formation of bubbles in the blood stream, bubbles of nitrogen that has not escaped fast enough from solution in the blood.

Helium, which goes out of solution far more swiftly than nitrogen, and is just as inert chemically, promises to serve as an efficient substitute for nitrogen as the 79% inert diluent of oxygen in a diver's breathing atmosphere, and to permit longer work at greater depths.

At Dayton, Ohio, last fortnight, Chemist C. F. Adams claimed to have converted hydrogen into helium by a process analogous to that by which he and others claim the transmutation of mercury into gold--bombarding the atoms with electricity. If practicable on a large scale, this process would greatly facilitate the preparation of helium for airship bags. It is now obtained chiefly by difficult fractional distillation of the inert gases found in certain metallic ores and in the natural gas wells and mineral springs of Kansas, Texas and the Pyrenees.