The Active Straw

As atom-jumpy as most of the rest of mankind, Dr. Chauncey G. Suits of General Electric last week jumped to a conclusion. When Dr. Suits heard that some mysterious radioactivity was affecting photographic film at an Eastman Kodak plant, he mused out loud. Eastman, he told newsmen, was probably getting a drizzle of uneasy isotopes from the atomic bombs exploded in New Mexico or Japan. He was later proved not quite right--but not quite wrong enough for comfort.

Yes, announced Eastman, it had had a bit of radium trouble some time ago. A batch of film had been spoiled by packing it in cardboard made partly of waste paper from a factory using radium paint. Since then, the company had tested all packing materials for radioactivity. For a long time no trouble showed up. But recently, a shipment of strawboard proved to have 1,000 radioactive specks per sheet. The batch of strawboard had been discarded. The company preferred to say no more.

Where had the radioactive strawboard come from? Dr. Robley D. Evans of M.I.T. offered additional clues. It was made, he said, of straw cut in Illinois on Aug. 6, just 21 days after the explosion of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. Straw cut before the explosion proved entirely harmless. This coincidence suggested, thought Dr. Evans, that radioactive residues, carried into the upper atmosphere in New Mexico, had fallen with the rain on Illinois. The only other apparent possibility was that the Wabash River, whose water was used in the strawboard factory, carried radioactive silt.

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