Radium bromide Institute had four grams of radium total, which at the time was more than half the world supply. Countries all over the world set out to make as much radium as possible, a time consuming and expensive task. It was reported in "Science" magazine in 1919 that the United States had produced approximately 55 grams of radium since 1913, which was also more than half the radium produced in the world at the time. A principal source for radium is pitchblende, which holds a total of 257 mg of radium per ton of UO. Obviously with so little product recovered
Radium ("ray"): this was in recognition of radium's power of emitting energy in the form of rays. On September 1910, Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne announced that they had isolated radium as a pure metal through the electrolysis of a pure radium chloride (RaCl) solution using a mercury cathode, producing a radium–mercury amalgam. This amalgam was then heated in an atmosphere of hydrogen gas to remove the mercury, leaving pure radium metal. Later that same year, E. Eoler isolated radium by thermal decomposition of its azide, Ra(N). Radium metal was first industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by