Mrs. Josie Bishop is a small, bright, sun-browned widow with four grown children. Twenty years ago she moved to California's Mojave Desert from New Mexico, arriving with "a can of beans, a loaf of bread but no butter." She owns a patch of mining territory 27 miles north of Mojave, near wild, scenic Red Rock Canyon. Her claim to this land was recently in litigation, was cleared a few weeks ago after the case reached the California Supreme Court. Last week it looked as though Mrs. Bishop's troubles were over. Newsstories from Southern California made it appear that Mrs. Josie Bishop owns an extremely rich deposit of radium-bearing ore—one of the richest, in proportion of radium to the ton, ever discovered.
A rich radium deposit is one which yields 90 to 120 milligrams (.00315 to .0042 oz.) nearly pure radium bromide salt per ton of concentrated ore (50 tons of crude ore). From ore bodies of such richness in northwestern Canada the refining plant is able to extract one gram of commercially pure radium from 550 tons of mined ore. A San Diego mining engineer and chemist named F. S. Kearney, now working in Mexico, assayed Mrs. Bishop's ore at 130 milligrams of radium per ton. This high figure, Mrs. Bishop said, was confirmed when she sent a sample to the Institut de Radium in Paris (once presided over by the late Marie Curie). Present price of radium is $25 per milligram, $25,000 per gram, $700,000 per ounce. Mrs. Bishop suspected for years that she had radium ore on her property, kept it quiet until her claim was cleared in the courts. Last week the excited little woman did not know just how extensive her deposit was, but she and her lawyers laid plans for a thorough survey and hoped to write a new chapter in the shifting course of world radium production.
The radium discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie was laboriously extracted from a radioactive mineral called pitchblende, found in what is now Czechoslovakia. For years those deposits remained the only source of the world supply. Then a radium-bearing ore, carnotite, was discovered in Utah and Colorado. This was a low-grade ore but with the help of the U. S. Bureau of Mines and several corporations, the U. S. became the biggest radium-producing country, at one time turning out 80% of world production. Between 1912 and 1922 the U. S. produced more than 170 grams. In those early days the price ranged around $110,000 per gram.
Meanwhile, Belgian prospectors had discovered veins of pitchblende in the Belgian Congo no less than 20 times richer than the U. S. carnotite. After the War, Belgium's Union Minière du Haut Katanga started mining this material, shipping it to the mother country for refining. The U. S. with its low-grade carnotite could not compete and soon dropped out of the world picture. The Belgian company enjoyed what amounted to a monopoly, producing just enough to fill the demand at its arbitrarily maintained price of $70,000 per gram. Since the medicinal uses of the element were rapidly expanding, grumblings were heard from other nations that the Belgian monopoly was cruelly greedy, especially since the cost of processing the African ore, exclusive of actual digging costs and overhead, was estimated to be not more than $10,000 per gram.