Showing: Signal lights Lead glass windows Lead shield Scintillation shield Photomultiplier tube Solution storage tank under platform
Shielding for the Geneva counter consisted of 3 inches of lead. Only the most energetic background gamma rays and cosmic rays can penetrate this amount of shielding, and the number that do so remain almost constant during successive counting periods. This constant remaining “background” radiation level, once determined, could be subtracted from the recorded number of emissions to provide the correct radiation total from the body of each person examined.
[Illustration: Figure 3 _Typical crystals and liquid materials used to produce scintillations for whole body counters and other radiation-detecting instruments. Scintillation counters provide much faster recording of radiation than Geiger counters, and are widely used in experiments with high-energy particle accelerators, as well as in whole body counters._]
To detect the gamma rays emitted by radioactive atoms disintegrating within the body, whole body counters take advantage of a property of radiation that has been known since 1896. In that year the English physicist William Crookes discovered that X rays react with certain chemicals to produce fluorescence. A few years later a New Zealand-born physicist, Ernest Rutherford (later Lord Rutherford), found that this glow consisted of many tiny individual flashes or scintillations, each caused by the emission of a single alpha particle. He laboriously counted individual flashes by observing them through a magnifying glass. If you examine a luminous watch with a hand lens in a dark room, you can see these fascinating scintillations, just as Rutherford saw them long ago.
Today, scientists have found several crystals, liquids, and plastics that are especially effective in showing scintillations caused by nuclear radiations. One of these substances, with the challenging name 2,2′-_p_-phenylene bis [5-phenyloxazole], often shortened to POPOP, was used in the scintillating liquid of the Geneva counter. How the flashes are detected can be appreciated by considering the infinitely small world of individual atoms and following a single atom as it disintegrates. (For a more complete explanation of radioactivity, see the companion booklet _Our Atomic World_ in this series.)