Geiger counter

I made the discovery in the chem lab.

We got a brand new Geiger counter and it's...

By the way, have you ever used a Geiger counter?

I haven't had to, Walter.

Very few of my pupils are named Geiger.

No. I'm

afraid you don't understand.

A Geiger counter is an instrument that measures the number and intensity of emanations from radioactive substances.

Germans were way ahead and still are, everybody, in Geiger counters.

We all know like kind of what a Geiger counter is, right? And Geiger-Muller were too German, Geiger-Muller.

And they count.

What are they counting? Well, they can count alpha rays and gamma rays and all sorts of different things, right? And so gamma is that smallest of wave, right? And it gets sent off inside the earth by decaying isotopes, primarily of uranium, thorium, and potassium, right? So it's decaying and it's coming up and out of the earth.

Lauren Vogelbaum here.

The closest that lots of us ever get to a Geiger counter is the movies.

In all kinds of media, from atomic age horror films to tragic dramas like Chernobyl to 1984's sewer monster classic C.H.U.D., you may have gotten a chill down your spine when a character pointed a boxy gadget into the darkness and was alerted to the presence of some yet unseen danger by an ominous clicking sound.

But Geiger counters aren't just a conveniently spooky audio prop, nor an obsolete technology that went out of fashion when people stopped building atomic bomb shelters in their backyards.

The Geiger counter, which in the scientific and engineering worlds is more precisely known as the Geiger-Mueller counter, is still frequently used to detect radiation in various settings.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it's the most commonly used portable radiation instrument.

The origins of this technology date back to the early 1900s.

But you should avoid that.