Women on a fast track
QUESTION How close to the sub-four-minute mile has a woman run?
THE closest a woman has run to a fourminute mile is the 4:12.56 record set by Russia’s Svetlana Masterkova in 1996.
Roger Bannister was celebrated as the first to run a sub-fourminute mile in 1954, but it went under the radar that 23 days later Britain’s Diane Leather became the first woman to break the fiveminute barrier, finishing in 4:59.6 at the Midland Championships. She reduced her time to 4:45 in 1955.
In June 1967, another British runner Anne Rosemary Smith ran 4:37.0, which was ratified by the International Association of Athletics Federations as its first official women’s world mile record.
Current world record holder Svetlana Masterkova had an unusual career. She was an 800m specialist who won the silver medal at the 1993 World Indoor Championships. In 1996, when she returned to competition after a maternity break, she ran the 1,500m as well as the 800m, winning Olympic gold medals in both.
Eleven days after winning the 1,500m in the Atlanta Games, Masterkova ran her first mile, at the Weltklasse Grand Prix in Zurich on August 14, 1996. She set a fast pace and ran away with the race, finishing in her world record of 4:12.56.
For two decades her record was not seriously challenged. That was until Ethiopia’s Genzebe Dibaba came on the scene. She set the world indoor record for the mile in Stockholm with 4:13.31 on February 17, 2016. This June she is hoping to break Masterkova’s world record.
Mrs Irene Watts, Huntingdon, Cambs. Following the death of Sir Roger Bannister, former mile record holder, Steve Ovett said ‘his legacy would be complete when a woman broke the fourminute mile’. It may happen. In 1989, the Journal Of Applied Physiology published the Mathematical Analysis Of Running Performance And World Running Records by Francois Peronnet and Guy Thibault of the University of Montreal.
Using equations that predict average power output for a number of athletic events, their model has so far proved accurate within one per cent. They have calculated that a woman will run a subfour-minute mile by 2033.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Does every element in the Periodic Table have a practical use?
THE Periodic Table is an elegant arrangement of chemical elements ordered by their atomic number and properties. Created by Russian chemist Dmitry I. Mendeleyev in the mid-19th century, it has been invaluable in the development of chemistry.
Most of the first 92 elements have some practical use while none of the chemical elements with atomic numbers higher than 98 — from einsteinium (99) to oganesson ( 118) — have any real applications. They are too dangerous, too expensive or too scarce — many can only be created in tiny amounts.
Thulium (atomic number 69) was once the butt of scientific jokes because for many years it was not considered to have any practical applications. However, a thulium laser is being developed as a treatment for cancer.
Extremely short-lived elements such as actinium (89) and astatine (85) are used only in research or to produce isotopes of other elements for medical purposes.
Protactinium (91) is listed between uranium and thorium, which both have numerous applications. But owing to its scarcity, high radioactivity and high toxicity, there are no known uses for protactinium. The most stable isotope of francium (87), francium-223, has a halflife of 22 minutes, which means it does not have a practical use.
The extremely rare berkelium (97) has no known practical applications.
Liam Jackson, Glasgow.
QUESTION The opening credits of Call The Midwife show a street with terrace houses and a huge ocean liner in view. Is this a genuine picture?
THE terrace houses are in Saville Road in Woolwich, South-East London. Of the young children playing in the street, the boy on the furthest right staring forlornly at the camera is my father, Fredrick Heather. Aged eight at the time, he remembered this photo being taken.
I believe it had been commissioned by the Evening Standard as part of a photo diary of post-World War II East London and was taken around 1948. The photographer would have been standing by the gates of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery.
My father was the second youngest of 11 children. My grandmother Mary Heather married a submariner, with whom she had two sons. After he died in World War I, she married John (Jack) Heather, a Coldstream Guardsman who had lost his left eye in the trenches.
Paul Heather, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. FURTHER to earlier answers, my mother was surprised to see the photo of the Dominion Monarch, which had docked at London’s King George V dock.
In December 1945, my father came home on this liner from Australia. He was in the Royal navy on HMS Indomitable during World War II as part of the British Pacific Fleet. He was given the chance to stay in Australia when the war finished as there was a huge shortage of manpower, but chose to return home.
He married my mother in April 1946 and they had 69 years together.
Carol Clarke, Ilkeston, Derbys.
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