OI founder James Henry Breasted purchased the artifact, and many others, during his honeymoon trip to Egypt in 1894-95.It was while working in the Kent Laboratory building in the 1940s that Prof.
He also discovered that tritium similarly could be used for dating water, and therefore wine.
In 1950, he became a member of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
Additional complications come from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, and from the above-ground nuclear tests done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Willard Frank Libby (December 17, 1908 – September 8, 1980) was an American physical chemist noted for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology and palaeontology.
The resulting radiocarbon combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died.
The older a sample is, the less (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit accurate analysis of older samples.During World War II he worked in the Manhattan Project's Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories at Columbia University, developing the gaseous diffusion process for uranium enrichment.After the war, Libby accepted professorship at the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, where he developed the technique for dating organic compounds using carbon-14.Willard Libby and his UChicago associates developed radiocarbon dating -- an innovative method to measure the age of organic materials."Everything which has come down to us from heathendom is wrapped in a thick fog; it belongs to a space of time we cannot measure.Libby received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1960.