This is the famous Paneth and Peters work which they later withdrew - after receiving much criticism. They were trying to replicate Tandberg who claimed a new way to make helium which was in great demand for Airships. Deuterium was not yet discovered.
P&F were fully aware of all of this. Frank Grimer wrote: How interesting. One wonders what prompted them to look for helium in the first place.Was it ordinary hydrogen or heavy hydrogen? Nigel Dyer wrote: While looking for an article in a a copy of Nature from 1926 (as you do) I came across the following article describing how small quantities of helium had been seen when hydrogen was absorbed into palladium at room temperature. There is nothing new under the sun. https://www.nature.com/articles/118526a0?fbclid=IwAR3cI0_tWhMXny-_5VwiIZBr-OmiXLocmzd7gWgBCC1LKNtPHOShckdpUD4 The article I was really looking for was one of the early Klein papers on there being a fifth dimension, following up an idea that this might be part of the explanation of how hydrogen gets converted to helium.
