RexTalionis: Also, note that your smoke detector might also have a very small amount of radioactive americium in it as well.

Hell yeah! USA USA USA!!!

\Sorry, but it had to be done.

Mmmmm, that's great bass!

It's in tasty beverages as well!!

There's a town here in New Mexico called Radium Springs, where the hoi polloi used to flock for "the cure."

The arsenic works better

Makes me think of the shoe-fitting fluoroscope. (new window)

you gotta wonder what's going through their heads "ya we really don't know shiat about this other than the glow, but fark I bet we could sell it as a cure-all!"
I guess with no FDA you can do whatever

RexTalionis: Also, note that your smoke detector might also have a very small amount of radioactive americium in it as well.

Were you a boyscout? (new window)

oldebayer: There's a town here in New Mexico called Radium Springs, where the hoi polloi used to flock for "the cure."

I'm not sure from the context that you know what hoi polloi means, so here's a helpful wiktionary article.

/an helpful wiktionary article?
//God, I'm a stinker

LordOfThePings: Mmmmm, that's great bass!

Don't forget, it's also a dessert topping!

oldebayer: There's a town here in New Mexico called Radium Springs, where the hoi polloi used to flock for "the cure."

Pet Peave

Shenanigans!: LordOfThePings: Mmmmm, that's great bass!

Don't forget, it's also a dessert topping!

Oh, right. Those got conflated in my memory.

rocinante721: To be served in uranium glass

[www.oxygenee.com image 320x200]

If you're ever in Vegas, be sure to visit the Atomic Testing Museum. They have some samples of Uranium glazes which are remarkably radioactive.
Could explain a lot about the Sixties...

Heating with Radium

Workers in factories that produced 'glow in the dark' radium dials on clocks and such used to paint their teeth (and other body parts) with the radium paint. What fun! Who knew?

You know, people are smart enough to not buy dangerous quack nostrums, I think we need to do away with the FDA, cause, you know, they came about as a result of many people dying from Radiothor.

See Also:

Radium Girls by Claudia Clark - subtitled "Women and industrial health reform, 1910-1935"

and, more chilling:

The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome "America's secret medical experiments in the cold war"

Search google for "Radium Girls" - Back in the early 1900s, they painted the numbers on watch dials with radium paint, licking their brushes to sharpen them until their jaws started falling off....

acronym: [www.tiberiapictures.com image 240x139]

Those have Thorium.

KarmicDisaster: [www.mentalfloss.com image 430x249]

Heating with Radium

LOL how naive! They think we would be able to afford maids to serve us tea in the year 2000.

Hester Prynne: Search google for "Radium Girls" - Back in the early 1900s, they painted the numbers on watch dials with radium paint, licking their brushes to sharpen them until their jaws started falling off....

I can't imagine licking regular paint would have been good for them either.

the government needs to get out of the free markets way and let people enhance their products with radium if they want.

What's with the Radium stories lately? There was just a special on History or something last week about Radium back in the day. Or was it just a lazy writer at BB saw the show too and bingo bango we have an article.

Semi-relevant fact: Some (all?) radium isotopes decay into polonium.

Uncle Tractor: Semi-relevant fact: Some (all?) radium isotopes decay into polonium.

And if you expose Radium to an intense Neutron source you will get Neudium. A key component in the bomb seen in this documentary (new window) about the cold war...

Do you suppose that in the future people will say, "Botulinum? That's a biological weapon. You mean people willingly injected that into their face? (Botox)

Tergiversada: Do you suppose that in the future people will say, "Botulinum? That's a biological weapon. You mean people willingly injected that into their face? (Botox)

Then again, people were saying that the same day it was announced, which wasn't the case back then.

Saw an empty bottle of radium nail polish in an antique store a while back. I should have picked it up.
/csb

I thought is was only good for cracking software.....

Tergiversada: Do you suppose that in the future people will say, "Botulinum? That's a biological weapon. You mean people willingly injected that into their face? (Botox)

In the future? I say that now! Farking morans thinking the path to beauty is to remove your ability to communicate using your facial muscles.

RexTalionis: Radium was also the thing that made clockfaces glow before people discovered other (safer) phosphors.

Also, uranium used to be an additive to dentures to give it that "natural" glow.

Radium paint ("Undark" being a common brand name) was radium and zinc sulfide as a phosphor. Zinc sulfide was the glow-in-the-dark pigment of the 70's, 80's & 90's. You're not seeing the radium itself glow, the alpha particles are exciting the zinc sulfide which then glows. Promethium and strontium replaced radium for awhile and were eventually discontinued completely in the 60's, at least for consumer products. Some industrial and military equipment used it on the dials.

If you find one, it's not as bright as it was originally. Not because the radium was used up, radium has a half-life of 1600 years. Rather, the alpha particles damage the phosphor over time and it stops glowing.

We put a geiger counter next to one, with the watch glass intact, it made a LOT of noise. The watch glass should block its alpha decay, but it also makes gamma and had a cascade of short-lived radioisotopes in the decay chain after that that make beta as well as alpha.

They use tiny phosphor-lined tubes of tritium gas now. Tritium's one of the most expensive substances on the planet, though. Also only has a 12 year half-life.

Oznog: RexTalionis: Radium was also the thing that made clockfaces glow before people discovered other (safer) phosphors.

Also, uranium used to be an additive to dentures to give it that "natural" glow.

Radium paint ("Undark" being a common brand name) was radium and zinc sulfide as a phosphor. Zinc sulfide was the glow-in-the-dark pigment of the 70's, 80's & 90's. You're not seeing the radium itself glow, the alpha particles are exciting the zinc sulfide which then glows. Promethium and strontium replaced radium for awhile and were eventually discontinued completely in the 60's, at least for consumer products. Some industrial and military equipment used it on the dials.

If you find one, it's not as bright as it was originally. Not because the radium was used up, radium has a half-life of 1600 years. Rather, the alpha particles damage the phosphor over time and it stops glowing.

We put a geiger counter next to one, with the watch glass intact, it made a LOT of noise. The watch glass should block its alpha decay, but it also makes gamma and had a cascade of short-lived radioisotopes in the decay chain after that that make beta as well as alpha.

They use tiny phosphor-lined tubes of tritium gas now. Tritium's one of the most expensive substances on the planet, though. Also only has a 12 year half-life.

At the Submarine Force Library and Museums warehouse they found some old WWII depth gauges on a shelf so they bagged and tagged them for disposal. They took them to the nuke barge on lower base to take care of. So far so good right? Well, they didn't do it right (the curators weren't trained for it and these particular ones were more radioactive than the others that they had come across in the past) and they ended up leaving a nice little trail of contamination from the warehouse into the barge where it got spread all over the place. It wasn't discovered until the next day when they did a routine radiological survey of the barge and found hot spots everywhere. The freak-out was epic as they scrambled to find the source of the contamination. They finally figured it out and got it cleaned up but it does highlight that the stuff isn't exactly safe.

When I was in junior high school, I took my grandfather's good watch which had a luminous dial among other features to show to my science teacher. After he pointed a Geiger counter at it, he used a pair of tongs to pop it into the same little lead cask he kept uranium samples in. He then called my mother and I think the AEC.

I never saw that watch again and my grandfather told me to stay away from his WWI souvenirs.

foxyshadis: Tergiversada: Do you suppose that in the future people will say, "Botulinum? That's a biological weapon. You mean people willingly injected that into their face? (Botox)

Then again, people were saying that the same day it was announced, which wasn't the case back then.

Saw an empty bottle of radium nail polish in an antique store a while back. I should have picked it up.
/csb

I wish I had seen that. I collect vintage cosmetics!

Tergiversada: Do you suppose that in the future people will say, "Botulinum? That's a biological weapon. You mean people willingly injected that into their face? (Botox)

I read an article last year about some dumb b*tch that kept getting botox while pregnant and had a boy that was profoundly retarded and deaf and blind as well.
Coincidence?

buckler: here to help: [amazingdata.com image 347x425]

I'm still horrified by the pictures of that guy whose jaw dropped off after drinking radium water for awhile.

Yeouch! Have not seen. Do not really care to.

This is a perfect example of why you shouldn't really trust what the gov and industry tells you about the safety of new products. If it hasn't been around for twenty years or more I'm not putting it in my body.

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