![]() The vibration created a buzz of energy, visible as a faint shiver of light. This paint glowed due to a rather neat little cascade of chemical interactions: if radium salts were mixed with a zinc compound, particles emitted by the radium caused the zinc atoms to vibrate. ![]() ![]() Luckily, German scientists had developed a “self-luminous” paint some years before the war. Driven by military need, watch companies began putting watches on straps, which could be safely buckled on, and began looking for a way to make watch faces glow in the dark. The timepieces fell out of pockets, were crushed by the next crawling soldier, and if the watches somehow weren’t smashed, they were hopelessly unreadable at night. Soldiers, huddled in the muddy trenches of Europe, learned quickly that the pocket-watches they carried were totally unsuited to the battlefields. The corporation’s success story began with the new technological demands of the Great War. Of course, his first encounter with involved a rather mysterious health crisis arising at the U.S. The New Jersey physician, Harrison Martland, chief medical examiner of Essex County, had a different, less inspirational idea about radium. Radiant Health, the ads proclaimed, beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health – ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight. Perhaps, scientists suggested, the health effects of the mineral hot springs came from radioactive elements in the ground around them spas in upstate New York rushed to compete by dropping uranium ores into their swimming pools a New Jersey company grew rich selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of “Radithor: Certified Radioactive Water” as a tonic that guaranteed new vigor and energy. Researchers discovered that the European hot springs, famed for their healing powers, contained radon, a gas that derived from the element uranium. There were bottles of radium water (guaranteed to make the drinker sparkle with energy), radium soda, radium candy, radium-laced facial creams to rejuvenate the skin, radium-sprinkled face powder in four clearly labeled tints: white, natural, tan and African, soaps, pain-relieving liniments and lotions. What he wondered – and no one had ever asked this before – was whether those aging bones might be radioactive? In 1928, he contacted the New York City Medical Examiner’s office to find out if they could decipher the story in the bones. But the New Jersey doctor who’d ordered the skeleton excavated thought they had a lethal story to tell, if he could only understand it. The bones were five years old, slightly yellowed, with scraps of decayed tissue clinging to them. Today's post is the first of three that I'll post in the next few days. It remains a cautionary tale of radioactive elements, the slow recognition of their danger, and the risks of scientific over-confidence - that rings remarkably true today. I told my version of their story in my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, but it's worth revisiting here. The story I find most haunting is that of the Radium Girls, the young painters of luminous watch dials in the 1920s. But there were warnings beforehand, small ones, really, canaries in the radioactive mines, if you will. Of course, that changed in the horrific aftermath of the nuclear bombs the U.S. As we analyze and worry over radiation seeping from Japan's earthquake-damaged nuclear plants, it seems a curiosity that less than a hundred years ago, many people still believed that radioactive elements were the stuff of wonder.
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