But Radithor did claim at least one life, that of the well-known industrialist, playboy and three-bottle-a-day Radithor user Eben Byers. Alas, Radithor was the real thing: No one ever claimed the prize. This led to a couple of the more surreal aspects of the whole episode: advertisements that positively guaranteed that a company’s products exposed you to the full dose of radiation promised, and instances of the government shutting down companies selling perfectly safe phony products instead of the real (deadly) items they claimed to be offering.įor example, the Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove that its “Certified Radioactive Water,” sold under the brand name Radithor, did not contain the large amount of radium and thorium it claimed to. It was meant to be placed over–the very thought makes me shudder–the endocrine glands.Īs the industry developed, it gave birth to the inevitable wave of fraudulent products–fraudulent in the sense that they did not emit the high levels of radiation they claimed to. The supremely scary Radiendocrinator was a 2-inch by 3-inch case that contained paper infused with 250 microcuries of radium, enough to illuminate a fluorescent screen placed near it. But over time, companies started producing ever more powerful devices, most of them based on radium, the element with the strongest marketing appeal. Many of the radioactive products marketed at the time, such as uranium blankets, contained radioactive materials, but at such low levels that they probably did little harm to consumers. (Today, of course, we run as fast as we can from radon ridding basements of it is a big business.) Unfortunately for those who used them, Revigators actually worked. Storing any water in this cooler overnight would give you fresh, potent, invigorating radon water to drink by morning. You might go so far as to say that Radon Water was a rip-off, which is exactly the pitch the Radium Ore Revigator company used to sell its “better,” “more scientific” product: a watercooler lined with a serious amount of carnotite, an ore of uranium and radium that undergoes radioactive decay, yielding radon gas. By the time the bottle reached the customer, most of the radiation would be gone. Entrepreneurs started bottling the water and selling it as “Radon Water.” But rivals soon pointed out a problem: Radon’s half-life is just 3.82 days. Since no one really knew what made them healthful, the springs’ radioactivity was as good a guess as any. (Radon gas produced by the decay of thorium and uranium deep in the earth permeates the water at many natural hot springs.) When scientists went around with radiation detectors, they discovered that the waters from quite a few well-known hot springs were radioactive. Natural hot springs have been used as health spas for thousands of years even today, vacationers flock to their healing (well, maybe) waters. In fact, early discoveries made plenty of reasonable people think that radiation could be good for you. Electricity had been discovered relatively recently, and it turned out to be perfectly safe in moderation, so why not radiation? Even when radiation is used to treat cancer, its deadliness is what does the work, killing cancer cells at a slightly higher rate than normal cells.īut imagine yourself 100 years ago, before many of the first researchers studying radioactivity had died of cancer or other radiation-induced causes. Today we know that exposing yourself to radiation is a bad idea. Thorium-laced medicine for digestion (you don’t even want to know about the radioactive suppositories).Ĭrazy, huh? Until I ran into the fascinating book Living with Radiation, the First Hundred Years, self-published by Paul Frame and William Kolb, I had no idea that radiation was the basis for a huge quack-medicine industry that lasted for decades and took in millions. A century ago radioactivity was new, exciting and good for you–at least if you believed the people selling radium pendants for rheumatism, all-natural radon water for vigor, uranium blankets for arthritis and
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