The Reverse Radium Craze: A Dark Story

Disease killed more solders than they killed each other in WWI

That’s a fact that’s quite mainstream at this point. Although what is not mainstream, is that an even more silent killer was among them. In shampoo, glow-in-the-dark watches, even in medical equipment; used to help treat the other two forms of death. Humanity throughout the centuries has had a fascination with a cure-all substance, a fountain of youth, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Even though, to this very day, it has yet to be discovered. This is the story of one of those substances. But it even more a story about the reverse of it.

To love Radium is to love death

At least, that’s one of your first thoughts when I mention, radium, as well as thorium or actinium. Any substance with radiation has the emotional feeling of some form of disgust. But throughout history, humanity has reacted to a new substance in two ways; disgust and rejection, or full embrace of any or all uses. Rarely do people collectively and logically assess something new, integrating it moderately. And the 1920’s is full of examples of this. The roaring ‘20’s, so to speak. But I want focus on radiation, and in particular, radium. Because the ‘20’s was also the age of the radium craze. The age where the highest form of paid work for a women was working with this substance. Radium was first discovered in 1898 when Marie Curie noticed a substance with four or five times more radioactivity than uranium. It was Henri Becquerel who first recognized that radium caused many materials to create an alpha reaction that results in fluorescence. Although, the invention of radioluminescence paint can be attributed to William J Hammer; who in 1902 mixed radium with zinc sulfide and applied the paint to various items. Perhaps due partly because he did not patent the invention, the idea exploded in Switzerland first. Radium’s properties were not well known at the time, and a particular group of personalities arose; that of the entrepreneurs. Two of these entrepreneurs established The Radium Luminous Material Corporation in Newark, New Jersey. They were a company that was in the thick of it all, selling 2000 of glowing watches alone (the source for this info is on Page 16 of The Radium Girls, I looked for the original reference, but I could not find it). Not only a manufacturing business, they also publicly sponsored scientific studies that were highly misleading for the time and just plain wrong now. As we are constructing a meta framework not just around the radium craze, but human trends in general, you must understand the 3 factors that create the perfect habitat:

1. An illogical urge for a cure-all
2. An illogical lack of moderation for new things
3. The tendency for others to use the other two for their own personal gain (e.g.: money)

A craze of opposites

According to the Merriam-webster dictionary, a craze is simply:

an exaggerated and often transient enthusiasm

It is interesting to note the publics’ view of radium and radiation. The 1920’s brought radium paint on watches, and the 1990’s brought Radiation Ranger, a villainous action figure complete with a deformed face and a catchy quip: Think of us as your future: humorless, radioactive and cold. Which outlines that we are just in the opposing direction since that of the 1920’s. To be more specific, we are in the craze to go against anything radiation related. The reverse-radium craze. We are still enthusiastic, about radium, we are enthusiastic about going of out of our way to avoid it. Disgust and rejection. And you know what? People profit off of that as well. One of the issues that Andrew Cuomo promised to fix was clean energy. During his term, he shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant. It was long time coming with movie posters as far back as the 1950’s that give rays of why the public’s current craze. Using fear tactics to create a worrying fusion of entertainment and information. Although, as a direct result, greenhouse gas emissions went up. New York now has more emissions than Texas. A state that not only is five times larger it also has several times the population, as the second largest state. But sadly, this is just one of the many examples of a perfect habitat for destruction.