Glow in the Dark: The ‘Dangers’ of Radioactivity

Radiation is fascinating. Invisible to our eyes but not to our machines and powering whole countries whilst simultaneously looming over their destruction. Through misinformation and pseudoscience, we know a lot of its dangers. Like with all science, by looking through the quackery, we can learn to understand the positive impacts it can have for all of us.

Marie Curie (nee Sklodowska) was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1867. The daughter of two teachers, her parents instilled in her the importance of education. Curie loved to learn, but due to her being born with the wrong reproductive system, she was unable to advance in her studies in her home country of Poland. At the age of 24, after working to earn money so both she and her sister could continue studying, Curie moved to Paris to begin her studies at Sorbonne University. Living in a cold and damp flat in the Latin Quarter, she devoted her time in Paris to her studies and went on to complete degrees in Mathematics and Physics. Despite aiming to eventually return to Poland with teaching credentials from Sorbonne, the course of her life was changed when she met her future husband, Pierre Curie.

Eight years her senior and already an internationally renowned physicist, the pair’s love for the scientific endeavour meant together, they made each other’s love and want for scientific understanding greater. In July 1895, they married in Sceaux in the suburbs of Paris. The following year, Marie passed her teaching degree and Pierre laboured for the university to permit his wife to study a doctoral thesis of her own. After reading and listening to Wilhelm Röntgen discuss his discoveries of what would later be known as radiation, she found her calling and subsequently got to work.

It was during her thesis that she noticed that the invisible ‘rays’ being given off by uranium salts, as Röntgen previously discussed, were also being given off by another element, thorium. Her observations were revolutionary. No matter the compound of uranium or thorium, for example, uranium dioxide (UO₂) or uranyl nitrate (UO₂(NO₃)₂), the amount of radiation being given off was dependent not on the molecules themselves, but on the amount of uranium or thorium present in the compound – it has to be something coming from the atoms themselves.

Curie’s brilliance was to study naturally occurring radioactive rocks, such as pitchblende, and measure the amount of radiation emitted. However, the amount of radiation being emitted by pitchblende was more than that of isolated uranium. There had to be another element concealed inside that was responsible for this extra radiation.

By looking at bismuth and barium and their compounds, Marie and Pierre wrote in July 1898 “We thus believe that the substance that we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal never known before, akin to bismuth in its analytic properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we suggest that it should be called polonium after the name of the country of origin of one of us.” A few months later, the Curies announced they had found evidence of yet another element, which later became known as radium. In 1903, she presented her doctoral thesis where she successfully isolated radium and determined its atomic weight (225). In 1903, both Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physics “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.”

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In the early days of radioactivity, there was a buzz, an excitement around this new enigmatic property of matter that had never been witnessed and with it, the quackery began. With little oversight and not much regulation numerous companies appeared selling the supposed medical benefits of radioactivity. One of these companies, the United States Radium Corporation, jumped onto the scene in 1917 with their wonderous invention, Undark.

Undark was a mixture of radium and zinc sulphide. When combined these substances had the remarkable property of luminescence. In the case of radium specifically, this exerts the phenomenon known as radioluminescence. When an atom is radioactive, it is giving off ionising radiation in the form of alpha, beta or gamma radiation. If this radiation comes into contact with another atom, it excites the atom’s electrons moving them up a higher energy level. When the excited electron descends back down an energy level, it emits a photon of light. Radium does this naturally, however, it is very weak. Combine radium with a phosphor, such as zinc sulphide, and the resulting luminescence is considerably brighter. Undark was a luminescent paint blend of radium and zinc sulphide as well as a doper, copper, to give it that distinguishing green glow.

Undark, and its competitors Luna and Marvelite, were placed into numerous household objects to make them glow in the dark absence of any external power source. They were placed on watch dials, compasses and aircraft dials to assist them in the dark. Unfortunately at the time, there was so much hype that those who were applying the paint to the dials, usually women, were unknowingly exposed to life-threatening ionising radiation. Those who were manufacturing and distributing the radioactive paints understood the damaging effects of radiation on living tissue, but the lowly workers, who came to be known as the Radium Girls in factories were kept in the dark (ironically) about the risk of short and long-term exposure.

The 4,000 girls who were employed by the US Radium Corporation blended their own paints and coated the dials using a camel hair brush. After a few applications, however, the tips of the brush became frayed and consequently the practice of lip, dip, and paint commenced. The girls were astonishingly instructed to use their lips, tongue and teeth in order to keep the brushes as fine as possible meaning that many of the girls unknowingly consumed radium on a daily basis. Due to the workers not knowing the dangers of using the substances they were painting onto dials for the US military, they were perplexed by the substance and would paint their nails, eyelashes and lips with the paint to give them a head-turning glow.

The first to notice the bodily problems Radium Girls faced, were dentists. They witnessed patients who worked with radium arriving at their surgeries teeth falling out, jaw pain, ulcers, lesions, anaemia numerous fractures around their jaw. They had developed ‘radium jaw’ a condition that results in the necrosis of tissue after exposure to radium-based compounds.

Initially, the US Radium Corporation batted away claims of negligence and the negative effects of the paint by constructing their own disinformation campaign whereby they blamed the dentists using X-rays on their patients as the reason why their jaws were falling apart. This was entirely dismissed, as those who had received treatment from dentists, but didn’t work with radium, did not suffer the harmful consequences the Radium Girls had.

In 1923, the first Radium Girl died as a result of her employment after her jaw had fallen away from her skull. A few months later, numerous women were ill, and ~15 had since died. Even the inventor of the paint, Dr Sabin Arnold von Sochocky, had passed away after suffering a similar fate. But again, the company continued to try to slander the girls declaring the issues the girls were having were a result of their promiscuity and syphilis infections; all of which was a failed endeavour to discredit the girls and protect the corporation from negligence. During the eventual trial against the companies who employed them, a number of the workers were unable to even attend court due to them being bedridden.

Six years after the first recorded death, the Radium Girls had won and even caused a change in US labour laws meaning workers could now sue their employers if they had ‘provable suffering’ as a result of their employment. All employees working at the factories were given the equivalent of $100,000 each as well as yearly remunerations of almost $10,000 and, quite rightly, had all of their medical expenses paid for life.

In the realm of the unknown and perplexing, legitimate companies creating a product that could eliminate an issue (not being able to see your instruments whilst flying a plane in the dark) were of course going to come about, but with every honest and fair business comes countless illegitimate ones wishing to sell their own miracle.

Nowhere more is this best demonstrated than with the horrifying case of the US socialite and amateur golfer, Eben Byers.

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Eben Byers was born in 1880 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania to the iron industrialist Alexander Byers. A Yale graduate, he was a well-educated and confident man who adored golf, becoming the US Amateur winner in 1906. At the age of 47, after suffering a fall and injuring his arm, his doctor advised him to begin taking Radithor, a new medicine built on the ‘scientific‘ basis of radiation hormesis.

Radithor’s manufacturer, Bailey Radium Laboratories, sold it as perpetual ‘sunshine in a bottle’, and a ‘cure for the living dead’. The company’s namesake and Radithor inventor William J. A. Bailey was a Harvard dropout with no scientific or medical degrees to his name, yet sold Radithor for $30 a case of 24 ($650 in 2023). He would then would travel around from state to state selling this miraculous cure for a multitude of ailments such as impotence, virulence, libido and general well-being. The cherry on the quackery cake here is, doctors who prescribed Radithor to their patients would receive a kickback for every one sold. Unfortunately for Byers, his doctor was in receipt of kickbacks from Bailey and his company and proceeded to prescribe Radithor which Byers himself described as giving him a ‘toned-up feeling’.

In 1930, after taking almost 1400 doses, Byers stopped taking the ‘medicine’. He could no longer talk and holes began to form in his skull. Surgery was required as a result of his Radithor treatment and Byen’s bottom jaw had to be removed entirely as well as all but his two front teeth. An autopsy upon his death had found 36 micrograms of radium in his body, almost three times higher than the lethal dose. An image of him is below but is understandably quite graphic.

The defence from Bailey was that Byers was prescribed the phoney remedy by his doctor who insisted it was harmless stating, later stating “I never had a death among my patients for radium treatment. I have taken as much or more radium water of the same kind Mr Byers took and I am 51 years old, active and healthy. … I believe that radium water has a definite place in the treatment of certain diseases and I prescribe when I deem it necessary.” He claimed what caused Byers’ death was complications from other diseases such as gout.

Byers died in 1932 aged just 51. He was laid to rest not far from his place of birth in the Byer Mausoleum at Allegheny Cemetery (Section 13, Lot 67). He was buried in a lead-lined coffin to protect others from the fatal radiation emanating from his body for the subsequent millennia.

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Hindsight is a remarkable thing. Looking back now at the radioactive errors of the past, we would think that today nobody would be so foolish as to play around with radiation. Surely, nowadays nobody is going to be using radioactive toothpaste to make their teeth glow, or just drink ionised water to soothe our ailments, right? But alas, many still fall victim to the quackery of the enigmatic fundamental property.

Let me present to you Radium Palace, a hotel and radioactive spa you can visit today in Czechia for the princely sum of £1300 (!) a night with a minimum stay of 7 nights. Built atop an old Soviet uranium mine in the spa town of Jachymov (the same place Marie Curie acquired radioactive ores for her experiments), the Radium Hotel allows the affluent (and gullible) to bathe in radioactive water that flows from the mines below.

Doctors at the hotel boast about the tremendous advantages of soaking in radioactive water, from reductions in inflammation to morphine-level pain relief. Visitors are given a variety of doses for their ailments, with those suffering from gout receiving a loftier dose than those attending for neurological disorders.

Besides the large-scale deceitfulness of the Radium Palace, today there is an accumulation of gullible folk who are unknowingly ordering radioactive substances to their homes in order to obtain spiritual purity under the guise of negative ion technology (you can literally order one here but please don’t). Pendants, wristbands and jewellery containing radioactive isotopes which purportedly allow their wearers to support physical and spiritual health, improve their mental health and aim to balance their internal ‘energies’.

There remains little to no published benefit of radiation used in these ways.

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Radiation is not a thing to be played with. Yes, it is mysterious, mesmerising and captivating but it has consumed the lives of many. The discoverer of radioactivity, Henri Becquerel died shortly after his discovery at the age of 55 and whilst his cause of death remains unknown, he suffered from horrendous burns to his hands and skin in the years preceding his death. Marie Curie passed away at the age of 66 from aplastic pernicious anaemia, a condition she developed after years of exposure to radiation through her work. Her cookbooks, laboratory, and even the back of her chair remain radioactive to this day. Her husband Pierre died in a street car accident but was also heavily afflicted with radiation burns and scarring from handling radioactive materials.

In 1995, both Marie and Pierre were interred in the Panthéon in Paris for their contributions to science. Their contributions to science will continue to instil aspiring scientists for years to come, but it is not only in the classroom they make their long-lasting impact even in their lead-lined graves their bodies will continue to emit radiation for centuries to come.

One can only hope the memory of the impact their lives had a world of science lasts as long as the impact science has made on their own lives.

sources.

Gunderman, R.B. and Gonda, A.S. (2015) “Radium girls,” Radiology, 274(2), pp. 314–318. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.14141352.

Jiang, S.-Y., Ma, A. and Ramachandran, S. (2018) “Negative air ions and their effects on human health and air quality improvement,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 19(10), p. 2966. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms19102966.

Medicine: Radium drinks (1932) Time. Time Inc. Available at: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,743525,00.html

Moore, K. (2018) The Radium Girls: They paid with their lives, their final fight was for Justice. London: Simon & Schuster.

Mould, R.F. (1998) “The discovery of radium in 1898 by Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934) and Pierre Curie (1859-1906) with commentary on their life and times.,” The British Journal of Radiology, 71(852), pp. 1229–1254. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1259/bjr.71.852.10318996.

Radithor (ca. 1928) (2022) Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity. Available at: https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/pills-potions-and-other-miscellany/radithor.html

A spa where patients bathe in Radioactive Water (2018) BBC Future. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180306-a-spa-where-patients-bathe-in-radiactive-water