A hundred years ago, radium was the wonder ingredient of the age. Freshly discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, it glowed an eerie green — and manufacturers decided that anything glowing must be good for you. So they put it in almost everything.
You could buy radium toothpaste, face cream, hair tonic, chocolate, and bottled "health water." The most notorious was Radithor — distilled water with a trace of radium, sold as a cure for everything from fatigue to impotence. Watch and clock dials were hand-painted with radium so they would glow in the dark.
It was, of course, a catastrophe. Radium concentrates in the bones, where its radiation causes cancer. The "Radium Girls" who painted those dials — often licking their brushes to a fine point — developed anaemia, bone tumours, and a horrifying condition nicknamed "radium jaw." The socialite Eben Byers drank around 1,400 bottles of Radithor before dying in 1932; the Wall Street Journal reported the water worked fine until his jaw came off.
For comparison, radium's journey from miracle to menace:
- Then: sold in toothpaste, cosmetics, tonics and glow-in-the-dark dials
- Now: banned from consumer and industrial products almost everywhere
- The one exception: a targeted form, radium-223, has been an approved prostate-cancer therapy since 2013
- Still with us: radium-226's half-life is 1,600 years
That last number is the sting in the tail. Most century-old radium dials no longer glow — the phosphor that produced the light has long since burned out. But the radium itself is barely diminished. It will keep emitting radiation for thousands of years, long after the green glow, the adverts, and everyone who believed in them are gone.
The glow that sold radium has faded. The radium hasn't.