Long before scientists split the atom, quacks and con artists were splitting the profits.
Marie and Pierre Curie’s pioneering scientific work was 50 years old before America dropped the A-bomb. But the onslaught of atomic gadgets, radioactive tonics, and other potentially lethal nonsense?
That followed almost immediately.
Lucy Jane Santos’ “Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium” digs into the element’s weird history. It begins with hungry curiosity and self-sacrificing dedication.
Unfortunately and predictably, it soon turned into get-rich-quick schemes and fatal frauds.
The story starts in 1789, when a German chemist, working with the ore pitchblende, discovered a strange new element he named uranium.
Little mentioned then was that the ore came from a mining town where people often suffered odd illnesses. Superstitious locals put it down to a curse, the vengeance of “goblins who lived underground, attempting to protect their buried treasures.”
What the people were experiencing was radiation sickness from the dust the mining operations created. But it would be many years and deaths before that was understood.
Breakthroughs would come through the work of Marie Curie. Born Maria Sklodowska in Poland, she moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne. A gifted scientist, Maria, now known as Marie, graduated at the top of her class. She would later win Nobel Prizes in Physics and in Chemistry — the only person to win in two separate sciences.
In 1895, she married Pierre Curie, a physicist whose lab she had been sharing. With Pierre’s help, Marie focused on furthering the work of Wilhelm Rӧntgen, Henri Becquerel, and other scientists, who had been experimenting with uranium and what Rӧntgen called “X-rays.”
Working together in an old shed, the Curies soon discovered two new elements, polonium, which they named in honor of Marie’s birthplace, and radium. Like uranium, these elements also gave off a strange, intense energy. The Curies called it “radioactivity.”
It was a mysterious power, but so new that scientists took few precautions. At first, radioactive samples were left in drawers or even carried around in pockets. Eventually, it was discovered that prolonged exposure could damage skin, leaving burns.
Significantly, though, the radiation destroyed diseased cells faster than it harmed healthy ones. This was a major medical discovery and would eventually become a cancer-fighting breakthrough. More discoveries would follow.
Hucksters, however, saw a different kind of opportunity.
Soon companies were advertising everything from “radium fabric” to “radium fireworks.” A manufacturer of fireplace tools bragged that “more heat emanates from coal when burned in our radium grates than in any other.”
None of these products, thankfully, actually contained atomic elements.
Others swore they did, however. A shoe insert, the Radiomite insole, came guaranteed to help “sufferers from nervous disorders, rheumatism, and kindred troubles.” A bath salt, Ra-Ba-Sa, promised to promote “an instantaneous feeling of vigor and health.”
And then there were Sparklets, seltzer siphons said to add a splash of radioactivity to every glass. “The new great natural remedy for rheumatism, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, neuritis, sciatica, general loss of vitality, etc.,” ads claimed.
The actual radioactive content, if any, of these products was minimal. Not so with the items pushed by William James Aloysius Bailey.
Bailey began with radium pills and his hyped promise: “Gives Super-Man Power!” before moving to balms, toothpaste, and hair tonic. He even sold a radioactive jockstrap, said to enhance sexual performance.
In 1925, he introduced his biggest hit, Radithor. It could treat over 150 diseases, he bragged, and put “sunbeams in your bloodstream.” By the end of the decade, he had sold over 400,000 bottles.
Then the FDA stepped in.
Radithor was, indeed, radioactive – and lethal. One of its biggest fans was Eben McBurney Byers. Heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune, he turned to the elixir after injuring his arm. Soon he was chugging three bottles a day.
When he died in 1932, his bones were splintering, his kidneys were failing, and his entire body was radioactive. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin. (As, thanks to over-exposure to X-rays, was Marie Curie, who died in 1934.)
Radithor was removed from the market. Bailey was never charged.
Ironically, it seemed the best way to get in trouble with the authorities was to sell a radioactive tonic that wasn’t radioactive.
In 1904, readers opened their newspapers to see ads from Dr. Rupert Wells proclaiming: “I Can Cure Cancer.” Wells had “devoted my life to the helping and healing of the sick and suffering,” he bragged, “and, as you know, have been unusually successful.”
Now he had invented Radol, a potion containing the “warming, life-giving rays” of radium. Wells diagnosed patients by mail and sent out 25 packages a day. A month’s supply was $15.
When authorities investigated, they discovered the main ingredients in Radol were alcohol and quinine sulphate. “Dr. Wells” – real name Dennis Dupois – was fined $150. Sales of Radol were stopped.
Far more imaginative were the products offered by the Radio Sulpho Company, guaranteed to treat everything from “putrid wounds” to syphilis. The three-step treatment included an ointment, a drink called Sulpho-Brew, and a homemade poultice of glycerin and Limburger cheese.
Germs “flee before the fragrance of Limburger cheese,” explained Radio Sulpho founder Philip Schuch Jr.
Once again, authorities investigated and found Schuch’s miracle drug primarily consisted of sulfur, lye, and alcohol. It, too, was taken off the market, and Schuch later took his own life.
Although selling fake radium cures could get you sued — and ingesting real ones could kill you —entrepreneurs continued to exploit the magical element.
In the 1920s, the Radium Golf Ball Company started selling balls with a radioactive center. “The ball literally is alive,” they declared, “and the increased energy actually fights to free itself.” Not surprisingly, the terrifying product did not catch on.
One radioactive product that did find fans was the glow-in-the-dark watch, first developed for soldiers in World War I. Unlike today’s luminous models, these early timepieces used powerful radium paint.
Factory workers, mostly women, painted over 250 watch faces a day, keeping a fine point on their brushes by wetting them with their tongues. “For this they were paid $20 a week,” Santos writes. “It was a coveted job – until they started dying.”
After several years, the body of one of the “Radium Girls” was exhumed. An autopsy proved she died of radiation poisoning.
Sued for damages, the U.S. Radium Corporation protested, claiming many of their workers were already sick, claiming they were “cripples and persons similarly incapacitated.” The company said it employed folks out of sympathy and eventually settled with a few claimants.
The arrival of the atom bomb in 1945 finally ended any idea that radiation might be healthy — or harmless. After half a century, the fad began to fade. Outside of visiting a medical center, few people dose themselves with it today.
Yet go online, and you can still find those old lethal watches for sale. You can find a few modern, New Age versions of radium cures, too.
Night Hawk Minerals even sells pieces of radioactive carnotite to drop into a glass of water or wear around your neck. They also suggest sewing them into bras. It almost sounds like a joke.
But it’s hard to imagine Madame Curie laughing.