I was doing some local research and came across an interesting story on what they called the radium treasury in 1923. The story is attributed to the NY Times. I will link to the newspaper archive but I am not sure if you need to be registered at Ohiomemory.org so I will quote some details. It is written in the “Gee whiz” style you might expect of a reporter writing about radioactivity in 1923.
This radium repository was the only one in the world, “For greater safety it is hidden away on top of one of the highest and most Isolated of the upper Broadway buildings, at Fifty-seventh street, facing Central Park.”
“As closely guarded as the United States treasury, the reservoir contains the largest supply of pure radium under individual control. Extraordinary precautions are taken to Insure Its safety…”
“From an ordinary office the visitor Is led Into a laboratory containing an amazingly complicated and delicate apparatus of glass and glistening mercury. On all sides are barred windows electrically articulated so that the least attempt to break In would be instantly recorded, and in a manner that would surprise the most Intrepid Intruder. This room Is the outer portal to the reservoir…”
“From the barred, prison-like anteroom a massive lead door with three locks opens into a lead room, dark and much like what a youthful and romantic Imagination would conjure up as a medieval torture chamber. The room, about twelve or fourteen feet square, has five tons of lead in its walls to protect people passing In the corridors beyond and working In offices adjacent. In the very center of the lead-lined room, standing like a sacrificial altar, is a safe lifted high Into the air by a concrete pedestal. It ls the heart of the reservoir, the origin of the never-ceaslng flow of energy…”
And on and on. It seems to have a refining purpose and purified radium is passed through glass tubes to be encapsulated. So what was this place? I didn’t turn up a good lead on Google. I would love to read a more scientific discussion of this lab.
a quick search of Google Ngram and Google books reveals nothing. Google itself has only two real results, the first of which is the SDMB page you started. The other is a New York Times article from May 6, 1923 covering the topic, but which you have to sign in to read all of. It appears to be where your Ohio paper got the story. What I can access says:
Can this have anything to do with it? It’s an appeal for funds to build a facility at Memorial Hospital in New York. They planned on using Radium to treat cancers. The appeal is dated 1921, but I can see it taking time to get the money and the facility together for storing the radium they felt was needed.
I’m not sure when the full belief in the healing powers of radium faded – you can read a lot in the pulp magazines about how wonderful it was (look at Stanley G. Weinbaum’s story “A Martian Odyssey”, for instance), but it faded after 1926 and the revelations about the irradiated “radium girls”
Here’s a similar piece about a storage facility for radium in Paris, used for the treatment of cancer:
It’s from the Journal of the American Medical Association May 15, 1920 pp. 1413-1414
The article is careful not to name names. The radium seems to be used for strength and calibration of radium sources for physicians but the description doesn’t wind up anywhere.
I believe the use of radium as therapy took a big nose dive after the widely publicized death of Eben Byers, whose horrific death in 1932 was caused by ingestion of large quantities of Radithor, a concoction of radium dissolved in water.
The radium vault story reads like a spin-doctor piece conveying that there is no radium"problem", only a handling and security issue which is wel under control. I would not be surprised it was put out in direct response to the ‘Radium Girl’ lawsuits then underway in the US. [Wikipedia articleseems well put together]
A newspaper article from a cable service in 1925 gives a hint regarding the actual dangers of radium:
**a deadly industry
** RADIUM WORKERS (AUSTRALIAN CABLE SERVICES - NEW YORK, Tuesday. — The
United States Radium Corporation’s great plant at Orange, New York, has been closed became eight workmen have been killed in 18 months and 300 are seriously ill from a form of lead poisoning. One of the last deaths was of a workman engaged in painting watch dials with radium. The lead plant was called “the house of butterflies” among the workmen because sufferers have hallucinations that they see butterflies and other winged insects. The victims pause while at work, gaze intently into space, and suddenly leap into the air clutching at butterflies that are nonexistent.
[Brisbane Daily Mail 25 June 1925]
The earliest date in that Wikipedia article for an investigation is 1925 (“US Starts Probe of Radium Poison Deaths in Jersey, United States Radium Corporation (1925) - on Newspapers.com”. Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2016-06-12.), which corresponds with the first date of one I can find in the New York Times.
That was two years after the article we’re discussing. In 1923 all the articles in the Times about radium were about how it was going to conquer cancer, not cause it.
Another NYC radium company, named Radium Chemical (with variations), aka Radium Dial and similar, and Standard Chemical company (viol started in that. I guess Cameron merged it to make Radium) was run by
Charles Herman Viol - Year of death ? 1928!
and William Herron Cameron who did live to 64, dying in 1944.
The company continued to run a factory in Queens, which required superfund cleanup.
See
Here’s a product they sold.
Of note , it says this site was in fact a storage building containing 12,000 radium-filled ‘‘needles’’ still in the 1980’s ! It required superfund cleanup - a USA fed gov scheme to clean up the most hazardous sites,especially the radioactive.
The New York Times reported in 1988 that there may have been as many as 13 radium-processing facilities owned by Radium Chemical Company operating in the city.
Safety considerations were almost unknown during the war effort. According to Manhattan Project troubleshooter George A. Cowan, his radiation monitor “went berserk” on a 1943 trip to the Radium Chemical Company offices in a “big building” on Sixth Avenue.”
They gave Marie Curie the rather nice present of a gram of radium… The owner of Standard Chemical didn’t live long after adding Radium to their products - another chemist didn’t last 5 years with Radium Chemical
Thanks for the clarification about the dating - the article about the plant closure mentions deaths over 18 months, which means end 1923 for the first, but would be very interesting to know over how long the 300 sick developed, and what disquiet this raised.
I’m sure it did, but the well-publicized case of the “radium girls” happened well before that, as others have observed here.
What I find amazing is that the use of radium paint continued, quietly, and elsewhere, after all the uproar in the 20s. And it continued to be used for another fifty years.
I’m reminded of Glenn Seaborg, who at one time kept the world’s supply of plutonium in a box in his desk.
About 20 years ago, I did the standard tour of the Curie Museum in Paris. Since there’d been all the coverage about the research notes being radioactive in the likes of Science at the time, I took the opportunity to ask the guide whether this was true or not. Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the climaxes of the tour was supposed to be the guide explaining this and then demonstrating it by taking a Geiger counter to a page of the notes. All a bit embarrassing.
Per the OP, between the suggested secrecy and the popularity of radium in the period - even given its relative rarity - I’m drawing a blank.
Promethium is/was used on some night-sights for one model of the M72 Light Anti-tank Weapon (LAW rocket). We’d have to remove the sight and double bag it for turn-in.
I’m reasonably sure older equipment (WWII level) might have had radioluminescent paint.
"This is a front sight for the U.S. Army’s M72 Rocket Launcher. Better known as the LAW (Light Antitank Weapon), the M72 is fired once and disposed of. The LAW is …
The two white crosses on the sight (at the 100 and 150 meter marks) employ promethium-147 containing radioluminescent paint. After the LAW has been fired, the sight is removed and turned in to the Radiation Safety Officer (RSO) for disposal."
I think the Radium Girls case raised awareness that radium could be dangerous, but it was the Byers case that showed the public a direct correlation between cancer and radium therapy, rather than industrial exposure.
Yeah, as a child in the 1960s I had a wrist watch with radium-painted hands. I’m not sure where I got it; I think it was handed down from an uncle so I don’t know when it was manufactured. None of my relatives showed any concern about me wearing it.
Along those lines, I had one of these mercury mazes, a plastic maze toy with a blob of mercury inside. I (nor my parents apparently) didn’t consider the danger at the time. I’m still astonished that this thing was allowed to be sold as late as the 1970s. Although I’m pretty sure I never broke mine, it wouldn’t have been hard for a kid to break it and be exposed to the pure mercury inside.