Yep. The show is wonderful, btw.
I could not find any answer to that question. All I can say is that spinthariscopes were a known scientific product before the war. Somebody had sources of polonium then. Incredibly tiny amounts were needed for any individual spinthariscope. Radioactive elements were the big thing right after the war and many companies surely would have been offering them for various types of research as well as consumer items. Polonium was used for anti-static devices, e.g.
The actual source is unknown. Possibly deliberately, for all I know. Maybe General Mills purged its files when the ring became controversial. Or maybe they had a back door to Oak Ridge that nobody wanted to have known. Many have looked; nobody has found.
If you type in “polonium” on the Snopes website, I think there is a link that answers your question, at least partially.
That was one of the first places I found outside of Reddit, but the article, while accurate, doesn’t say much of anything at all. There is literally no mention of a source for the polonium, only that the element itself was “the most accessible” for the purpose. Well, yeah, I bet that General Mills did indeed use the “most accessible” source but Snopes isn’t the place to look.
There were companies that specialized in providing radioactive materials. General Mills surely got it by buying it from such a company, and they presumably got it by refinement of pitchblende.
Long before the war; they were invented in 1903, and were obsolete by the time the rings came out.
Spinthariscopes were quickly replaced with more accurate and quantitative devices for measuring radiation in scientific experiments, but enjoyed a modest revival in the mid 20th century as children’s educational toys.
If you go into the footnotes on that page you’ll see several for Oak Ridge Associated Universities. It’s a fascinating site, but I’ll just point you to their page on spinthariscopes.
Click on the individual pictures and you’ll see that spinthariscopes were being manufactured into the 1940s. Not all the pictures gave radioactive sources and those which do used radium, not polonium, but a deal this large was one-of-a-kind; you can’t just round up the usual suspects.
If the first hits on Google actually supplied any useful information, I wouldn’t have bothered to spend months researching the article. They don’t, though. I noted them and then dug a lot deeper. That’s where the best ore is.
Many years ago when I developed and printed from film, I had a “Static Master” dust removal brush that had some Polonium inside to eliminate static electricity as you brushed the dust away. I do not recall and warning labels. This was in the middle/late 70s.
Looks like replacement Polonium elements are still available.
You would get a nice, cool effect with about five random flashes per second. If the spinthariscope catches all of them, it would take about 50 femtograms of polonium. That’s a really tiny amount.
50 femtograms is really super tiny. Could they handle such tiny amounts back in the 1940s?
The Oak Ridge site I mentioned before says that static-devices were limited to 500 microcuries of radiation. Google says that is produced by 0.111 micrograms, a vastly larger amount or 111,000,000 femtograms. Even assuming that the rings would need far less polonium, could that really be 2 million times smaller?
I’m skeptical of that number, but certainly no expert. From my reading, though, the ability to work with incredibly tiny amounts of a substance developed only after the war.
You can easily measure amounts that small by measuring the radiation itself.
That’s not the point I’m making. Making the rings involved physically allocating polonium atoms. Not microscopic amounts, but millionths of a microscopic amount. And doing so to some accuracy millions of times over. The cost of that precision and accuracy couldn’t be the amount that a normal scientific laboratory would spend. It had to be essentially negligible to allow the rings to be available for a 15 cent price, which had to cover everything else, manufacturing, staffing, shipping, with the only hope for offset being an increasing sale of Kix cereal.
Measurement would have been crucial, sure. That’s only a small subset of everything else involved. We’re talking 1947 technology needing to suddenly scale up the spinthariscope manufacturing process a thousand-fold, something that remains difficult today.
My question remains. Could 1947 technology handle the installation of 50 femtograms of polonium? Especially when that meant doing so for 3,500,000 rings in a short period with short lead time?
Maybe they diluted it repeatedly somehow.
You have to be careful with homeopathic radioisotopes. If it becomes too dilute it might melt down.
Beautiful. Is that how they make atomic bomb pills in cartoons?