![]() ![]() Since they were neither, this had the effect of putting manufacturers out of business. ![]() Byers’s gruesome death in 1932 inspired the Wall Street Journal headline “The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off.”īyers’s death also prompted the newly formed FDA to crack down on radioactive health products, insisting on proof of their safety and effectiveness. But Radithor did claim at least one life, that of the well-known industrialist, playboy and three-bottle-a-day Radithor user Eben Byers. Alas, Radithor was the real thing: No one ever claimed the prize. It was meant to be placed over–the very thought makes me shudder–the endocrine glands.įor example, the Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove that its “Certified Radioactive Water,” sold under the brand name Radithor, did not contain the large amount of radium and thorium it claimed to. The supremely scary Radiendocrinator was a 2-inch by 3-inch case that contained paper infused with 250 microcuries of radium, enough to illuminate a fluorescent screen placed near it. But over time, companies started producing ever more powerful devices, most of them based on radium, the element with the strongest marketing appeal. Many of the radioactive products marketed at the time, such as uranium blankets, contained radioactive materials, but at such low levels that they probably did little harm to consumers. (Today, of course, we run as fast as we can from radon ridding basements of it is a big business.) Unfortunately for those who used them, Revigators actually worked. Storing any water in this cooler overnight would give you fresh, potent, invigorating radon water to drink by morning. You might go so far as to say that Radon Water was a rip-off, which is exactly the pitch the Radium Ore Revigator company used to sell its “better,” “more scientific” product: a watercooler lined with a serious amount of carnotite, an ore of uranium and radium that undergoes radioactive decay, yielding radon gas. ![]()
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