Radium Craze

I'm currently reading "Obsessive Genius" by Barbara Goldsmith, a biography about Marie Curie. I would recommend it, as it's very interesting. I've just passed the section that talks about Curie's isolation and identification of the element radium in 1902. I never realized this discovery touched off a "radium craze" around the world.

The book's website has an abridged chapter posted, noting that radium can be diluted up to 600,000 times and still retain its power. Dilutions of radium were added to tea, health tonics, face creams, lipsticks, bath salts, even water. One American industrialist, Eben Byers, drank the radium-water product Raithor at a rate of a bottle a day for 4 years, "at the end of which he died in excruciating pain from cancer of the jaw as his facial bones disintegrated."

I wonder how much of the weird health issues we're facing now has to do with this glorious chapter in history. Radium has a half-life of 1,620 years, after all.

Related links:

The Radium Girls
Theodore Gray apparently collects item from the radium craze era; it's scary to think of what you can buy on Ebay.
More history on atomic energy use through the years