11/6/2023 0 Comments Does radium glowMy Geiger counter, a very fine modern thin-window model, has a maximum count rate of 350,000 counts per minute. Maybe I'm just a ninny, but when a Geiger counter literally screams at me, I find it unsettling. Spinthariscopes are explained in more detail here. I'm not sure what "The Hammer" means, but this is a fairly nice little radium spinthariscope. Just as today we have "titanium" padlocks that contain no titanium, or "titanium" clocks made of gray plastic that looks at best vaguely metallic, in the past there were countless "radium" products that contained no actual radium. The word "radium" was widely used in the early to mid 1900s as a sort of designation of quality and brightness, based on its use in luminous paints. This boot polish never had any radium in it, of that you can be 99% sure. See that sample for more details for what a Revigator is and why it's listed under radium. This is a smaller model of Revigator, but more complete than my other model (also listed under radium). The radioactivity will stay for thousands of years.) (When new the hands would have glowed too brightly to see individual flashes, but over time the phosphors in these clocks degrades. Although I have not tried this, the seller claims that if you look at the hands with a magnifying glass in a dark room you can see individual flashes of light, which says more about how decayed the phosphors are than about the amount of radioactivity. This clock has an unusually large amount of radium paint on its numerals and hands, making it more radioactive than the average antique luminous hand clock. I paid a lot for this book, which is almost impossible to find, because while it's not radioactive, it is a a wonderful artifact from an era where that would have been considered a problem along the lines of false advertising, while giving a child a radioactive book to read would have seemed perfectly normal. The Radium Book is something I've been trying to acquire for a long time, if only to confirm once and for all that it doesn't actually contain any radium (which would have been far too expensive to use in a book like this). ![]() ![]() This antique watch is still quite radioactive, and will stay that way for thousands of years.Ĭlick here to buy a book, photographic periodic table poster, card deck, or 3D print based on the images you see here! ![]() Radium was widely used in self-luminous clock and watch hands, until too many watch factory workers had died of it. Pictures, stories, and facts about the element Radium in the Periodic Table H
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