Here’s a nice one from the Gilbert Co.
The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106?), a gamma source (Zn-65), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a Geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual “Prospecting for Uranium.”
I love the packaging design.
The only other context I’ve heard polonium used in, was a fancy poison used to assassinate critics of the soviet regime.
So, now that I know it’s also in a kid’s toy, I feel much better about polonium. Thanks, Lone Ranger!
I think its not so much “carrying” it as “ineptly contaminating oneself.” Po-210 is so reactive that trace amounts will travel up the lip of a container before you even pour it. Andrei probably hadn’t read that far in Яussian Atomic Spy Manual.
Truly a thing of beauty. Some of the Erector sets from that era were similarly beautiful. Looking at it makes my mutant brain happy.
I remember instructions on how to make one of those, rather than a kit, but yes, it was a thing, for sure.
According to Kim Newman’s Draculaverse, the “Brit Reid” silver bullet design was adopted world wide for the killing of vampires.
The novels are like a historical version of True Blood with vampires out and about from the Victorian age until 1970’s. One of the more fun “spot the allusion” alternative history series out there.
I had a few of these as a kid, from the New York Worlds fair. I distinctly remember regularly popping out the radioactive dime and putting it in my mouth. I know alpha particles won’t penetrate skin, but how about mucous membrane? Shudder.
I really miss that game. It was a lot of fun. But having a lawn dart land on your head usually meant a nearly instant and (probably) painless death. After the recall most families went back to horseshoes or croquet, or picked up that Iowain classic: corn hole.
Respectfully, that seems unlikely. A microgram of Po-210 costs several million USD, and while I’m sure the price was a bit lower in 1947, I doubt it was crackerjack-box toy cheap. The main reason it’s used as an expensive assassination device is because it’s so rare to have the resources to posses lethal quantities and looks like terminal cancer. Moreover, hobbyists still make spinthariscopes using zinc sulfide and trace amounts of americium-241 (another alpha-particle emitter) taken from a smoke detector or two. Lastly, although either radioisotope can be dangerous, even such small amounts must be ingested to be lethal.
Almost as good as a polonium ring is brightly coloured dinnerware glazed with depleted uranium.
surely, packaging it with food was the best way to avoid this.
Respectfully, its not my claim that polonium was used.
Nobody thought litvenenko SUDDENLY had cancer. It’s that if the acute toxicity (200x that of cyanide) misses you, the chronic tox will get you 10/10.
Polonium and Americium have very different toxicological profiles, aside from their similar radioactivity. I’m a toxicologist, you’re not factually correct here.
You sent away for it with a boxtop. It wasn’t included in the food. That’d make a great Isle of Lucy episode, little Ricky eats a polonium ring!!
From adult cereal boxes?
I really don’t mean to sound like this is an uncool thing. It’s a very cool thing. It just amazes me. This is one of the only things that I’ve heard of that’s worse than
a) running behind the DDT truck to cool off
b) “Showering” in 1,1,2-TCA over the dirt - to get grease off yourself.
Both of which were shockingly common in 1947. Smoking is something we recognize from that era as shockingly unsafe - these rings kinda take the cake. I’m sending the info on this ring to a toxicology prof I know, as yet another example of
“we really really must not have known better back then”.
Doing the math (and assuming whole years), that means it is currently at 1.6890759292530551e-56 of what it was in 1947.
10 ^ -56 is a pretty small number.
I thought you were saying the polonium-210 in the ring was liable to have killed someone (sorry if I misunderstood you on that). My understanding is that a lethal dose is a microgram, that only about a hundred micrograms are produced annually worldwide, and that a lethal dose is incredibly expensive if you can’t make it yourself in a nuclear reactor.
Okay, my mistake. But is it really at all likely that this ring ever had a toxic amount in it? Was just a lot more made in the 1940’s? Am I misinformed on the amount needed for a lethal dose? And if so, how would it get into the body? I’m no toxicologist, but I know alpha particles can’t penetrate human skin.
Liable? yes, in 1947. Likely that it did, and we’d not know, was my point. Yes. one of those rings very likely killed a person, when the polonium was fresh. Absolutely.
I once figured out why two people who had gone crazy and fallen apart physically, emotionally, and mentally over 30 years. It was in my home town. They were a known rich family with ALL the issues. Years later i am drilling monitoring wells on their property. Turns out the lead paint (with plenty of other metals in it) that they disposed of not far enough downhill from their well, starting in the 1940s caught up with them.
I could have told their kids that the parents had managed to poison their own well (as well as a creek and a tidal shellfish bed) and that all the chaos of 50 years was very likely down to drinking their own tea… but who would be served then? I sealed the well myself and decided nobody ever needed to know. Nobody lived there, the house had town water, the hazardous waste was being addressed… but nothing would be gained by sharing the tragedy of that well. It was already a tragedy!
But I know, that old-timer managed to poison himself and his wife, and their kids. Drove the two parents literally institutionally crazy and made a lot of people sick. I’d never seen that much paint waste in one place - and 2 feet of linseed oil and other solvents floating on top of the groundwater too.
All to save what probably added up to 30K in proper disposal costs over 60 years.
Okay, I do believe you. I’m just curious now. Is the toxic dosage much lower than I thought, or was a whole lot more made then, or both?
I suppose I would want other people to know why they got sick, even if it meant the wealthy couple’s (adult?) kids would find out. But I can see why someone might decide otherwise.
ETA: These are the sources I can find…
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/polonium.html
I’m thinking it must have just been a lot more commonly made before it was regulated. The earliest reference I can find to a US regulation on it is 1949. Maybe like cocaine, no one tried to stop commercial production and sale before it was controlled.
P.S. I don’t mean to be quarrelsome, I’m merely interested.
“A kid was pegged in the head with a lawn dart
so they’re now off the shelves at the K-Mart.”
I got one of these rings as a kid and still have it. Twenty years ago I saw one scintillation after waiting half an hour. But I thought these used tritium, which has a 12.3 year half-life and which would explain why I could at least see that one flash.
