in radium baths. For the early part of the 20th century,
radium enjoyed a tremen-
dous, albeit curious, popularity.
But that popularity gradually turned to disdain. In 1925, a man fraudulently titled
“Dr.” William Bailey patented and promoted a nostrum of radium-laced water
called Radithor. Bailey seems to have been motivated by a desire for easy money
as well as a personal obses-
sion with radioactivity. His
oral medication, a solution
containing the two radium iso-
topes radium-226 and radium-
228 (the latter called mesotho-
rium), was touted as a cure
for “dyspepsia, high blood
pressure, impotence, and more
than 150 other ‘endocrinolog-
ic’ maladies.” Whatever truth
lay in those claims, Radithor
in large quantities proved
lethal. In 1927, Eben Byers, a
millionaire socialite and ama-
teur golf champion, began to take Radithor on the recommendation of a physician
to treat the chronic pain in his arm. Byers reported feeling rejuvenated and invig-
orated by the nostrum. However, in 1932, four years and about 1000 to 1500 bot-
tles of Radithor later, Eben Byers died, having suffered severe anemia and weight
loss, massive destruction of the bone in his jaw, skull, and entire skeleton, and fi-
nally kidney and bone-marrow failure.
National press coverage of Eben Byers’ horrible death brought the danger of inter-
nal deposits of radium to the attention of the general public. It also inspired the
Food and Drug Administration to campaign for broader jurisdiction over the uses
of radium. Although that outcome was a very positive result from Byers' death, it
is painful to realize that his death was avoidable. Two years prior to Byers' inges-
tion of his first bottle of Radithor, the health risks associated with radium had been
identified within a select group of radium workers, and “radium poisoning” had
been recognized as a deadly occupational hazard. The story of the radium dial
painters is a tragic, yet crucial episode, in the development of radioactive risk
assessment.
During World War I paint containing radium was widely used to make self-lumi-
nous dials for watches, clocks, and military instruments. The “glow-in-the dark”
paint was first developed in Germany around 1908 and began to be made in the
United States by about 1913. This “self-luminous compound,” as it was frequent-
ly called, contained fine crystals of zinc sulfide mixed with radium salts. When
alpha particles from radium collided with molecules of zinc sulfide, the latter
would “scintillate,” or emit light.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, a factory in Orange, New Jersey,
became a major supplier of radium-dial instruments to the military. The factory
employed hundred of workers, most of whom were very young women. Those
women were in the practice of “tipping” their brushes, that is, using their lips to
shape the brush into a sharp point, which enabled them to paint fine lines and nu-
merals. As a result, many women inadvertently ingested small but significant
quantities of radium. From 1922 to 1924, nine young dial painters, most of whom
The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments
226
Los Alamos Science Number 23 1995
Figure 1. A Miracle Cure
Brought about through Radium
Treatments
These three photographs show the
miraculous results that were obtained
using radium applicators. The first
image is a baby girl immediately be-
fore radium treatment in December
1923. The next two photographs show
the young girl in April 1926 and then at
10 years old. She was treated at the In-
stitut-Curie, Paris. (Reprinted wih per-
mission from the Institut-Curie, Paris.)
226
Mass number
222
218
214
210
206
Radium
1620 years
238
Uranium
4.5 x 10
9
years
Radon
3.82 days
Lead
22 years
Indicates short-lived
radon daughters
Bismuth
5 days
Polonium
138 days
Lead
stable
α
α
α
α
β, γ
β, γ
β
α
β
Polonium
3.05 minutes
Lead
26.8 minutes
Bismuth
19.7 minutes
Polonium
0.000164
seconds
(Five daughters)
232
Mass number
228
224
220
216
212
208
Thorium
1.41 x 10
10
years
Mesothorium
(radium)
5.75 years
Actinium
6.13 hours
Thorium
1.91 years
α
α
α
α
α
β
β
Radium
3.62 days
Thoron
(radon)
55.6 seconds
α
α
Polonium
0.15 seconds
Lead
10.6 hours
Bismuth
60.6 minutes
Polonium
0.3
microseconds
Thallium
3.1 minutes
Lead
stable
β
β
β
The radioactive water sold by William
Bailey, Radithor, contained a mixture of
two radium isotopes, the common,
long-lived isotope radium-226 (half-life
of 1600 years), but also the short-lived,
and therefore highly active, radium-228
(half-life of 6.7 years). At that time, ra-
dium-226 was called radium, and radi-
um-228 was called mesothorium. Al-
though radium and mesothorium were
isotopic, and therefore had identical
Number 23 1995 Los Alamos Science
227
chemical properties, they belonged to
different radioactive decay chains and
had distinct radioactive characteris-
tics. Unlike radium, which was the
sixth daughter in the uranium-238
decay chain with a 1600 year half-
life, mesothorium was the first daugh-
ter of thorium-232 and decayed with
a 6.7 year half-life.
Mesothorium became commercially
available in about 1916 as a by-prod-
uct of the thorium “gas mantle” indus-
try. By 1917, both radium and
mesothorium were primary ingredi-
ents of a self-luminous paint that the
military used to produce glow-in-the-
dark instrument faces. Mesothorium
was preferred to radium because it
was cheaper, but the supply of
mesothorium was erratic. Some
batches of paint contained only radi-
um whereas others had a high pro-
portion of mesothorium. This variabil-
ity in the isotopic composition of the
paint became an issue when it was
discovered that the paint was a se-
vere health hazard and attempts
were made to correlate a person's
physiological harm with the amount of
radium retained in that person's body.
Mesothorium activity decreased more
rapidly than that of radium due to its
much shorter half-life. Consequently,
when body-burden measurements
were made years after intake, the
mesothorium activity was very low
and couldn’t be distinguished from
the radium activity. Not until the late
1950s, when high-resolution gamma-
ray detectors became available, could
the residual mesothorium be mea-
sured and accurate doses be deter-
mined. Those doses were within the
same range as the radium-226
doses, and thus they did not alter the
radium standard, which had been set
in 1941 with a large margin of safety
relative to the radium-226 doses that
were known at that time.
Radium and Mesothorium
The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments