r/interesting • u/lb3a3 • 4d ago
HISTORY Atomic Bomb Cereal ring with real Polonium-210
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u/EricWisegarver 4d ago
According to Google:
Polonium-210 is extremely lethal if inhaled or ingested, the external alpha radiation could not penetrate human skin, making the intact toy relatively low-risk during normal play.
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u/fricken 4d ago
The KGB has been known to assassinate using Polonium-210
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
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u/Mmmm-Amethyst 4d ago edited 4d ago
By that logic, we should also ban windows...
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u/GravitasFailures 4d ago
Thank god they never left it around young children with a tendency for putting interesting things in their mouths…
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u/ryan516 4d ago
ingested
Good thing it's not in a food box or anyth- oh. Oh no.
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u/ProfessorMalk 4d ago
It wasn't in the box, you sent in the money and a box top and they mailed it to you.
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u/SinoSoul 4d ago edited 4d ago
Real *polonium plutonium in toy bomb, real coke in Coca Cola. Kids back then lived their best lives.
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u/Tartaros030 4d ago edited 4d ago
Oh well, you know, back the in these days people also wore wristwatches that
glewglowed in the dark. because they were made of Radium-226, and also used x-ray machines as a party gimmick. And when you felt a little sick you went to your local drug store and got yourself a bit of Radithor, a wonder medicine sold in a flask containing water enhanced with radioactive radium isotopes to cure your sickness.You could have lots of fun as an adult too, back in the days. Maybe not the healthiest life decisions possibly, though, in rerospective.
But luckily there's another medicine product from Bayer called Heroin to compensate, or Pervitin to the rescue. Latter is nowadays called Methamphetamine.
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u/bobkaare28 4d ago
A lot of the women who painted the watch hands with radium-226 licked the brushes to get a fine tip on them and ended up getting bone cancer, bone necrosis of the jaw, tooth decay and other unpleasant health problems.
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u/cwsjr2323 4d ago edited 4d ago
I saw in Illinois one such factory for alarm clocks with the pretty glowing green clock hands. It was superfund clean up site, the building, basement, and all the grounds there are now just a big pit, all buildings in that blocked boarded up.
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u/Warden_lefae 4d ago
That was the home of the second batch of radium girls. And having learned about it, it felt like someone went out of their way to spread the radium around that town as much as possible.
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u/Boring_Albatross_354 4d ago
Some of them their jaw bones fell off. Most of them were late teens early 20’s It’s a wild story. The radium girls book just skims the surface.
I have a radium clock and just think about the poor girl who painted it.19
u/Cant-Think-Of 4d ago
And let's not forget the white phosphorus, which was used way back in matchsticks, because it was cheaper than the safer red phosphorus. Caused quite a "nice" ailment called phossy jaw...
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u/u_r_succulent 4d ago
They were told to do that by their superiors, even though their superiors knew it was dangerous.
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u/commanderquill 4d ago
Bingo. Not sure why the story is suddenly changing, but the ladies were in fact trained to do specifically that, even after the company knew it was dangerous, because it was the best way to get a fine tip.
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u/u_r_succulent 3d ago
It’s so fucked. I don’t think any of them received any sort of financial reconciliation. They essentially kept pushing back the trials until the last one died.
Without government regulation, this could easily happen today.
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u/Bitter_Dimension_241 4d ago
They did this because they were told to by management even though management knew it was dangerous.
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u/Dan_H1281 4d ago
There was a great podcast on that called the radioum girls I can't remember who did it maybe it was the last from criminal
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u/IndividualistAW 4d ago
Cocaine was great for toothaches too
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u/CardOk755 4d ago
All good diarrhea medicines contained opium.
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u/Over-Conversation220 4d ago
Imodium is just an opioid agonist that doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier
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u/Zaev 4d ago
Apparently there is a way to make it cross the barrier, and that's why you can only get it in blister packs in the US now
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u/Over-Conversation220 4d ago
Is that why? I’m not surprised. I used to have periods of stomach issues and bought it in bottles. Those seemed to have disappeared about a decade ago.
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u/SuperSandLesbian23 3d ago
I want to make anyone reading this not in jest know that the amount of imodium (loperamide is the name of the medication generic) you have to take to get even a small oxycodone like buzz also causes painful heart arrhythmias (prolonged QT) and severe constipation that can cause an intestinal blockage needing surgery. You do not want to abuse anti diarrheals, please do not do this it gets really ugly.
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u/porp_crawl 4d ago
Most opioids are really good antitussives (cough suppressants).
Laudanum was popular for temporary symptom relief for tuberculosis coughing.
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u/PmMeYourStraponPlz 4d ago
Was? Pretty sure it still is.
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u/TooDooDaDa 4d ago
Great for ENT cases. Numbs and acts as vasoconstrictor to keep blood out of the view of your scope and cameras.
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u/lorgskyegon 4d ago
It's one of the only uses for which cocaine can actually still be legally prescribed in the US
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u/BewitchingPetrichor 4d ago
"Glew" is utterly insane lmao
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u/prion_guy 4d ago edited 3d ago
I think it sounds better tbh. Just like I think "reached" (ew) should be "raught", which has a nicer sound.
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u/base43 4d ago
Back in the 2020s they ate corn sugar and wheat in everything. They drove cars and made electricity by burning coal and oil. They poisoned their crops so they didn't have to deal with weeds. And they dumped chemicals in all major water bodies and then ate the aquatic life and drank the polluted water.
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u/aloofball 4d ago
And can you believe they knew about microplastics already and yet they just walked around all day clothed in garments made of woven polyester that shed "lint" (actually plastic fragments) everywhere they went?
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u/drhuggables 4d ago
What's wrong with WHEAT bro lmao
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u/NewShinyCD 4d ago
It'll make your dick fly off
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u/Bloosqr1 4d ago
I think the radium thing lasted a lot longer than one would expect. I had one of these in the UK in the late 70's (I think I was 7 or 8 at the time).
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u/Tartaros030 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yep, radioactive fluorescent paint was used for a long time beyond that. In clocks and wristwatches you'd find Radium based paints until the 1960s, Tritium based paints even even until the 90s in some places.
Modern clocks may still use gaseous tritium. It's said the latter is safe.
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u/Haunt_Fox 4d ago
And compasses. Military ones, anyway. Best thing for navigating in the dark. 🤷🏼♀️
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u/ScottOld 4d ago
Yea the war museum here has a compass, it's inside its own glass box behind the window, with the radioactive warning on
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u/Smooth_Beginning_540 4d ago
What do they use now for luminous watch hands and numbers? Also gaseous tritium? I have one from about 10-15 years ago and it still works.
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u/RokulusM 4d ago
The most popular watch lume brands like Super-Luminova and Lumibrite are made from strontium aluminate. It got popular in the 90s.
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u/Smooth_Beginning_540 4d ago
My watch is Casio. I always assumed that the glass was sufficient protection from whatever was used.
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u/OxycontinEyedJoe 4d ago
The modern ones are Phosphorescent. They have to be "charged" with light. The old radioactive stuff would still be glowing just the same after spending a year in a dark closet. But once it stopped glowing it was done, no charging it back up.
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u/FlyingHounds 3d ago
Glass vials containing a phosphor and tritium gas. Used by a number of watch-makers (Ball Watches being one of the more creative ones when it comes to colors). Same thing for night-sights on firearms. If the vials are broken, the gas dissipates quickly so it’s a better alternative than radium based glow-in-the-dark stuff.
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u/Nessy3fidy 4d ago
Don't forget Merbromin in old first aid kits, because you know mercury kills bacteria.
Also in really old bandages the presumably antibiotic chemicals crystalize and become...explosive.
Mercury one V "a organomercuric topical antiseptic used for minor cuts and scrapes"
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 4d ago
Meth changed in the 2000s and is much more unhealthy now.
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u/heavensto_mergatroid 4d ago
4th of July they give you a baggy with 10 m80s and say don't blow your fingers off. 8 yrs old.
One of those of m80 was probably like 1/8 of a stick of dynamite. Big explosion
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u/Uncaring_Dispatcher 4d ago
I grew up with lawn darts and, yeah, M-80's. It was fun, indeed, but the real fun was had by my grandpa, who was able to buy actual dynamite at the hardware store...as a kid.
Those must've been the good ole' days!
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u/heavensto_mergatroid 4d ago
I'm 50 and I remember seeing dynamite being sold in the small farm community hardware stores outside Denver like in the early 80s! Lol it's crazy how recent you could buy dynamite at a hardware store
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u/Loud_Produce4347 4d ago
Explosive boulder removal kits were still available at the hardware store 20 years ago IIRC. Dexpan was still sort of a novelty.
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u/doge_lady 4d ago
What purpose did they use besides mining?
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u/Uncaring_Dispatcher 4d ago
It was considered a labor-saving tool at the time. People would remove large tree stumps, boulders, dig large holes and ditches, etc.
It's crazy how times change and how people change. And yeah, bad people did do bad things with it. Check out the "Bath School Disaster". It's a wonder dynamite was still easy to buy even after that. You could order it from the Sears catalogue!
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u/Old-Personality-4241 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was 12, in 1983. I could walk to the Armory in town in R.I. and buy a Lb of black gunpowder... no i.d., no questions. We'd take take it home, , dig a 2' deep hole, run some powder for a fuse, bury the 1lb container in the hole, light it and run to the shed to watch it go BOOM! The good old days.
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u/MrLancaster 4d ago
When my grandfather died, we found half a dozen sticks of dynamite in his safe, INSIDE his house lol. He used them for blasting stumps out of the ground, apparently.
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u/Old-Personality-4241 4d ago
M80's.....pfft, you thought they liked you until you found out I got to pay with Pineapples...1/4 stick of dynamite!. The fish we unknowingly killed as youths. Oopsie.
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u/heavensto_mergatroid 4d ago
I only heard of pineapples as a myth back in the day lol I never got to see one but my friend Anthony used to make his own little 1/4 stick pipe bombs with gun powder. We called him MacGyver because he was always making shit. Little psycho lol
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u/G-EDM 4d ago edited 4d ago
Funny. When I was a very young child (30 years in the past or something) we had a neighbor who collected militia and a lot of other stuff. he was heavily into Surprise Egg figures. I had some and we traded. I received a military helmet and a chain from a machine gun with one round in it. It was a big box of figures so there was some value coming into the trade from my side too. Only warning was that I should never ever hit it with a hammer. Boy was my mum angry after finding out. There was a third item but I don't remember what it was. Maybe a belt or something else. Times where different back then, high trust society. Edit: it is possible that the round was not live anymore and the warning was just to increase the trading value of the collectible item. But I was too young to know for sure.
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u/heavensto_mergatroid 4d ago
Lol...
One day my friends and I had a 22lr bullet and we were daring each other to hit that sucker with a hammer. None of us had the balls thank God! 😆
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u/SinoSoul 4d ago
You laugh, but: some neighborhood kids lit one m80 during July 4. And less than 10min cops came to my house because my kid was just hanging out, watching… my kid wouldn’t rat the boys out so the cop decided to come to my house…
I don’t even know where to buy an m80 from.
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u/Psychological-Tea998 4d ago
Husband-"Honey, I have a headache."
Wife-"Did you take your morphine tablets yet?"
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u/Onslaughtered1 4d ago
That’s what’s wrong with today! Nothing is pure anymore!!!!
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u/kleenkong 4d ago
It was nice of them to deliver in those wagons. It's what a drug dealer with great customer service should do.
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u/SinoSoul 4d ago
I already get all my meds from Amazon, I’m waiting for them to start carrying weed
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u/canman7373 4d ago
They took cocaine out of Coke long before that, but it's crazy took so long to learn radioactive products was something should not be sold.
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u/Background-Wafer-548 4d ago
It's called a spinthariscope and you can still buy them, although they now use thorium or apparently americium and no longer something so ungodly nasty as polonium.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2568:_Spinthariscope
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u/OkDark5738 4d ago
Booooo! Lemme poison myself. Woke gone mad!
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u/ChooseYerFoodFighter 4d ago edited 4d ago
You can take my spinthariscope when you pry it from my cold, dead, glowing hand.
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u/YoureAmastyx 4d ago
It’s a fucking nanny state I tell ya! We ain’t got no rights no more. I can’t even pour organophosphates on my vegetables anymore!
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u/Iluvatar-Great 4d ago
I wonder what kind of hellish thing we will find out 50 years from now, that we think is completely safe.
My grandson in 2070: "Damn, Grandpa, did you really use Wifi? In your HOMES? How did you even survive? How come no one told you it was giving you *insert serious illness."
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u/TheChickenReborn 4d ago
Microplastics, social media, and overwork will be some of the new ones. But with all the deregulation we'll get to experience all the old ones again as well!
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u/TrulyOutrageous42 4d ago
They act like folks with permanent injuries can just get any old job, but at this point every store works like the dollar stores where stockers are cashiers and somehow the store thinks it's better to have them walking around constantly rather than 2 people doing the work.
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u/joshTheGoods 3d ago
Microplastics are always the popular answer to this question, but I'd argue we have enough data at this point to put a cap on the effect size of microplastic exposure. It's basically PM2.5 exposure at worst. That's not nothing, but it's not the sort of thing we look back on like lead exposure and certainly not like Polonium exposure!
That's not to say we should ignore the impact. A subtle effect like increasing odds of heart attack by 2% won't impact individuals in a meaningful way, but from a population perspective we're talking about millions of extra heart attacks worldwide despite the fact that the impact of the microplastics pale in comparison to the rest of the factors ... for example, lack of exercise is 10-15x more impact than hypothetical 2% increase in risk associated (again, hypothetically) with microplastic exposure.
The real answer is sugar. It's at least 20x more dangerous than microplastics.
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u/SkisaurusRex 4d ago
Something is giving young people colon cancer and we don’t know what it is
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u/leetzor 3d ago
Likely not one thing. Plastics. The recent meta of putting extra protein in every imaginable food. Nitrates in processed meats. Most recent i read about was residual dish soap from dishwashers not being good enough at rinsing it. Our poor gut bacteria just cant keep up with all the shit (heh) we try to nuke it with.
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u/DifferentAnalyst2001 3d ago
How did you have PFAS/PFOs in all your food packaging, clothing, and in all your drinking water?
Did you ever think to not pollute the entire world with a forever chemical grandpa?
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u/reality72 4d ago
“Why did you wear clothes made of polyester? Didn’t people know plastic is poisonous?”
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u/Subotail 3d ago
I love the scene in the movie iRobot where the female character freaks out when will Smith start his Motorbike
"gas explodes you know ?!!!"
Like combustion engine are a devious thing of the past
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u/InterestingSoup1252 3d ago
It’s going to be plastic. Like using plastic bottles to hold beverages, or using plastic wrapping to hold food, or using plastic utensils to cook.
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u/wavveygravvey 2d ago
Driving cars manually. Once we get automated cars on the road and car wrecks are a thing of the past.
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u/ProfessorMalk 4d ago edited 4d ago
You're probably right, I'm sure there will be some things that will be determined to be unsafe. That's just kinda how it goes, we learn and do better.
That being said, this ring was actually completely safe as long as it wasn't eaten.
Snopes did a fact check on these rings last year.
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u/Sea-Woodpecker-610 3d ago
“You let kids on social media all day long? His the fuck could anybody think that was a good idea!”
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u/Nervous_Writer_2632 4d ago
I mean highly radioactive toys for free!?! What could go wrong?
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u/Imaginary-Contest887 4d ago
Polonium-210 is strong alpha emitter. The radiation itself from it is harmless as long as polonium stays outside of your body, it can't penetrate your skin. However once this toy is broken, ingesting or inhaling Polonium-210 is lethal.
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u/edingerc 4d ago
When I was a kid, all we had to play with was a bag-o-glass
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u/BuckyD1000 3d ago
“Yeah, it’s broken glass. It sells very well, you know. We’re just packaging what the kids want. We sell a lot of products in the Bag O' line."
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u/mara-banana 4d ago
"Back in my time" ahh post
But this one is actually fire
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u/wild_womanxoxo 4d ago
and nobody ever mentions that it expired. polonium-210 halves every 138 days, so the flashes faded out inside a year and you were left wearing a normal ring that used to be an atomic bomb
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u/MolecularConcepts 4d ago
thanks you saved me some money was about to get one, but was just thinking about the half life lol
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u/OkCattle9114 4d ago
Yeah back in the gold mining days they had dilaudid in liquid form or just smoke straight opium. Healthy pain solving methods
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u/BigMack6911 4d ago
No wonder boomers are crazy lmao
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u/e37d93eeb23335dc 4d ago
I’m Gen X and when I was in elementary school they let us play with mercury with our bare hands. They probably let boomers swallow the stuff.
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u/MuchoCoco 3d ago
How did they find enough affordable polonium for that prize? It's not as if it was industrially available at the time.
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u/slowamigo 4d ago
Flashes of light? Can someone elaborate
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u/einTier 4d ago
It’s called a Spinthariscope. They’re still available, I bought one about ten years ago. Typically they use Thorium today but the idea is the same.
There’s a reactive screen in front of the radioactive element. As the radioactive element decays, the alpha particles hit the screen and create faint flashes of light. Alpha particles require very little shielding so the device is very safe so long as you don’t crack it open.
It requires a completely dark room and about five to ten minutes of acclimatization to see. Mine is still very active and the display lights up well but it really just looks like static on a very old television.
It’s cool but a little anticlimactic for the work you have to put in.
Here is where I bought mine if anyone wants one.
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u/Major-Hooters 4d ago
You know, the US went through its third world stage before it got to first world stage. It was rough, but we learned our lessons. But not good enough because we are going through it again like we have learned nothing the last 100 years. What a shame to watch us walk backwards.
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u/BoardTwoTiers 4d ago
The real surprise is learning that 1947 was the last time anyone was excited to get Kix cereal.
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u/funnyfinger2017 4d ago
I had one of those. Remove the red cap - see little flashes of light. So cool!
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u/Dull_Panda_833 4d ago
Nuh uh? That sounds insane
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u/jerquee 4d ago
You can still buy photographic brushes with polonium-210 in them.
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u/Double_Distribution8 4d ago
What's a photographic brush? And why is there polonium in them?
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u/Ok-Hyena4541 4d ago
https://company7.com/staticmaster/products/staticmaster.html
They're for cleaning dust off of photographic film and the polonium reduces static charge in the film which attracts dust.
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u/NoDoOversInLife 4d ago
Let's not forget the chemistry sets from the 50's & 60's! I've heard my uncle's talking about getting these from their parents and the kits contained real, dangerous, chemicals!!!
Gilbert Chem set
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u/KailyKail 4d ago
Do they still make Kix cereal? I remember eating it as a kid, but honestly, I don’t think I’ve seen it on shelves in years.
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u/ShintaOtsuki 4d ago
Fallout NV stuff, kinda what the Novac Rockets were based on
Guy says something like
"Got some kinda isotope in em that made them glow. Kids must've thought they were juice or soda and started drinking em down. Then kids started getting sick."
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