Radium: Miracle. Medicine. Poison.Episode 32:11
The Paint That Never Went Dark
Sabin von Sochocky's luminous formula turned radioactive decay into a commercial light source and launched a new industry.
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Transcript
A speck of radioactive paint could keep making its own eerie light.
Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898.
The market became infatuated with radium after its discovery.
By 1904, radium appeared in paint, cocktails, and objects designed to glow.
In 1913, Sabin von Sochocky produced fluorescent paint for commercial use.
Radium decay excited zinc sulfide to provide a continuous light source.
He mixed radium-226 with zinc sulfide and other additives.
In daylight the dish held nothing but a smear of dark paint.
That reaction produced a continuous light source from radioactive decay itself.
A light without a switch felt less like chemistry than captured time.
In 1914, Sabin and George S. Willis founded Radium Luminous Materials Corporation.
Its raw material came from carnotite ore in Colorado’s Paradox Valley.
The RLMC extracted carnotite ores from Colorado’s Paradox Valley region. Sabin von Sochocky produced fluorescent paint for commercial use in 1913.
The industry developed a commercial market for luminous-dial watches and other products.
Across the Pacific, radium hot springs became fashionable in 1910s Japan.
In 1916, Kosakai Fuboku described the era as an era of radium or radiation.
By 1917, the Orange, New Jersey, complex occupied several buildings.
In 1918, demand grew so high that people feared a radium shortage.
By 1917, the RLMC complex in Orange, New Jersey, occupied several buildings. The industry developed a commercial market for luminous-dial watches.
Now the formula was ready for customers far beyond the watch counter.
Where it leaves off
But continuous light found its biggest customer in a war that could not risk darkness.
Sources
- The National Bureau of Standards and the Radium Dial Painters - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
- Introduction - Radium: Topics in Chronicling America - Research Guides at Library of Congressguides.loc.govsecondary
- Radium traffic: radiation, science and spiritualism in early twentieth-century Japan - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
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