The Fountain of Youth Came in a Jar

Name: The Fountain of Youth Came in a Jar
Genre: Documentary

American entrepreneurs packaged radium's reputation into beauty products, water jars, tablets, animal feed, and decorative devices.

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Transcript

A 1925 booklet called the Lifetime Radium Water Jar a personal Youth Fountain.
The market became infatuated with radium, used in medicine and consumer products.
Marie and Pierre Curie’s 1898 radium discovery soon brought medicine and consumer products.
In 1903, Tanakadate Aikitsu brought radium from Europe to Japan, only 10 milligrams.
In Japan, radium hot springs became fashionable, and radium became a panacea.
A visitor raises a cup, treating radium water as a health remedy.
In 1919, beauty products and makeup joined the radioactive promise list.
Radium Radia contained no radium, yet its instructions promised treatment by rubbing.
The market even included Provaradior, a radium-containing food for farm animals.
Thomas Radium Ore jars came in three sizes: 2, 4, and 10 gallons.
A December 1924 ad claimed over 5,000 jars made monthly.
After Dow-Herriman bought it, it became the Radium Ore Revigator Company.
In Denver, National Radium Corporation operated an office.
In 1925, the company’s booklet featured the Lifetime Radium Water Jar.
The Vitalizer’s radon source was an insoluble radium-barium sulfate salt, free of mineral poisons.
Research established radiation’s use in medical practice, but its dangers were not fully understood.
In 1928, American scientist Elizabeth Hughes told a New Jersey Chancery Court about radium.
Years earlier, federal prosecutors targeted Arium tablets, sold 42 per tin for $1.
A 1926 analysis found 8.58 nanocuries radium per tablet.

But one one-dollar tin called Arium did not merely borrow radium's name; every tablet carried a measurable radioactive dose.

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