Antonios Theodosis - Super Blog 3

 





Image Number One: This image I found this week perfectly encapsulates the pop culture craze of radium at the time by showing the quackery revolving around radium during the early twentieth century. The advertisement for a product originally made in England called “Caradium” claims that this radium infused product will “restore” any silvered or damaged hairs. This image ties into my research argument because it shows that this naturally occurring extremely dangerous element was used in everyday products at the time despite the extremely dangerous health risks associated with it. It also just goes to show us now that we have hindsight of course, of just how crazy some of these products were. The public was essentially being poisoned without even knowing it thanks to quackery and money hungry corporations looking to exploit the public’s health for monetary gain. 





Image Number Two: This is yet another image which highlights the use of radium in everyday products during the radium craze. Cooking utensils were infused with radium - yet the reasoning for this is not explicitly clear in the advertisement. But based on my research so far I am assuming that the thought process behind this was that the radium infused into the cooking utensils was either supposed to be some sort of novelty factor due to the glow, or they proposed that there were nutritional benefits to having radium in cookware. Overall the idea seems pretty insane today, especially after seeing just how deadly small specs of radium can be if ingested. Like the first image, this one captures the pop culture use of radium, but also ties into how this element was putting the public at extremely high risk of becoming sick and dying from this. 

 Image #2

Image #3

Image Number Three: This map is one that highlights the radium concentration in wells throughout the nation, specifically for this project though my focus is in southern california - Los Angeles to be even more direct. The map highlights the radium concentration within the area and so I found it to be a good addition to my project. I am including this because back during the radium craze, the most popular way to extract radium and put it into products was through the wells which naturally contained radium in them. Radium would be mined out and incorporated into the everyday products such as the ones mentioned above which was extremely dangerous and deadly. I wanted to use this image because it gives the reader the idea of just where the radium was coming from. It isn't something just made in a lab (though nowadays it mainly is) at the time of the radium craze it was extracted through natural resources and then marketed heavily without much scientific research going into it. 


Image Number Four: This is an image of naturally occurring radium which can be found in the wells mentioned above. This small rock is what contains trace amounts of radium which would be broken down and used to create the products during the radium age. It is estimated that just one small gram of radium cost 100,000$ in the early twentieth century (adjusted to inflation.) The dangers to human health just from a small rock like this are extremely deadly which I plan on covering in my final research blog to not give away too much information on this assignment and ramble on too much. 



Comments

  1. Jose Chavez-HerediaMarch 2, 2021 at 5:09 PM

    Hi Antonios, I think your first picture is great for your research blog. It is important to show how harmful radium was and there were companies making beauty products with it.

    ReplyDelete

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