The power of radium

If you mentioned atomic power to the man in the street around 1920, the first word that would have sprung to mind would have been "radium".

Discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, Radium was the first popularly known radioactive elementand one that is intensely radioactive.  It was this radioactivity that provided the early practical applications of radium.  The rays given off by the element were used to treat cancer and when mixed with zinc fluoride was the key ingredient in luminous paints used on watch dials and, for some unfathomable reason, on indoor radio antennae. 

Radium was a mysterious substance of seemingly limitless potential that could do everything from lighting a dial to generating the incredible beams that powered the Martian machines of Edgar Rice Burroughs, allowed Boris Karloff to fashion his death ray and Bela Lugosi to become invisible.  Hugo Gernsback even used radium in his novel Ralph 124c41+ to bring the dead back to life.  If modern man flattered himself on no longer believing in the philosopher's stone, he'd very quickly replaced it with a new one no less fantastic.

Ironically, it was in the medical and luminous applications that radium gained its reputation for being not only mysterious, but dangerous.  Patent medicine salesmen reasoned that what is good for cancer is good for any other ailment and in the early decades of the 20^th century the market was flooded with radium salts, radium water, radium baths, radium inhalers, radium suppositories, radium massages, radium belts, radium food preservative, radium toothpaste, radium hair cream and heaven knows what else that produced far more deaths and illness than they ever managed to cure.  Meanwhile, the deaths of women workers in radium paint factories was a national scandal in the United States in the 1930s and eventually resulted in radium paints being banned from sale.

As the implications of Albert Einstein's equation were understood, both scientists and laymen speculated that if the power of the atom was ever to be liberated it would be from the already powerful form of radium.  Realising the potential of such compact, boundless energy, the pages of popular science magazines in the 1920s and '30s were filled with diagrams of miraculous machines that would use radium to drive them. 

One such was this plan for a dirigible with a lead safe filled with radium, which not only provided power for the motors and lights, but even generated helium as a byproduct for the gas cells to keep the ship aloft.

If the helium in the dirigible was an asset, it was a liability in the speculative radium-powered submarine.  Though a radium boiler produced the steam to drive this proto-Nautilus through the ocean depths, the helium it gave off had to be bled off into the surrounding water.

A nice bit of thinking, but such a miscalculation of how much helium a given weight of radium could let off makes one suspect that the writer, alas allowed his slide rule to sleep in its sheath.

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