Above the sun are the words, "Radium Brand Creamery Butter." There was most likely no radium in said butter, but it must've been a boon to sales. In one ad, a pastoral landscape dotted with grazing cows near a pristine stream are bathed in the warm glow of a rising sun. Numerous are the ads of this time for wares like "radium silk lingerie" and decks of cards with the word "radium" emblazoned on them. Products that didn't have anything to do with radium carried the name of the expensive metal to add allure - similar to the way we use words like "platinum" or "titanium" today. Radium quickly became a veritable marketing force. But that didn't stop companies from riding the marketing wave it created. ![]() Products that fraudulently touted radium as an ingredient were shut down by the government. ![]() Radium was put into chicken feed with the hopes the eggs would self-incubate, or at least self-cook. The luminous metal was used in household products such as lipstick, chocolate (in Germany), tonics, and of course, watches. Adding radium to anything somehow made it better. "No medicine, no drugs," raves one ad for an item claiming to help alleviate asthma and nine other things, "Just a light, small, comfortable, inexpensive Radio-Active Pad worn on the back by day and over the stomach at night." One particularly disturbing medical innovation was the "Radiendocrinator," a device the size of a thick stack of credit cards to be worn with an adaptor "like any 'athletic strap.'" Its inventor, who fervently claimed to use the product, later died of bladder cancer. ![]() The glowing element was hailed as a panacea for everything from blindness to hysteria. In the first decades of the 20th century, America, along with the rest of the world, was enamored with it. It's no wonder the girls painting watch dials and such weren't aware of the dangers of straight up eating radium.
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