Radium cocktail consumer poisoning (1920s)

Brief teaching aside in the periodic-table survey. Wealthy consumer drank a daily glass of radium and rapidly decalcified. Used as comic relief and as the "anti-structural material" punchline before Tom turns to magnesium proper. ## §9 — Magnesium

Magnesium — let me finish up these. Strontium and barium start to get very soft. Radium — some forms are radioactive. They used to drink it back in the 1920s. Have you ever heard about that? When radioactivity was new, people thought they'd make radium cocktails — they thought drinking it would make them feel better, sort of like five-hour energy. But it was very expensive. The longer they drank it, they started having other effects. There's one guy who was very wealthy, and to his dying day would drink a glass of radium every day. His dying day didn't take too many months, because his bones started decalcifying and he started turning into just sort of an amoeba, no structure. So maybe we call this an anti-structural material. But this was the 1920s, so these things don't really count.

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Brief illustrative aside on shifting public attitudes toward radioactivity — used to justify the welding industry's abandonment of thoriated tungsten electrodes in favor of cerium/lanthanum/yttrium oxide variants. Tom mentions the wealthy 1920s consumer who drank hundreds-of-dollars-per-drink radium tonics daily until his bones disintegrated.

But people don't like thorium, because it's slightly radioactive — just like they don't like depleted uranium all over the ground in Iraq. People have learned to not like radiation as much as they used to. Back in the 1920s, really wealthy people used to drink radium because they thought it gave them an upper, made them feel better. Some people started finding health effects after a little while of drinking radioactive radium. There was one very wealthy guy — some people started getting aches and pains and bones started breaking — but this guy was convinced and drank it until the day he died, and he hardly had any bones left in his body when he did die. He died of radiation poisoning. I don't know what the cost was, but it was hundreds of dollars per drink — he would drink some radium every day. People used to like radiation when they first discovered it. They thought it was a good thing. Nowadays they think it's a bad thing.