A presentation at the 13th International Congress of Physiologists by the German researcher George Wendt only intensified the theoretical atmosphere. Wendt had found that moribund, vitamin-starved rats would be temporarily rejuvenated by exposure to the alpha radiation coming from radium. The old homeopathic principle seemed valid: a poisonous substance in large quantities would destroy life, but in trace amounts it was beneficial, even necessary. By the end of the war in Europe, radioactive liniments, candles, and potions of every kind were available to a buying public. In the U.S. in 1921, interest surged after Marie Curie, twice the winner of a Nobel Prize, made an exhausting whistle-stop tour of the country. If pinned down with the right question, she would acknowledge the medicinal properties of radiation as a catalyst for essential body functions.
William Bailey, always on the lookout for a new way to redistribute wealth, jumped into the fray. He formed a company named Associated Radium Chemists, Inc. in New York City and sold a line of radioactive medicines. There was “Dax” for coughs, “Clax” for influenza, which had recently wiped out 3 % of the world’s population, and “Arium” for that run-down feeling. Unfortunately, none of these concoctions actually worked, and Bailey’s operation was shut down by the Department of Agriculture for fraudulent advertising. Never deterred, he soon started two new corporations: the Thorone Company, making a radioactive treatment for “all glandular, metabolism and faulty chemistry conditions” (impotence), and the American Endocrine Laboratory, producing a device called the Radioendocrinator. This contraption was designed to place a gold-plated radiation source near where it was needed. Around the neck for an inadequate thyroid gland, tied in back for the adrenal glands, and, for men who may be specially concerned, a unique jock-strap held it comfortably under the scrotum. Suggested retail price was $1,000, but the market quickly saturated.
Bailey moved to East Orange, New Jersey, ground zero for making interesting chemicals, in 1925 and began manufacture of his most successful product, Radithor, a triple-distilled water enriched with radium salts. This radioactive elixir was guaranteed to practically raise the dead, curing 150 diseases from high blood pressure to dyspepsia. It was advertised as “Perpetual Sunshine.” It came in a tiny, half-ounce clear glass bottle, with a cork in it and a paper wrapper around the stopper. Many radium medicines were being sold at the time, and most were absolute frauds, either having a slight bit of rapidly decaying radon or nothing at all dissolved in the water. Bailey was true to his word. Each dose of Radithor contained one microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228.[15] It was genuinely poisonous.[16] Bailey bought his material from the nearby American Radium Laboratory, marked it up by about 500 percent, and resold it under the banner “A Cure for the Living Dead.”
The public need and the advertising slogans were good, but the most brilliant of Bailey’s promotional setups was his rebate plan. He promised physicians a 17-percent kickback for every bottle of Radithor prescribed. The American Medical Association angrily labeled it “fee-splitting quackery,” but it helped sell over 400,000 bottles of the stuff in five years. A case of 24 bottles retailed for $30. Dr. William Bailey became comfortably rich.
Into the middle of this campaign fell Eben McBurney Byers, socialite, man about town, free-wheeling bachelor, Yale man, accomplished athlete, and wealthy chairman of the Girard Iron Company, which he inherited from his father. Powerful, handsome, vigorous in all pursuits, and broad of chest, Byers had competed in the U.S. Amateur Golf Tournament every year since 1900 and won it in 1906, two strokes over George Lyon. In his Pittsburgh home was a room dedicated only to skeet-shooting trophies, and he loved keeping racing horses in his stables in New York and England. He also maintained homes in Southampton, Rhode Island, and Aiken, South Carolina.
In the fall of 1927 he was aboard a chartered Pullman, returning from the Yale-Harvard football game, when he fell from his upper berth to the floor, injuring an arm. There was an ache in the bone that wouldn’t go away, despite the attentions of his trainers and personal physicians. When it started to affect his golf game and possibly his libido, Byers became very concerned, and he cast about for a doctor who could fix it, finding Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar right in his home town. Dr. Moyar, finding the source of the pain difficult to pin down, prescribed Radithor.
In December 1927 Byers began drinking three bottles a day, and he immediately felt better. He started ordering it by the case, straight from the manufacturer. He became a believer, and he fed it to his friends, his female acquaintances, and his favorite horses. Reasoning that if a bottle made him feel good, then many bottles would make him feel marvelous, he eventually downed about 1,400 bottles of Radithor by 1931.
There is a problem with ingesting a significant amount of radium. Radium shares a column on the Periodic Table of the Elements with calcium. This means that both elements have the same outer electron orbital structure, which means that they form chemical compounds in basically the same way. With this chemical similarity between radium and calcium, when the human body finds radium in its inventory, it will use it for rebuilding bones.[17] Byers’s range of beverage intake did not necessarily include calcium-rich milk, and when his metabolism demanded material for repairing that hairline fracture in his arm, it found plenty of radium on hand.
Bones may seem like hard, immutable structures made of an inorganic calcium compound, when actually they are constantly being torn down and rebuilt. The bones with the most material turnaround are the jaws, which are under tremendous stress from having to support the teeth and chew food. It is surprising how much effort goes into constantly shoring up teeth, which seem barely alive but are also under constant maintenance. By the time Byers stopped taking Radithor he had accumulated about three times what is now known as the lethal dose, and it went straight to his bones and teeth. An x-ray machine was not necessary to take a cross-sectional picture of his teeth. They would light up a photographic plate with their own radiation output.
On February 5, 1930, the Federal Trade Commission filed an official complaint, claiming that Dr. Bailey had advertised falsely by claiming that Radithor could be beneficial and would cause no harm. Bailey took umbrage, proclaiming “I have drunk more radium water than any man alive, and I have never suffered any ill effects.”
15
Not to sow confusion here, but there are two completely different species of radium at work in Radithor. The radium-226 is a product of uranium-238 decay. It occurs as traces in uranium ore, and it has a half-life of 1,600 years. Radium-228 is a product of thorium-232 decay. It occurs in monazite sand, or thorium ore, and it has a half-life of 5.75 years. Unlike radium-226, this isotope of radium emits beta rays instead of alpha particles, and at the time it was a byproduct of the gas mantle industry. The syllable “thor” in Radithor stands for mesothorium, an obsolete term meaning radium-228, and the “Radi” means radium-226.
16
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. It means that the radium-226 and radium-228 in that bottle were decaying at a rate of over 4 million times per second. Even after sitting on a dusty shelf for over 80 years, an old, dried-up bottle of Radithor will swamp a Geiger counter. Each of those 4 million radiation bursts per second finds something to hit and destroy in the body of the consumer. Once the radium is gone or decayed away, the resulting products keep radiating, adding to the injury. In the case of radium-228, the radiation dose rate actually increases by over 10 % after the person stops ingesting Radithor.
17
Strontium is also in this column. This makes radioactive strontium-90, a fission byproduct with a half-life of 29 years, one of the major contamination concerns when a reactor core comes apart or a nuclear weapon is exploded above ground. It is a pure beta minus emitter, and it is just two disintegration hops away from stable zirconium-90. The interim isotope is yttrium-90, with a 64-hour half-life, emitting a beta minus and a gamma ray that is so weak it can be ignored. Although its danger potential is far less than radium, it is known to cause bone cancer.