Byers could not make such a claim. He started to complain about unusual aches and pains. He had lost “that toned-up feeling,” and he was losing weight. Maybe it was just age catching up with him, who had just passed his 50th birthday, or perhaps it was just a bad case of sinusitis, as his doctor opined. He started having blinding headaches and then toothaches. Soon, his teeth began falling out. Starting to panic, Byers consulted a specialist, Joseph Steiner, a radiologist in New York City.
To Steiner, the problem looked like “radium jaw,” a newly identified occupational disease that had been seen in watch-dial painters. The common factor was, of course, the presence of radium in the person’s life. It goes straight to the jaw. Frederick B. Flinn, the radium expert from Columbia University, was called in, and he grimly confirmed Steiner’s suspicion. There was absolutely no known cure or even a treatment of the symptoms. Although Dr. Moyer, Byers’s personal physician, refused to accept the diagnosis, the patient’s health was steadily declining. The once solid hunk of man wasted down to 92 pounds but remained alert and lucid. His bones were splintering and dissolving.
The Trade Commission, seeing this as a further indictment of Bailey’s work, called on Byers to testify in September 1930. He could not make the trip, so attorney Robert H. Winn was sent to his Southampton mansion to take a deposition. His written description of Byers says it alclass="underline"
A more gruesome experience in a more gruesome setting would be hard to imagine. We went to Southampton where Byers had a magnificent home. There we discovered him in a condition which beggars description. Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive jaw operations and his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.
Byers was moved to Doctor’s Hospital in New York City. He died on March 31, 1932, at 7:30 a.m. The Trade Commission had shut down Bailey’s operation with a cease-and-desist order on December 19, 1931.
Eben Byers had been rich and well known, and the New York Times took his death as important and worthy of front-page reporting. The headline was crude, but it still has a compelling effect on even the casual reader: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTILE HIS JAW CAME OFF. On April 2 the subtitles started to unwind the story: DEATH STIRS ACTION ON RADIUM “CURES.” TRADE COMMISSION SPEEDS ITS INQUIRY. HEALTH DEPARTMENT CHECKS DRUG WHOLESALERS. AUTOPSY SHOWS SYMPTOMS. MAKER OF “RADITHOR” DENIES IT KILLED BYERS, AS DOES VICTIM’S PHYSICIAN IN PITTSBURGH. FRIENDS ALARMED TO FIND MAYOR HAS BEEN DRINKING RADIUM-CHARGED WATER FOR LAST SIX MONTHS.[18]
This intense tabloid journalism pushed all the right buttons. The reading public was justifiably horrified, and the dangers of radioactive materials came into sharp and sudden focus. The Federal Trade Commission, feeling empowered, reopened its investigation, and the Food and Drug Administration began a campaign for greater enforcement power and new laws concerning radioactive isotopes. Sales restrictions on radiopharmaceuticals, still in place, date back to the Byers affair, and the market for over-the-counter radiation cures collapsed immediately.
William Bailey was not one to be discouraged by federal intervention, and he went on to market a radioactive paperweight, the “Bioray,” acting as a “miniature sun” to give you the benefits of natural, environmental cosmic rays even as you sat in your dismal office space. The Great Depression was killing sales, but he kept on, selling the “Adrenoray” radioactive belt clip and the “Thoronator,” a refillable “health spring for every home or office” designed to infuse ordinary tap water with health-giving radon gas. Fortunately, none of his new products were noticeably radioactive.
Meanwhile, a second death-blow to the popularity of radium was developing on the other end of the ladder of success. Thousands of young women were working in factories using radium paint, and they were beginning to die off in horrible ways. They lacked the celebrity of Eben Byers, but there were so many of them that the problem became impossible to ignore. This highly successful industry was making profits in Canada, Great Britain, and France, with particular enthusiasm concentrated in the United States. Its only goal was to make things glow in the dark.
The quest to make a paint that would glow by itself goes back as far as 1750 in industrial Europe. The first concoction to be advertised and sold was probably called “Canton’s Own,” manufactured by a Professor Tuson in London in 1764. By 1870 there were competing formulae, and luminous paints were selling briskly. Most used strontium carbonate or strontium thiosulphate. It had been found, probably accidentally, that strontium compounds would seem to store sunlight and would then give it back after the sun went down. We now know this phenomenon as a “forbidden energy-state transition” in a singlet ground-state electron orbital. The strontium, like everything else, absorbs and then returns a light photon that hits it, but in this case the return is delayed. The strontium atom, excited to a higher energy state by the absorption of light, “decays,” as if it were radioactive, reflecting the light back with a half-life of about 25 minutes. After four hours of glowing, the strontium compound needs to be re-charged with light. By 1877, phosphorescent paint was all the rage. The insides of train cars were painted with it, so your reading would not be interrupted when the train passed through a dark tunnel. Glow-in-the-dark wallpaper was sold.[19] Street signs and souvenir postcards used it.
The discovery of radium and its radioactivity in 1898 put an entirely new spin on the concept of phosphorescent paint. It did not take long to figure out that a speck of radium carbonate, invisibly small, mixed with zinc sulphide would glow not for four hours, or four years, but forever. There was never a need to charge the material with light. All the excitation of the zinc came from the radiation emitted by the radium. This world-changing discovery was made not by a crack team of physicists, but by Frederick Kunst, a gemologist working at Tiffany & Co. in New York City. He teamed with Charles Bakerville, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina, and they came up with the formula for luminous paint, receiving a U.S. patent in 1903.[20]
Ignoring the concept of patent rights, the Ansonia Clock Co. of New York began selling timepieces with self-luminous dials in 1904, supposedly using their own formula. The concept was an immediate success. Limits to the availability of the active ingredient, radium, kept sales from going out of control, but the glowing clock-dial was an attractive novelty.
In 1914 came the First World War. It was a new type of war, fought partly in the dark of night. All critical equipment needed to be lighted, but not so brightly that it would reveal your position to the enemy. Radium paint was the logical, perfect solution, and demand on both sides of the conflict became huge. Everything needed to glow: gun sights, compass cards, elevation readouts on cannons, land-mine markers, and, most urgently, watch dials. Watches were used widely, to synchronize night charges by mile-wide fronts of men emerging suddenly from their trenches. In 1913 the United States Army began equipping every soldier with a luminous-dial timepiece, and there were 8,500 in use. The radium-dial watch became a necessary part of living during that war, and the need came home with the surviving troops. By 1919, the number of glowing timepieces turned out in the U.S. had grown to 2.5 million. The Ingersoll Watch Co. alone made a million radium watches per year, and the demand for the rare metal put a maximum load on the mines in Colorado and Utah. Hospitals began to protest that the supply of radium was drying up, and thousands of cancer patients would be denied the only effective treatment for some forms of the disease. The sum of all radium inventories in the world amounted to only hundreds of milligrams, and any application had to be judicious and without waste.
18
James J. “Jimmy” or “Beau James” Walker was mayor of New York City at the time, and he at first refused to give up his radium water because it made him feel so good. Later that year Walker fled to Europe in fear of prosecution for several crimes while in office. Seldom mentioned is Byers’s girlfriend, who also perished of radium poisoning from the Radithor that Byers insisted that she drink.
19
This product was particularly popular in gunpowder factories, where liberal use of gas lighting was liable to end in disaster.
20
Bakerville could never grasp the theory of transmutation of elements due to radioactive decay, and he announced the discovery of two new elements, “carolinium” and “berzelium,” while studying curious properties of radium. He was thus lauded in the