The metal they thought could change the world – until people started to die

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30-01-2025

For some children it's dinosaurs, for others trains or mermaids. For me it was rocks. I can pinpoint the moment exactly. I must have been five or six when I heard a surf-like swish, and a truck-load of gravel was tipped on to our driveway. I discovered that some of the stones glittered. I put those ones in a tin and sifted the pile for more. I began to look further afield. For Christmas, I was given a geological hammer and chisel and a green canvas bag, and I went 'chipping' whenever I could. For the next few years, my life became a series of rock hunts, quarry hauls and boulder-flakings, measured out in crystals, fossils and finds.
On a Somerset hillside, I collected 'potato stones', muddy lumps of rock which when broken open revealed sparkling geodes. In Derbyshire, I found a large chunk of Blue John, deep-blue fluorite, which I scrubbed and scrubbed in a youth hostel shower room, and which caught the eye of someone else as it dried, and was gone. Quartz in a dozen shades, tourmaline, jasper, agates, gleaming galena, iron pyrites – 'fool's gold'.
I remember total absorption, the excitement of the quest and the stones themselves; their presence in my room, where I endlessly inspected them, left me with an enduring sense which only later was I able to articulate – that another world lay hidden inside this one.
A couple of weeks shy of my eighth birthday came the big find. I had just started at a boarding school and the alienation of the first weeks was offset by going into the woods with my green canvas bag. One Sunday morning I was out there with a boy called Lea, when he pointed at something that was the shape of a mushroom cap, but much bigger – an old staddle stone. I knew what to do. I took my hammer and gave it a whack. A tiny hairline appeared. Another whack, and we watched the edge of the stone fall away. Exposed were the outer coils of a very large ammonite, a series of perfectly rounded corrugations curling out from the rough sides. It was thicker than my arm.
I can recall now the exact sound the hammer made on the staddle stone, the faintly metallic smell and the shock of its opening. Weeks of chiselling followed, chipping away at the cast in a space behind the school reserved for outdoor hobbies. Groups of boys gathered to look over my shoulders and watch. When fully extracted, the ammonite was half a metre across. Lea and I made an agreement. He had found the stone, I had broken it open. We would each have it for a year and then swap round. He was older than me, and when he left the school, it was his year and he took the ammonite.
The decades slipped by and rocks receded into that ever-dimming cache of childhood enthusiasms. Then a few summers ago, clearing out the attic, I uncovered my old collection. It stirred deep layers of sediment – each dusty crystal, each fossil, each lump of gleaming ore bringing back the long-ago moment of discovery. It set me thinking more broadly about finding minerals, about metals and the miracle of metallurgy and how they altered for ever our relationship with the earth. Beneath our feet were secret substances which, once revealed, set our species on its precipitous trajectory. What began in wonder ended in hubris. It's a story that has led me on an odyssey of research and travel – from the abandoned tin mines near my Cornish home, through Europe, to the gold-rich mountains of Georgia.
Early on in my research, I read The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade's classic study of metallurgy in traditional society. In it he proposes an astonishing idea – that 'the imaginary world… came into being through the discovery of metals'. The production of metals, he suggests, was more than a functional process. It was a revelation. It is impossible now to know how much metals 'opened' the imagination, but they certainly sent it in new directions. Each time the earth produced a new material – copper first, then bronze and iron – it opened up an entire world of possibility.
At the end of the 19th century, a metal was discovered that turned the known world on its head. Nature had become more predictable of late. Each of the sciences was putting things in order, and chemistry was proving every bit as tidy as the others. Mendeleev's periodic table had emerged as a very efficient way of arranging the basic components of the universe. Each element seemed to have its own pre-booked seat at the table, arranged according to atomic weight, and new ones simply slipped into the empty spaces. Once they'd found their place, they stayed put. They could be built up into compounds, the metals into alloys, but they couldn't be broken down further or transformed. But here comes radium, fizzing into the room like a hyperactive socialite. Not only was it in a state of transition but it appeared to contain its own internal power source. Everything about it was impulsive, exciting, rebellious. This was a party now.
It began in 1898, when Marie Curie was studying a lump of uranium ore in Paris. She noticed that its levels of radioactivity were inexplicably high. There was something else in there. She set about reducing the ore, grinding it in a pestle and mortar, filtering it, precipitating it, dissolving and crystallising it. The work took three years and was physically testing and poorly funded. The laboratory where she and her husband Pierre worked was described by one visiting scientist as 'a cross between a stable and a potato cellar'; another noted with admiration that Marie 'worked like a man'. But their efforts paid off and at last Marie had isolated an element they named 'radium'; they had already discovered another and named it 'polonium' after her native Poland. This newcomer was something even more exceptional. Marie explained that radium was a million times more radioactive than uranium.
The Curies' breakthrough sparked a frenzy of excitement that spread far beyond the scientific community. The historian of science Luis A Campos described the initial impact: 'Unfathomably rare and intensely powerful, glowing in the dark and utterly unaffected by any outside force of nature as it gave off rays of unprecedented energy, radium was perhaps the most wonderful and perplexing thing the modern world had ever seen.'
By 1903, there were so many articles about radium that the secretary of the Royal Society noted that the 'newspapers have become radioactive'. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a sample of two grains of radium metal was placed on cotton in a glass case. It proved so popular that the police had to be called in to marshal the crowds. 'No other chemical element has ever attracted so much popular and scientific attention,' concluded Dr SC Lind some years later in The Scientific Monthly. 'Entire institutes have been devoted to its study. Medical clinics have been founded for its therapeutic use. Industrial companies have been formed and plants erected for its commercial production.'
A secret drawer had been opened in the universe's jewellery box, and in it was a supercharged gem. Everyone wanted a piece of it, to find ways to make use of its enhancements. Radium fertiliser made plants grow bigger, bloom brighter. Given to a group of flour worms, radium enabled one of the grubs to end up living three times longer than its life expectancy. 'It was as if,' wrote one clinician at the time, 'a human being should keep the appearance of youth for two or three hundred years.' Cosmetics companies developed radium beauty products. 'When scientists discovered radium,' one advertisement ran, 'they hardly dreamed they had unearthed a revolutionary beauty secret.' Crème Activa proclaimed that radium was 'a wonderful conquest of science in the service of beauty'. Hair tonic, face creams, anti-wrinkle treatments, complexion soaps and lipsticks all used the magic of radium to help people look better. (Doramad toothpaste, which contained thorium rather than radium, was marketed in Germany with the tag line: 'Your teeth will shine with radioactive brilliance.')
In Paris, an 'afternoon radium cure' was introduced. It involved rheumatic patients taking afternoon tea in a room filled with radium vapours. Fashionable clients would gather to play bridge and they reported a heightened sense of well-being. 'It is astonishing how many society women have suddenly discovered that they are suffering from rheumatism,' reported The New York Times, 'in order not to miss the 3 to 5 o'clock 'Radium Tea'.'
Theatres staged performances where actors – decorated with radium paint – did 'radium dances'. If you were down in the dumps, or tired, or flagging in the bedroom department, you could take a slug of Radithor ('CERTIFIED Radioactive Water Contains Radium and Mesothorium in Triple Distilled Water'), a tonic of 'Perpetual Sunshine' or 'A Cure for the Living Dead'.
Radium spread its messianic light into the world's shadowy corners. A radium-based paint named 'Undark' was patented in the US and used first for military applications – night-sight compasses and flight instruments – and then for everything from fishing bait to light switches to glowing crucifixes. Wristwatches with luminous numbers and hour and minute hands proved madly popular. For millions of people, the glowing watch-hands were the attainable side of the radium craze. In the deep of the night, Americans raised their invisible wrists and the green shapes hovered in the darkness like clockface genies.
Medical uses of radium included the treatment of uterine fibroids, syphilitic ulcers, tuberculous lesions, warts, melanomas, gout, rheumatism, neuritis, diabetes, eczema, tumours of the lip and mouth, and 'every form of nervous complaint'. As many as 150 ailments were treated with radium. Alexander Graham Bell – he of the first telephone – suggested addressing internal cancers by brachytherapy, the insertion into the body of a tiny capsule of radium. Dr William Aikins, the first president of the American Radium Society, used radium to treat a wide range of conditions. One patient had a large tumour behind his left ear – 'a fungating mass covered with cauliflower excrescences'. After a few weeks of radium treatment, it had been reduced to a benign little ulcer.
Shortly after radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, they lent a test tube of it to a friend, which he placed in his waistcoat pocket. It remained there for several weeks until he discovered that his skin beneath had become very red and inflamed. He told Pierre, and Pierre then tested it out on his own arm; the result was severe burning.
The perils of radium were not apparent at first. Or rather, they were if people had only stopped to look. But such was the wonder and so limitless the promise that the signs were largely ignored. A blind mania swept over the public, and George Bernard Shaw wasn't the only one to express surprise: 'The world has run raving mad on the subject of radium.'
If it was true that one of those flour grubs lived a very long time, it was also true that all the others soon died. The radium pick-me-up Radithor worked so well that those who could afford to, drank it regularly. Eben Byers was an American iron tycoon, champion golfer and member of the East Coast social elite. He found that a quick drink of Radithor made him feel quite chipper. Soon he was drinking several bottles a day. He gave it to his lady friends and his racehorses. After three years, his bones began to disintegrate; his lower jaw collapsed. He died soon afterwards, and his body was so radioactive that when his lead coffin was exhumed decades later, the remains still brought out a crazed chatter from the Geiger counter.
A wider impact came with the 'radium girls'. From 1917, factories of the US Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company employed large numbers of young women to paint the dials of watches. Using camel-hair brushes, they were instructed to lick them – 'lip, dip, paint!' – to maintain a sharp point. Dozens became sick; many died. Their employers tried to blame it on syphilis and the girls' promiscuity, and those company directors fought vigorously against the lawsuits that piled up against them. The case that eventually found in the girls' favour helped establish US employee rights.
Some 20 years after discovering radium, with two Nobel Prizes under her belt, Marie Curie described the years of intensive laboratory work as 'the best and happiest' of her life: 'I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled… atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress'. She embodied in her dedicated curiosity the heroic spirit of scientific enquiry. But during that time, she also recalled feeling exhausted, and was beset by bouts of illness, strange aches and torpor. In 1934, she died from aplastic pernicious anaemia, brought on by sustained radiation exposure. Even now, her notebooks are considered dangerous to work with.
Never have the hazards and benefits of the earth's matter been so intimately linked; never has a single element so brazenly offered life and death with the same hand. Radium is a substance from nature's top shelf, a forbidden fruit, a Pandora's box. It is the secret at the centre of it all, something so tempting, so powerful and dangerous, that simply to know of it is to sit with the gods. And that story never ends well.
One thing that redeemed the fad was the expense. Many so-called radium treatments contained no radium at all. To extract even the tiniest amount requires huge effort. Several hundred tons of radium ore – pitchblende – had to be reduced in multiple ways, using vast amounts of energy, to yield about a gram. After the First World War, that gram would cost upwards of $100,000.
In the early years, the only source of pitchblende was a mining town in Bohemia. Joachimsthal, now known by the Czech name of Jáchymov, lies in a mountain range whose very name suggests mineral largesse. Erzgebirge means 'ore mountains' and their geology has had a striking impact on European and global history. In the early 16th century, large amounts of silver were discovered, a horde of miners arrived and Joachimsthal surged into being.
To get to the silver, the miners had to shift tons of a blackish rock, which they chucked into the forest. That was pitchblende. And so it was that Marie Curie's discovery put Joachimsthal back in the spotlight, initially as a source of wonder, and then horror. From the waste of the Erzgebirge silver mines was born the atomic age – the thrill of radium, the miracle of nuclear power and the eternal shadow of nuclear weapons.
Extracted from Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder, by Philip Marsden (Granta, £20), published on 13 February. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Bookshop
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