#37: If I Had a Rocket Launcher
Things that make you go boom?
Atomic energy is truly a subject which young people must master.
Joe Musial, Dagwood Splits the Atom
I love(d) receiving Christmas presents that stoked the fires of curiosity and creativity.
I would marvel over new art supplies; I loved the bright peacock blue ink that came with a calligraphy set (which is likely the root cause of my font snobbery appreciation). A globe and atlas captivated me, leading me into entirely different worlds as I poured over colour photographs of other locales and cultures, or ran my fingers along the raised mountain ranges.
As is often the case with adults, most Christmas gifts are sadly lost from memory. But because I was born at the tail end of the Cold War, and in a society that frowned on dangerous science presents, I’m quite confident that I never got a box of uranium for the holidays.1
Like some kids.
That’s right, gentle reader. During a brief window in the early 1950s, you could buy your budding Bruce Banner bottles of radioactive decay. More specifically, and according to the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity2, the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab included such home lab essentials as:
…four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210)3, a pure beta source (Ru-106?)4, a gamma source (Zn-65)5, a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210)6, an electroscope, a Geiger counter…”
But how dangerous was it really?
This is where I must caution you, friend. I’m not a physicist, and my research thus far hasn’t afforded me with the confidence I might normally have with other subject matter. (Perhaps Tad Thurston over at First Excited State has more light to shed on the matter.)
But I’ll share what I’ve learned so far, because of course I couldn’t leave this tweet alone as is.
Alpha and beta particles, and gamma rays, are debris that are created when atoms are unstable. Each of these types has unique features - how large they are, how far each can travel from the originating atom, and how much power they have to steal electrons from other atoms (i.e., ionize other molecules) in their travels to become more stable.78 Alpha particles have the most ionizing power - and thus are very damaging - but because they are large particles, they can’t penetrate a sheet of paper - whereas gamma rays are small, have weak ionizing power, but can pass through the human body.
Was it a safety hazard? Not sure. Is it still? Well, I’m making an assumption here, but after watching the video of the archivist handle the toy with latex gloves, it’s likely that the amounts in these sample trays aren’t still raising anyone’s risk of increased radiation exposure. Alternatively, after 60-70 years, whatever was in there has long since disappeared.
Much of the recent Twitter buzz, though, is focused on the four uranium ore samples.
All isotopes of uranium are radioactive and over time they decay to other lighter elements. However the rate of decay is slow; the radioactive half-life of U-238 is 4.47 billion years, meaning that it takes this much time for half of any given sample of U-238 to break down.9
A silvery metal, uranium can be found in a variety of rocks. The best-known example of uranium ore is uraninite, formerly known as pitchblende. You might have heard of pitchblende in reading about Marie Curie; she used it in her Nobel-winning discovery of the element radium, when she observed the uranium ore decaying into something else that gave far more radiation than the original metal.10
Were these samples dangerous? According to this site, it was taken off shelves due to lack of interest and that the kit contained no more radiation than what one gets from the sun.11 Again, the archivist wasn’t protected, so either the samples truly were akin to the gentle warmth of a spring sun, or someone already removed the uranium from the jars.
The kit came also with several accompanying manuals and pamphlets to guide your budding Oppenheimer. In addition to a densely-written manual written by Dr. Manhattan himself, the US Government also provided a wonderful piece of propaganda masked as citizen science called “Prospecting for Uranium”. Its intent was to generate interest in the public to search for new, American sources of uranium, and thus wean off the reliance of international supply.
Finally, the kit came with a comic book for the kit’s real intended audience, and featured characters from the comic strip Blondie, and, even more inexplicably, Popeye.12 Again, the story was prepared with the advice of none other than the leader of the Manhattan Project himself (Groves), as well as another project colleague (Dunning) and a third physics professor (Heil).
While you got to give kudos to Gilbert for including a comic book to explain some principles of nuclear physics in kid-friendly lay language, the comic is just bizarre.
I mean, I’ve certainly never been so excited with a research outcome that I ardently kissed my dog:
All in all, a strange toy from the inventor of the Erector Set. It certainly makes my science toy purchases for the kids more mundane (e.g., a small motor or circuit kit; an archeology toy where you chip away at a small pile of “rock” to unearth a plastic dinosaur bone or geode). But dangerous? I don’t think I’d buy it for my kids, because while having Junior get up close to any additional radiation beyond what is in the atmosphere already is likely not a wise risk to take, I’d be more concerned with ensuring proper handling and storage. Because let’s be real: kids aren’t well known for putting things away.
“Moooooom. Have you seen my gamma source?!?”
And yet, with all that said, the most insane thing about this toy might have been that it actually came with the batteries it needed.13
If you and your family celebrated a winter holiday where you gave gifts, did you get or give any science gifts? If so, what were they? And were they radioactive in any shape or form?
Marsh A. Fun—and Uranium—for the Whole Family in This 1950s Science Kit. IEEE Spectrum. 31 Jan 2020.
The museum also boasts a range of other atomic toys, comics and games.
Lead.
Ruthenium.
Zinc.
Polonium.
County of Monmouth, New Jersey. Radiation Health Basics. 12 Aug 2011.
United States Environmental Protection Agency. Radiation Basics. Last update: 24 June 2022.
World Nuclear Association. Uranium Mining Overview. Last updated: June 2022.
The Center for History of Physics. Marie Curie - Discovery of Radium.
Berry Drago E. Hazardous Fun. 14 Jul 2016.
Maybe he was one of the servicemen at Bikini Atoll.
Office of Legacy Management. Holiday Toy Shopping During the 1950s Looked a Bit Different than During the 2020s. 7 Dec 2021.
It came with batteries??? A unicorn indeed.
Love all this! Not much to add, though poking through some of those reference sites, it's a bit ominous that the kit is probably safe "as long as the material is not removed from their containers".
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