19th century: Radium Heating Systems? | KD's Stolen History Blog

A few years ago I went on a little

road-trip

with my wife. Somewhere in Utah we stopped at this place called

Fort Bluff

. It's a neat recreation of the old fort. In one of the huts there was the stove below. I'm pretty sure you can see what attracted my attention. My wife laughed at my radiation remark, and said that it was simply a window to monitor the fire. In other words it was just a coincidence. Well, I think there is no coincidence here, and below you will see why.


Proposed radioactive fuel usage: heating, cooling, lighting, powering... pre-20th century that is. Obviously I do not know how far back it goes.

Yes, I do suggest that the below 19th century stove, in its original design, was meant to use radioactive fuel for heating. I also suggest that the stove pipe is a much later addition. In its original design, the below stove did not need any exhaust.





Radiation Symbol

The

international radiation symbol

first appeared in 1946, at the

Berkeley Radiation Laboratory

. At the time, it was rendered as magenta, and was set on a blue background. The original version used in the United States is magenta against a yellow background, and it is drawn with a central circle of radius

R

, an internal radius of 1.5

R

and an external radius of 5

R

for the blades, which are separated from each other by 60°. The trefoil is black in the international version, which is also used in the United States.


The sign is commonly referred to as a radioactivity warning sign, but it is actually a warning sign of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is a much broader category than radioactivity alone, as many non-radioactive sources also emit potentially dangerous levels of ionizing radiation. This includes x-ray apparatus, radiotherapy linear accelerators, and particle accelerators. Non-ionizing radiation can also reach potentially dangerous levels, but this warning sign is different from the trefoil ionizing radiation warning symbol.



Radium

This here is probably the most boring section, but I promise to go through it quickly. Radium, in the form of

radium chloride

, was discovered by

Marie

and

Pierre Curie

in 1898. They extracted the radium compound from uraninite and published the discovery at the French Academy of Sciences five days later. Radium was isolated in its metallic state by Marie Curie and

André-Louis Debierne

through the electrolysis of radium chloride in 1911.



Radium is a chemical element with the symbol

Ra (right?)

and atomic number

88

. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen on exposure to air, forming a black surface layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). All isotopes of radium are highly radioactive, with the most stable isotope being

radium-226

, which has a half-life of 1600 years and decays into radon gas

(specifically the isotope radon-222)

. When radium decays,

ionizing radiation

is a product, which can excite

fluorescent

chemicals and cause

radioluminescence

.


Radiator

Radiators are heat exchangers used to transfer thermal energy from one medium to another for the purpose of cooling and heating. The majority of radiators are constructed to function in automobiles, buildings, and electronics.



The radiator is always a source of heat to its environment, although this may be for either the purpose of heating this environment, or for cooling the fluid or coolant supplied to it, as for engine cooling.


Radium Madness

With the discovery of Radium

(in my opinion rediscovery)

, the society went bananas and started sticking radium into just about everything. We are talking about soap, toothpaste, male ED enhancements, chocolate, tea, coffee, food, cigarettes, cosmetics, bath salts etc.



And who knows, may be they were right in doing so. The narrative tells us that with time scientists understood the danger of radiation, and the madness stopped.


I do not know how many girls worked for the dial company, and how many of them eventually died of the alleged radiation exposure. This is not a part of this post of mine.



Those who want to find out are welcome to research on their own. I will just add a few things I ran into:


Based on the amount of Radium containing products , there had to be way more dead people, and not only our Radium Girls. People had to be dropping left and right. Yet this "put Radium into everything" lasted well into 1930s.
Personally, I would like to know how much of this Radium they were producing in the first quarter of the 20th century to have enough for everything they had it in.

Radium Heating

I think it's fairly obvious that this entire Radium driven tech was scratched by the PTB. Some things are obviously out there, but any detailed info appears to be gone. To be honest, it reminds me of the fate suffered by them

Zeppelins

.


Whatever we have left is rather circumstantial, and for the most part limited to images. Judge for yourself what conclusions we could make.



The

most interesting heater

advertisement from the early 20th century came from the Novelty Manufacturing Company of Jackson, Michigan. Their advertisement offered something much better than the old coal standby. Novelty advertised its “X-Radium” heater as the best and latest heating technology. An advertisement boasted that “one of its chief advantages is the fact that it requires no fuel. . . . the heating pad consists of a stamped steel receptacle filled with a substance which will attract itself heat rays and retain the heat attracted for several hours. The substance they used was radium. Radium was an intriguing new material to manufacturers, who found a spot for it in a number of products, even toothpaste! In the first years of the 20th century the deadly power of radium was not yet understood and the idea of resting one’s feet on a container of radioactive material did not sound as terrifying as it does to today’s consumers.



I believe this X-Radium foot heater is not to be confused with similar looking Clark and Lehman Coal Heaters.



Radium Heating

The practical mind at once sees

radium in use as a new source of heat and light

for mankind, a furnace that would never have to be fed or cleaned, a lamp that would glow perpetually - and the time may really come, the inventor having taken hold of the wonder that the scientist has produced, when many practical applications of the new element may be devised. At present, however, the scarcity and cost and danger of radium will keep it in the hands of the experimenter.


Illustration shows a vignette cartoon with at center a group of six men, among them John D. Rockefeller and E.B. Thomas, warming themselves by a stove labeled "Standard Oil"; the vignette at bottom left shows Andrew Carnegie burning "U.S. Steel Bonds" and Charles Schwab attempting to burn "Steel Common" stocks, on the right is Chauncey Depew burning speeches; on the middle left is a tramp resting against a haystack in the warm sun, on the right is William Jennings Bryan generating hot air while speaking to a group of farmers; and on the top left is a family burning the furniture in a fireplace, and on the right is E.B. Thomas sitting in front of a fireplace where a lump of "Radium" is warming the room.



I do understand that just about any stove, furnace, fireplace or oven can be adapted to burn wood, coal, gas or oil. At the same time I think that some of the below ones were originally designed for the Radium-type fuel. As in no ashes, and no smoke.


Additionally, I think that some of the below "heating" contraptions were not originally meant for heating.




1936: Flash Gordon serial

The Sky City is the home of the Hawk Men, led by King Vultan. The city is kept aloft by gravity-defying rays, which are produced by

shoveling radium into the city's Atom Furnaces.


KD:

Anyways, I think there is a high probability that none of these stoves and fireplaces were originally designed to be vandalized by the burning wood or coal. They are too beautiful, and in my opinion compliment the buildings they were meant to be in. May be this is why we do not see any heating arrangements in the older buildings.


I doubt that Radium is the same name the ancients would have used. That is if they ever used any radioactive substance. But if they did, I doubt we would be allowed to know the name.


As far as Marie and Pierre Curie go. I think they were in the same boat with Tesla, Mendeleev and many others. I think due to being talented chemists they were given some books containing the above mentioned tech. They were supposed to bring it back, and they did.


Well, these are just some thoughts of mine...

https://www.stolenhistory.org/articles/19th-century-radium-heating-systems.27/