From Garry Tee, University of Auckland
The report of a truck in Australia delivering beer and uranium led Feedback
to wonder whether we might see the slogan “Real men drink radioactive beer”
(11 December).
After radioactivity was discovered, advertisers began using
fashionable words as brand names to sell various products, such as Radium Flour
and Radium Boot Polish, both in New Zealand.
The use of radium and radon for treating cancer, with some success, led to
quacks marketing nostrums said to contain radium or radon. An advertisement for
such a cure-all is reproduced in John Campbell’s biography of Rutherford,
Scientist Supreme. The advertisement (c. 1914) has a picture of a
soda-water siphon and a glass, with the caption “Radon emanations for
rheutmatism [sic!], arthritis, gout & nervous disorders”.
Some nostrums really did contain radium, with lethal consequences for the
consumers. “In the United States, radium decoctions were being marketed as a
general restorative, and a scandal eventually broke when a member of New York
high society, celebrated as a sportsman, died in appalling circumstances from
ingestion of radium” (A Bedside Nature, Genius and Eccentricity in Science
1869-1953, Macmillan Magazines, 1996, p. 148).
New Zealand
