NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Radium illumination
From: John Huth
Date: 2010 Sep 5, 21:21 -0400
From: John Huth
Date: 2010 Sep 5, 21:21 -0400
Unfortunately that seems to date from the 1930's, so if the phosphor degrades over time, it will suffer from the same problem. I wonder if there's a market for a fresh batch of this stuff?
On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:20 PM, Gary LaPook <glapook@pacbell.net> wrote:
Or maybe one can just buy new radium paint. This auction just ended.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=350376559549
gl
On 9/5/2010 5:13 PM, Gary LaPook wrote:
According to wikipedia after they changed the procedure for painting watch dials that the problem went away and no more watch workers suffered from radiation and that they still used radium on watches through the '60s.
gl
On 9/5/2010 4:42 PM, Apache Runner wrote:
George wrote:
"However, because of the short range of the alphas, it has to be intimately
mixed in with the Radium. There lies the problem."
Yes, I concur, I had to look up the decay products.
There was this famous problem of people who painted watch faces with radium paint and ended up getting cancer from licking the brushes. I heard somewhere that modern rifle scopes use tritium for illumination of the reticles.
