Static Eliminators (1960s and 1980s) | Hacker News Reader

Static Eliminators (1960s and 1980s)

orau.org

25 pointsdcminter8 comments

They are still sold: https://amstat.com/products/anti-static-brush-with-ionizing-...

It's crazy that these still exist. It only lasts 1 year? With how briefly they are often used and how tiny the power output must be, I suspect an electronic version could last a lot longer on a single battery.

There's a modern version that is literally a piezo crystal powered by pulling a gun trigger. That's probably not much energy.

Somewhere in FSB headquarters there's a room with a bunch of eBay bots buying these up from collectors and a bunch of dudes in hazmat suits with hammers and Tupperware bowls smashing em up as they arrive and saving the bits for later

Half-life of polonium (138 days) is a limiting factor in stockpiling these things. If you are the state, you will go straight to the literal source for these things.

For ingestion, a median lethal dose is around 238 μCi or 50 nanograms. [1] The article doesn't specify exactly how much Polonium is in these, but offers hints:

> The beads, approximately 20 to 60 um in diameter

But how many?

> The Po-210 activity is often on the order of 200 to 500 uCi at the time of manufacture, but this activity decreases quickly according to the 138 day half-life of Po-210.

Sounds like if the product was new, and Polonium harvested, there might be enough there to kill one or two people, if ingested, except...

> the polonium is bound up in a ceramic matrix so that it should not be assimilated if the spheres were ingested

A little moisture also defeats static, but it would be reckless and irresponsible to try and put that in an anti-static product.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine...

The polonium being bound in a ceramic matrix protects it from accidental release, but it's easy enough to extract it deliberately.

I bought an analytical balance that came with one of these mounted inside to remove the forces created by static. It is about worthless now, since the half life is fairly short.

Variants of those were extremely common and presumably fairly inexpensive in the 1970s to brush dust off of photographic negatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com