Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

>Radium watches, on the other hand, were quite dangerous.

Citation needed. Radium paint was hazardous to workers making the watches, but alpha particles aren't getting through the crystal or movement and there's not a huge risk to wearing them.

View on HN

Probably right. I was thinking about the factories, in retrospect. I believe that many of the workers ingested it.

Also, back then, they had radium philters (tonics).

Yeah, and while handling radium paint on a daily basis probably isn't the best, they ingested a lot more radium than you would from just being around it all day. Radium paint had been deemed non-toxic, and so the standard operating procedure for the factory workers was to "point" the tips of the brushes using their lips.

Ya, there are lots of "radioactive" glowing things safely used every day. But people get scared when things glow green because Hollywood tells them to fear glowing things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium_radioluminescence#Smal...

To be fair Tritium's half-life is significantly less than radium. You really don't want to be breathing any radium dust if you can at all avoid it, which is a good reason we stopped putting it in things. But if it's in a sealed container (like a watch that isn't smashed/cracked up) surrounded by a few millimeters of material it's not going to be a big deal even if it's on your wrist for years.

And it is a metal watch. On the user's wrist. I wouldnt sleep with the dial under my toungue, but at literal arm's length it would be fine.

I went to our local museum carrying my tritium marker to see if I could induce some trails on their radiation cloud chamber. Boy was I disappointed that I could not create a single trace from it. The plastic encasing seems to protect pretty well (like 100%) from beta radiation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com