Radithor: When America Drank the Atomic Age

In the 1920s, radium represented the dazzling promise of modern science. Then someone decided to bottle it...

America entered the 1920s looking toward the future. Electric lights had transformed the night. Automobiles were remaking cities and countryside alike. Radio carried voices invisibly through the air. Airplanes, once an impossible dream, were becoming machines of commerce and adventure. Science seemed capable of anything. And few discoveries seemed more mysterious, or more promising, than radium.

Only a generation earlier, Marie and Pierre Curie had helped reveal the strange properties of radioactive elements. Radium appeared to emit energy from within itself. In the popular imagination, it glowed as something almost miraculous: invisible power pulled from the earth itself.

Medicine had found legitimate uses for radiation, particularly in treating certain cancers. But in the marketplace of the 1920s, the distance between radiation having medical applications and therefore putting radium in consumer products as good for you proved alarmingly short. Radium appeared in an assortment of supposed remedies and health products.

And then there was Radithor... Radithor didn't merely imply it contained radium. That was the selling point!

The small half-ounce bottles contained triple-distilled water guaranteed to contain at least one microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. It sold for about one dollar a bottle... a substantial price for a tiny drink in the 1920s.

Bailey Radium Laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, produced the product and was run by William J. A. Bailey. Bailey was an extraordinary character even by the standards of the patent-medicine era.

He attended Harvard but did not graduate, although he later claimed he had. He also claimed a doctorate from the University of Vienna. Historical accounts preserved by the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity note that he pleaded guilty in 1927 to illegally practicing medicine. None of this prevented him from selling Americans radioactive water. And selling quite a lot of it, we might add.

Historical estimates suggest roughly 400,000 bottles of Radithor were sold between 1925 and 1930, at approximately one dollar apiece. Radithor was promoted for an extraordinary assortment of ailments. The FDA's own historical account notes claims involving impotence and dozens of diseases.

It sounds almost impossible today. Modern consumers see a radiation symbol and understand it as a warning. In the 1920s, Bailey turned radioactivity into a feature. Then Eben Byers entered the story.

The Man Who Could Afford Anything

Eben MacBurney Byers was no gullible drifter purchasing miracle cures from the back of a wagon. He was wealthy... Very wealthy.

Byers was a Pittsburgh industrialist and president of the A.M. Byers Company. He had attended Yale and, as a young man, won the 1906 United States Amateur golf championship. He moved comfortably through American wealth and society.

In 1927, Byers injured his arm after falling from a berth aboard a train following the Harvard-Yale football game. A physician recommended Radithor. Byers began drinking it. And he liked what he believed it was doing for him.

He reportedly felt invigorated. Rather than taking an occasional dose, he eventually averaged approximately three bottles a day over roughly two years. He recommended Radithor to others and even gave it to his racehorses. The irony is difficult to overstate.

Here was a man with access to wealth, physicians and virtually every comfort available in early twentieth-century America. And several times a day, he was deliberately drinking radioactive water. Estimates later placed his consumption at around 1,400 bottles, perhaps more.

For a while, nothing seemed wrong. That was part of the danger. Radium does not behave like an ordinary poison that announces itself immediately. Chemically, the body can treat radium somewhat like calcium. Once absorbed, some of it can become incorporated into bone. From there, radioactive decay continues irradiating nearby tissue.

The source of the exposure is no longer merely outside the body. It is inside it. And eventually, Eben Byers began to deteriorate.

The Price Arrives

By 1930, Byers's teeth were beginning to fall out. His condition worsened terribly. During a Federal Trade Commission investigation, attorney Robert Winn traveled to Byers's mansion in Southampton, Long Island, to obtain testimony. What he encountered was horrific.

According to Winn's report, quoted in the historical account maintained by the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity, nearly all of Byers's upper jaw and much of his lower jaw had been removed, while damage was appearing elsewhere in his skeleton. Winn described the contrast between Byers's magnificent surroundings and his physical condition as extraordinarily gruesome. Byers died in 1932.

Contemporary medical findings cited necrosis of the jaw, a brain abscess, anemia and terminal pneumonia among the causes associated with his death. Later examination and radiological research confirmed the enormous radium burden resulting from his consumption of Radithor.

He was 51 years old. And suddenly America's miracle water had a very different reputation. His death became national news. The wealthy sportsman who had consumed bottle after bottle of radioactive medicine became perhaps the most famous casualty of America's radium craze. His case, together with growing awareness of radiation injuries such as those suffered by radium dial painters, helped change public perceptions of supposedly healthful radioactive products.

Yet perhaps the most astonishing part of the Radithor story was still waiting beneath the surface. The government knew what was in the bottle.

The Label Wasn't Lying

The United States already had federal food and drug legislation. The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 represented a landmark step toward consumer protection. It prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated and misbranded foods and drugs and established important requirements concerning labeling and purity. But it contained enormous gaps by modern standards.

The law did not establish the system Americans today associate with proving a new medicine safe before selling it. And Radithor presented an almost surreal problem. The product really did contain radioactive material. It said as much!

The FDA's historical account explicitly notes that although Radithor was extremely dangerous, it was accurately labeled as radioactive water and therefore remained legal under the 1906 framework.

Imagine the regulatory absurdity. The bottle contains something dangerous. The manufacturer tells you that it contains the dangerous thing. Therefore, under the limitations of the law then in force, simply proving that the label truthfully described its contents did not provide the government with the authority we might expect today to prevent its sale.

The Federal Trade Commission did eventually act against Bailey Radium Laboratories. In December 1931, Bailey was ordered to cease making various claims about Radithor's therapeutic benefits and to stop representing the product as harmless. The company appears to have ceased operating around 1930 or early 1931. But the larger problem remained.

Radithor wasn't alone. American consumers were surrounded by products making extraordinary promises, and federal regulators repeatedly found themselves confronting things they knew were dangerous, deceptive or worthless while lacking sufficient legal authority to remove them. So they decided to show America.

The Chamber of Horrors

In 1933, FDA officials Ruth deForest Lamb and George Larrick assembled a traveling exhibition featuring roughly one hundred dangerous, fraudulent or otherwise troubling products that exposed weaknesses in the existing law. It became known as the American Chamber of Horrors.

Among its exhibits was Radithor. Think about that transformation. Only a few years earlier, a bottle of radioactive water had been marketed as a modern health product. Now it sat in a government exhibit demonstrating why America's consumer-protection laws needed to change.

The political battle lasted years. Then another tragedy accelerated events. In 1937, the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster killed more than one hundred people after a toxic solvent was used in a medicine, further demonstrating the limitations of federal law.

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Among its major changes was a requirement that new drugs be demonstrated safe for their labeled use before they could be marketed. The law also expanded federal authority over medical devices and cosmetics and eliminated legal obstacles that had frustrated earlier enforcement.

Radithor did not single-handedly create modern drug regulation. History is rarely that tidy. But its bottle belonged to the collection of evidence showing Americans just how inadequate the old system had become. And perhaps that is why the story remains so compelling nearly a century later.

The Bottle on the Shelf

It would be easy to look backward and laugh. Radioactive water? Who would drink that? But that misses something important about the people who bought Radithor. They weren't living in a world where everyone already understood radiation as we do today. They were living through an extraordinary scientific revolution.

Electricity had changed their homes. Automobiles had changed their cities. Radio had changed communication. Modern medicine was producing discoveries their grandparents could scarcely have imagined. And radium was real. Its energy was real. Its medical applications were real.

The leap from those facts to the conclusion that radium must therefore make you healthier was disastrously wrong. But it arrived dressed in the language of progress. That is what makes Radithor more than an oddity from the Roaring Twenties.

It is a story about the difference between science and the appearance of science. Between discovery and marketing. Between knowing that something is powerful and understanding what that power actually does.

William Bailey sold the future in a tiny bottle. Eben Byers could afford almost anything America had to offer. And for a time, neither wealth nor sophistication nor the existing law protected him from a product whose danger was printed almost proudly on its label.

Today, an original Radithor bottle survives in the Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity. It is tiny, only a little over two inches tall without its cork. Nothing about it looks capable of carrying such a large story. Yet inside bottles just like it was an extraordinary snapshot of 1920s America:

• Its faith in science.

• Its faith in salesmanship.

• Its hunger for youth and vitality.

• Its incomplete understanding of a newly discovered force of nature.

And eventually, its painful realization that progress sometimes requires something more than discovering the future. Sometimes you have to survive it first...