Retrospectively, I was so happy of yesterday’s entry about vintage robots, that I’ve decided to start a “Vintage category”.

A century ago, radioactivity was new, exciting and people believed it was good for health. So you could buy radium pendants for rheumatism, all-natural radon water for vigor, uranium blankets for arthritis and thorium-laced medicine for digestion.

Radium Ore Revigator company used to sell a watercooler lined with a serious amount of carnotite, an ore of uranium and radium that undergoes radioactive decay, yielding radon gas. Storing any water in this cooler overnight would give you fresh, potent, invigorating radon water to drink by morning.

As the industry developed, it gave birth to the inevitable wave of fraudulent products–fraudulent in the sense that they did not emit the high levels of radiation they claimed to. Companies promising their products would inject a good full dose of radiation in your boby were shut down by the government when it was discovered that the product was in fact perfectly safe and didn’t contain any real (thus deadly) dose of radiation.

(from top): Radione tablets, for energy; the Revigator watercooler and the Zimmer Laboratory Radium Emanator, designed to be immersed in a quart of water:

From Popular Science.