THE LIFE OF ONE BOTTLE OF RADITHOR
Most of the story of radium water is told through the people it hurt. This version follows the bottle instead. It is a small half-ounce of glass, and it ends up in one of the strangest medical stories of the twentieth century.
I. THE WATER
In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium, a metal that glowed in the dark and stayed faintly warm. It looked like magic, and for a while it also behaved like medicine. Doctors really did use radium to treat tumours, and for a few years the world was happy to believe that a substance powerful enough to shrink a cancer must be good for you in general.
There was a second reason the idea took hold. People had prized hot springs and mineral waters for centuries, and in the early 1900s scientists measured radioactivity in several of them. It was easy to conclude that the radioactivity was what made those waters healing. If a spring was good for you, perhaps radium was the secret ingredient.
Our bottle begins in that world. It was filled in East Orange, New Jersey, at the Bailey Radium Laboratories, run by William J. A. Bailey. Bailey was a Harvard dropout who called himself "Dr." and falsely claimed a medical degree. He had a simple product: triple-distilled water with radium dissolved in it. Each half-ounce bottle held at least one microcurie each of two radium isotopes, radium-226 and radium-228. He called it Radithor and said it would stimulate the body's glands. By the time he was done, he had sold roughly 400,000 bottles.
II. THE LABEL
Radium water wasn't alone. In the same years, shops sold radium toothpaste, face creams, chocolate and even a crock called the Revigator, lined with radium ore so that water left in it overnight would be "radioactive" by morning. Radium meant energy and modernity, in the same way that "natural" and "detox" mean something to us today.
Bailey's label promised relief from a long list of ailments. Notice what it did not offer: independent testing, a clear mechanism or any evidence. At the time, the law gave regulators few tools to stop a product like this. It sold because it sounded scientific, it came from a man who sounded like a doctor, and it came in a small bottle.
III. THE SHELF
Our bottle is one of more than a thousand that end up on the shelves of a wealthy man in Pittsburgh. Eben Byers was an industrialist and a celebrated amateur golfer, a man who had won the US Amateur title in 1906. In late 1927 or early 1928, after he injured his arm on a train, a doctor prescribed Radithor. Byers felt better, or believed he did, and he kept going. He drank up to three bottles a day and even sent cases to friends, and by 1930 he had worked his way through about 1,400 bottles.
Then his body began to fail. His weight fell, his teeth loosened, and the bones of his jaw began to break down. Radium behaves in the body like calcium, so it settles into bone and goes on irradiating it from the inside. Byers died in March 1932, at about 52.
IV. THE HEADLINE
By then the Federal Trade Commission was already investigating Bailey. Byers's death was widely reported, and years later the story got its famous headline, in a 1990 Wall Street Journal piece: "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off."
Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin in Pittsburgh's Allegheny Cemetery. In 1965, scientists exhumed his remains to study what radium does to the human body, and they were still radioactive. Radium's half-life is about 1,600 years, so he will not become safe soon.
His case is often credited with helping strengthen the Food and Drug Administration's powers and with the decline of most radioactive patent medicines. Bailey was never prosecuted for Byers's death, only for false advertising. He died in 1949 of bladder cancer, though whether that was linked to Radithor is unclear.
Radium also harmed people who never drank it. The "Radium Girls" were factory workers who painted glowing watch dials and licked their brushes to a point, and their illnesses, and their court cases in the 1920s, helped build the case for workplace safety rules.
V. THE AFTERLIFE
The bottle itself, if you can still find one, sits in museums. The idea has not entirely disappeared.
Radon, a radioactive gas produced as radium decays, is still sold as therapy. Visitors go to old mines and tunnels in places like Bad Gastein in Austria and Boulder, Montana, to breathe radon-rich air for arthritis and pain. A few small European studies have reported some pain relief, but the evidence is limited. Meanwhile, major health agencies list radon as a leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. Reading both facts together is the honest approach, and it is not a recommendation.
HOW TO SPOT THE NEXT RADIUM WATER
- The cure-all. One product that fixes many unrelated problems is a red flag.
- Science-sounding words with no proof. "Energy," "glands," "frequency" and "detox" should come with evidence, not just confidence.
- A credential you cannot check. Radithor's inventor was not a doctor.
- Testimonials from the rich and famous in place of independent trials.
- No outside testing. Ask who has checked it, and whether the product could do harm.
- Newness as a selling point. The people on the shelf are usually the first customers.
FINAL REMARKS
The bottle was only water, and the danger was invisible. That is the lesson that lasts: a product can look clean and clear, with a glowing reputation, and still be the wrong thing to put in your body.
