Radioactivity & antiques

[travel-north]

Hi gents,

recently I heard about an incident when a guy bought an antique clock in Germany, which turned out to be radioactive. When he was travelling back during the checks at the airport they found that his antique clock was radiating 10 times higher than the safe limit.

What do you think about the possibility of Soviet awards being radioactive? I highly doubt it unless the award spent time in Chernobyl or something like that, but it would be interesting to hear your opinions

[Tretov]

Never heard of it, but maybe his clock was from some scrapped submarine?

I know some clocks have radioactive paint for parts of the dial to shine greenish in the dark, but that's it. Maybe stuff left in Chernobil / Pripyat and later harvested by golddiggers would be radioactive, but I doubt such items exist at any larger scale.

[CtahhR]

It will have been "glow in the dark".

Unfortunately we're not always had the same level of knowledge.

I have been travelling with a "glow in the dark" wrist watch before where only the dots at each hour were luminescent and that set off alarms.

Nothing to be concerned about, just "one of those things". Considerably more radioactive than background radiation but still rather legal (or at least they were when they were made).

[Al-muell]

Once heard a story from a collector, about a visor capo bought in Ukraine that turned out to be radioactive, but don't know if that was a true, as according to him, he got rid ofthat cap.

Also, once a guy was selling on a local auction site a "mobuta" uniform he was wearing on his trip to Pripyat. He even posted some pictures of himself in that uniform during the trip. I recall that it sold quite cheap, but I don't know if anyone actually checked if it was indeed radioactive.

[travel-north]

I think his clock had a radioactive part to glow in the dark or something like that.

Have you ever checked your collectibles for radioactivity?

[Henry Sakaida]

A few years back I wrote an article about radiation on watches:

I have a surplus US Civil Defense CDV-700 which I bought online. It was made in the early 1960s. They need to be recalibrated for accuracy. Before you buy one at a collector show, you need to read up on that particular model so that you understand the perimeters and limitations. And it has to be recalibrated!!! There is a company which sells and services these devices. If you simply buy one at a collector show for $30, it may or may not work. And unless you read the manual, you will not understand how to use it nor understand the results.

The Geiger Counter’s dial is calibrated in mr/hr (milliRoentgens per hour) and it reads up to a maximum of 0.5, with a turning knob which can be turned to X1, X10, and X100. At 0.5 at X100, the reading is 50 mr/hr. At X10 (ten times), the reading is 5mr/hr. Are you still with me on this? This device is very very sensitive!

A milliRoentgen is 1/1000 of a Roentgen, a unit of measurement of ionizing Gamma radiation. 500 Roentgen in 5 hours is a lethal dose to humans (our editor requires 1,000). 25 Roentgens in a short amount of time will cause tissue damage. My CDV-700 doesn’t even come close to registering 1 Roentgen. It was designed only to detect low doses of radiation. Take one to a Japanese sushi restaurant and check over the sushi and sashimi. You don't want to eat contaminated fish from the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster area! Of course, the restaurant will take a very dim view of what you are doing!!!

A little history is in order. The U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, produced luminescent paint made with radioactive radium, and sold watches and clocks to our military. They and other companies employed hundreds of women in their factories to paint radium on the dials. The women were instructed to keep the brush tips pointed by licking them with their tongue or on their lips. Consequently, many women suffered health problems (anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw).

In 1917, five women from U.S. Radium sued their employer. The litigation was followed closely by the news media, and it was revealed that the company owners and scientists knew about the dangers of radium, but did not notify the women workers. They pressured their doctors to shift the blame elsewhere. The “Radium Girls” as they were called, won the case and set a new precedent which forced the government to enact tougher worker safety laws.

The Japanese women who labored in watch and clock factories did not know about the dangers of radium. There is no doubt that they too suffered the same consequences as American women did.

How bad is 50mr/hr? Is that dangerous to your health??!!! Here’s something to put all this into perspective. An American adult receives about 365 milliRoentgens in one year from natural background radiation and medical sources including the food we eat. Living in a brick house contributes an additional 50 mr per year as opposed to living in a wooden house. If you visit the Trinity site where we exploded our first atomic bomb, radiation at ground zero is only 10 times the background radiation.

A chest X-ray will give your body 8mr and your skin about 24. 50mr/hr is hardly worth getting excited about. The chances of you dying from cancer is like winning the Powerball Lottery or engaging in your wildest sexual fantasy…it ain’t gonna happen! Gary’s hottest Japanese WWII Army clock only registered .05 mr/hr which is far less than a chest X-ray!

If you are like most collectors, you have your clocks and watches stored away in a drawer, cabinet, or in a box somewhere. Be sure not to open the watch or remove the crystal because some of the radium may have sloughed off as dust particles and you don’t want to inhale it. And don’t strap the watch around your ‘nads either. If they wanted you to wear it down there, they would have called them nadwatches, and you certainly won’t find that word in the dictionary.

[desantnik]

Henry is right - "nadwatch" is not in the dictionary.