Radioactive Luminous Paint - a cardinal derailment of watchmaking E-Book

John Harrison

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 61

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Radioactive luminous paint on watches and clocks - should we laugh or should we cry? A little book about a monumental problem. Watchmaking hitting rock bottom. A sarcastic contribution to a sad story and one of the biggest aberrations of the 20th century. Shocking facts most people have no idea about ...

Leseprobe

Chapter

Introduction

Watches, time, and the universe

Gimmicks and derailments

And it can get worse

Risks

We give you Radium

The 'Radium Girls'

How to implement such an insanity

Why Radium?

The 'secret' of radioactivity

What was also used besides Radium?

Health-risks

Radon Gas (Radon 222)

Heidi, Heidi …

The nightmare is over

What has been applied?

Introduction

'Oh, I've discovered something wonderful, I can make my watch glow and read the time in the dark if I only knew what all the numbers mean', said Little Joe Hickerberg, son of Bernie Hickerberg.

Joe's father, Bernie Hickerberg, had married his younger sister Emma after his Dad ran off with Ava, Bernie's first wife and half-sister, a child of his mother and her grandfather. Dad and Ava were both declared dead, not because Bernie held a grudge, but to collect the $1.500 from Dad's life insurance policy.

Bernie Hickerberg and his sister Emma had seven children together, adding up to thirteen in the house, counting the five left with Bernie from his marriage to his first half-sister Ava and an illegitimate child living with them – said Little Joe – Bernie had fathered along the way with his eldest sister Olivia.

Whatever, child support had been claimed for only nine of them, because thirteen is already so far into double figures, that they couldn't do the math.

Little Joe's discovery became a tremendous success in the watch industry and came in very handy for this 'homogeneous' family in making ends meet, besides growing corn with an uneven number of rows, a phenomenon similar to strange deviations in human mental development. The Hickerbergs got it made ...

Normally, corn always has an even number of rows on each spikelet. The number of rows is always even because the spikelets appear in pairs and each spikelet produces two flowers: a fertile flower and a sterile flower. So, nature usually provides an even number of rows or lines. A watermelon, for example, has an even number of stripes. 'Special circumstances' in an unnatural environment could theoretically result in a spikelet with an odd number of rows. However, looking through a microscope, you'll probably find an invisible row that's just not fully developed. Imagine a cell dividing. That would be two, and if it continues like this, regularly and according to the norms, the result will always be an even number.

Well, this is how our sad story could begin and the origination of the idea of putting radioactive luminous paint on civilian watches would be better understandable …

… but to tell the truth, it wasn't the idea of Little Joe Hickerberg. 'Real' scientists with a pedigree like you and me, and large parts of the watch industry in general, have been responsible for this terrible nonsense.

The first commercially viable luminous paint activated by radium (radium-226) was developed in the early 20th century by 'Geheimrat' (privy councilor) Arthur Junghans together with Marie Skłodowska Curie, better known as Mme Curie, the famous two-time Nobel Prize winner and 'discoveress' of the radium. It was applied to watches made by Junghans, once the world's largest producer of watches and clocks. Others soon followed with their own 'mixture' and opinions are divided as to who was actually the first.

Given the state of knowledge about radioactivity at the time, we shouldn't throw too much dirt on the early protagonists, and can only quote – slightly modified:

'For they did not know – yet – what they do.'

The strongest criticism, however, must be directed primarily to the ones who have followed later and created a worldwide demand for this irresponsible idiocy.

In the early beginnings, this was an extremely interesting innovation for the military, especially around the two World Wars.

For obvious reasons, it was better to read the time without an external light source, in an airplane or the trenches. But in the civilian world, this was an utterly stupid thing to do.

But what the military has, a 'man' must also have, and the nonsense continued at a rapid pace – in the civilian watch industry, polluting the world with radioactive material, often far beyond the end of our days.

True, Radium and radioactivity were for a long time considered harmless, even beneficial to health, and extraordinary healing powers were attributed to this new discovery.

Today's nuclear medicine does a highly beneficial job when radioactivity is used sensibly, purposefully, and in the right doses, and ionizing radiation isn't used unworldly and negligently in a way that – in retrospect and according to today's state of knowledge – must be considered completely insane.

Watches, time, and the universe

Watches, mechanical or more modern, are among the most fascinating objects ever devised by man. Their contribution to progress isn't only something we should call valuable – it was essential. I wouldn't say that we would still eat raw meat without the invention of watches and clocks, but we would certainly not stand where we are today. It would lead too far to list all the mechanic-, electric-, electronic-, tuning fork regulated- or quartz-controlled watches which have been produced until today – up to the atomic clock.

I also want to skip going into detail about the first precise and reliable portable timepieces which made it possible to better determine longitude at sea and thus greatly changed the world. Ships could now sail along shorter and safer routes, giving seafaring an enormous boost and driving pirates and other maritime riffraff of the time into bankruptcy and their descendants to Wall Street. They could no longer lurk for booty anywhere along the standard routes that had previously been more or less compulsory. As we know from the documentary 'Mutiny on the Bounty', one of these watches was stolen by Marlon Brando.

These more individual and shorter routes also drastically reduced the incidence of diseases typical of long sea voyages, such as scurvy.

All of this will be familiar to watch and clock aficionados – these were the high points, not the low points, of the business.

From the discoveries of the physical laws of the pendulum and the phenomenon of isochronism by Galileo Galilei and their application in watchmaking, up to a freely oscillating balance wheel and later a regulation by a quartz crystal, we've moved up from 1 Hertz (oscillation/s per second) to 32,768 Hertz (ultra-high quartz watches go even up to 262,144 Hertz).

The 'atomic-clocks' 'tick' at a stunning frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hertz, and via radio transmission, they can also frequently correct the accuracy of our watches on the wrist.

The maximum time deviations went down considerably to +/- 1 second in several million years. In short-term operation, the target of a maximum deviation of +/- 1 second in one billion years has already been reached.

'Simply' put: One second in an atomic clock is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium 133 atom, set to rest at a temperature of 0 degrees Kelvin.