Vaseline and Uranium Glass (ca. 1930s) | Hacker News Reader

Vaseline and Uranium Glass (ca. 1930s)

orau.org

77 pointskeepamovin25 comments

If you're interested in other artifacts, you might also be interested in Fiestaware, some colors of which had U in the glaze until the mid forties. Here's one from my collection, moderately active. For comparison, background is about 0.2 µSv/hour.

https://imgur.com/a/U11rTao

And then there's the Revigator. I have no idea how many people died from this thing.

https://orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactiv...

Interestingly, the most toxic thing about the Revigator wasn't its added "radioactivity" through Radon to the water but its leaden spout combined with the impurities leaked considerable amount of arsenic, lead and vanadium into the water[0]

[0]https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/01/what-were-they...

Interesting! Nice find.

Revigator did prevent illnesses like arthritis by killing you with cancer before you can develop them.

Oddly, Radon therapy does seem to show some significant long term benefit for arthritis. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14673618/]

God knows why - maybe the bodies natural healing mechanisms when dealing with low level radiation reduces the inflammation? Or short term spike, causes longer term downregulation?

[https://www.redjournal.org/article/S0360-3016(22)00357-1/ful...] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859747/]

Either way, longer term pain reduction does seem to be supported with randomized trials.

haha, the Revigator had a lead spout. So it was poisoning you many different ways!

I always wonder how chemists make compounds that are colorless. For example, most shaving cream contains lots of chemical components, yet is completely white. If I would mix even a small number of random chemical components the result would certainly not be white (probably closer to brown). Perhaps someone can explain how this works from an engineering perspective.

(And also interesting in this context are odorless compounds).

Shaving cream is mostly soap, isn't it? Also I wonder that it's whiteness (reflects all colours equally) isn't at least partly due to it's physical structure (lots of bubbles).

However it is true that randomly mixing lots of different coloured components together does mostly end up with something brown (cf playdo and shit).

(Can't reply to "canadianfella", so...)

"Cf" is an abbreviation of the Latin for "compare": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cf.

when talking of objects rather than lights, "color" is reflectance or transmittance that differs significantly between the response curves of different kinds of cone cells in your eye. those response curves are fairly broad, overlapping greatly and each having significant response throughout the visible wavelength range

as i understand it, pure substances in liquid or gaseous form mostly have very narrow absorption spectral absorption lines in visible and near infrared, so they can only remove a tiny fraction of the energy from a continuous-spectrum light source; things like nitrogen dioxide, chlorine, and transition metal ions which can absorb light over a wide spectral range are unusual. (the uranium ions we're talking about here are transition metal ions.) in solid form the absorption lines do widen, but still usually not enough to appear as "color"

sometimes a wide absorption peak is so wide that it absorbs light across the whole visible spectrum and the material looks black

so the vast majority of pure substances are colorless. if you mix a small number of random chemical components, most of the time, the result will be colorless. if it's not black, whether it appears clear or white depends on whether it scatters light; interfaces between birefringent crystals or materials of different refractive indices scatter light. in canned shaving cream, what scatters the light is the interface between the liquid solution and the bubbles of propellant. it actually takes a lot of dye before such a fine foam stops looking white because the bubbles are so good at scattering light

so, if you mix a small number of random pure substances, the result probably will be clear or white. but most substances you encounter on a day-to-day basis, such as dirt, tomato sauce, paper, poop, or concrete, are not pure; they're inhomogeneous mixtures of literally thousands of different pure substances. such a mixture can easily absorb light over a wide spectral range even if each of the substances only has narrow spectral absorption lines. and usually a few of the substances contain transition metal ions and individually absorb over a wider range of wavelengths

i hope this is helpful

as for odorless compounds, most of them are just so far from their boiling point that not enough of them evaporates into the air for your nose to detect their vapor. there aren't very many odorless volatile compounds

>they're inhomogeneous mixtures of literally thousands of different pure substances. such a mixture can easily absorb light over a wide spectral range

So why is dirt, poop and mixed up playdoh brown, and not black?

because they reflect some light, so it doesn't keep going into the object until it gets absorbed. dirt scatters light with crystal facets. i don't know what the mechanisms are in poop and playdoh

but why is it brown instead of gray? the light that makes it back out is colored according to the dominant absorption mechanisms at play, and evidently in those substances they're better at absorbing blue light than other colors. i have some guesses about why that is but don't really know

Interesting. Thanks.

Fun fact: nearly every estate sale in the Midwest US has both Vaseline and uranium glass pieces in them. And it's cheap to buy.

Came here to mention this. I skim through the Estatesales.net listings every thursday planning my visits for the coming weekend, and I pluck out a few categories of items that I know some friends are interested in. Uranium glass is one of those. (Along with "classic video games", "landline phones", "film cameras", "typewriters", etc.)

In something like 6 months (I started 10 months ago but took a break in the middle), I've found 77 sales with likely or confirmed pieces. The most common, by far, is a little citrus juicer. Eeeeeeeeeveryone has that juicer.

I've been looking for a small, knobby, dark blue uranium glass toothpick holder for decades.

My grandparents had one, and my earliest memories are getting a toothpick for Grandpa after supper when he quit smoking when I moved in with them.

I would kill to find one of those just for the memories! It's the only reason I set auction alerts for uranium glass.

Dark blue?? Are you sure that's not cobalt? Uranium is always green or greenish-yellow, that I'm aware.

Oof. Maybe. I probably need to change those keyword alerts.

I'm having a hard time knowing how dangerous it is to drink once from one of those glasses. How many times till I reach dangerous dose?

>Landa and Councell evaluated the leaching of uranium into different solutions over a 24 hour period. The glassware they used was designed to hold liquids (e.g., drinking glasses). They determined that the average resulting concentrations of uranium were 0.052 ug/liter (1.7 x 10-11 uCi/ml) for water and 5.9 ug/liter (2 x 10-9 uCi/ml) for acetic acid. The highest measured concentrations were 0.63 ug/liter (2.1 x 10-10 uCi/ml) in water and 30.1 ug/liter (1 x 10-8 uCi/ml) in acetic acid. They noted that less uranium would leach into solution when the experiment was repeated. The presumed explanation is that less and less leachable uranium becomes available.

According to the WHO[0] the tolerable daily intake (TDI) for uranium is 0.6 µg/kg body weight per day. So, 42 µg/day for a 70kg/150lbs person.

Worst case scenario for drinking 5l of water daily from those glasses would give oral exposure to 3.15 µg in total. Even if you were for some reason a vinegar enthusiast 1l/day would leave you with "only" 30µg.

Maybe you want to err on the side of caution and don't try pickling with those.

[0]https://www.wise-uranium.org/utox.html

The dangers of consuming uranium are mostly because it's a heavy metal-- so the risk profile is similar to lead crystal glasses.

It's right in the article. It's basically nothing. Stress caused by using these glasses would cause more damage than radiation from them.

They're pretty much only dangerous (given normal use) if they get broken, and even then, only if some of the dust gets inside of you.

Collecting this is a fun hobby to get into! If you wanna learn more, feel free to join my Discord server! https://discord.gg/k2gewm3E

Anecdote: According to a Univ. of Michigan Chemistry Prof, early 1980's, that Dept. had a brilliant orange ceramic coffee mug. It'd been purchased (and presumably made) at some Native American reservation in the Southwest, and was pretty radioactive. Supposedly, the Dept's Tenure Committee use it to serve coffee to the prospect when their decision was "no".

These days, one would hope that the mug has long since been retired to a museum basement or something. Both because of the not-so-subtle malice of offering it, and because of the likely fates of the Native American potters who worked with that radioactive glaze.

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