Greetings,
Long long ago they made paint for numbers on watches which somehow used radioactivity to glow for years. They also used it on instrument dials in planes, etc. It was not dangerous when used for its intended purpose just as your radioactive smoke detectors in your house are not a danger to you. Is there still a legal means to obtain this paint or to make it? Does anyone know what it is called?
Thanks, William
It's a shame they prohibited lead solder for tin cans and potable water supply. It flowed so well.
R.... but you can still buy lead solder if you want it....
Rather tough to build a bomb with lead. There are inconveniences in life brought about by trying to restrict making things too easy for people offing themselves or others.
R
Its called Radioluminescent Paint. Google it.
Yes, my brother had a clock with a radium dial.
I'm not sure that was true.
I think I have the clock now, and I have no children.
You can still get fluorescent paint, that glows in the dark if it got enough light during the day. Any decent paint department I think, although I only bought a little bottle once 30 years ago because at night I kept walking into the edge of one of my French doors in my apartment in Brooklyn, NY. If I had walked into the door itself, it wouldn't have hurt so bad, but it didn't work out that way.
I painted the top half of the edge with the paint, and it glowed all night, and I never walked into it again. It looks white in the light. I'm haven't heard that its color could be changed.
As I recall, lots of women who worked in the factories ended up with mouth cancer as a result of pointing their brushes with their tongues.
In the 60s when I worked at the Bureau of Radliological Health we had to dispose of about 1000 army stop watches with radium dials. They treated them like a fairly high risk material. I know a survey meter would go off when you got close to the container they were in. One issue with users is when you put the watch in your pants pocket, next to your "deal".
The better modern version is tritium lights such as are used on gun sights.
It would appear that the professionals disagree with your opinion.
That was back about 30 or more years ago. I remember it contained phosphorous, which glows when radiated. Beyond that, I'm not much help. Did you google search?
Living causes dying. We should prohibit sex because it causes death.
Bob
But what a way to go!
toilets used to work great before the government added water flow rules.
have a friend with a old army radio with original glow in dark meters.
the stuff must of decayed nealy no glow anymore...
the workers got cancer a lot from the paint, just add a night light
Ummm. No I don't think so.
Phosphorous may glow a little if exposed to oxygen - shortly before it explodes.
Phosphorous will burn quite well when exposed to air. No doubt it could glow if irradiated -it would depend on how much and by what.
White Phosphorous was used in early matchsticks and covered in wax to prevent exposure - cowboys striking matches on their boots to remove the wax layer. Safety matches are made of red phosphorous - not quite as volatile.
Phosphorous was a very popular weapon during both World Wars and the Korean War. A spattering of phosphorous on the skin would burn all the way to the bone and just keep on going.
It has never been used in watch faces - then again maybe in the 1960s by the Bulgarians....
Nobody gets out of this life alive......
According to Avery :
Heh.
Television/computer CRTs and radium watch faces work through the use of _phosphors_ - phosphorous containing compounds that glow when irradiated by something.
With CRTs, phosphors are deposited on the backside of the face glass, and glows when hit by the electron beam from the yoke.
With radium watch faces, they simply mix phosphors with the (teensy amounts) of radium.
Phosphors come in many colours.
Pure phosphorous comes in two forms. White phosphorous which is spontaneously flammable in air _below_ body temperature. The ignition point is below 37C. Under normal circumstances, if you touch white phosphorous it _will_ ignite.
Red phosphorous is quite a bit more stable.
White phosphorous is usually stored in water. Red phosphorous doesn't need such precautions.
Old "non-safety" matches are NOT made out of white phosphorous. If they were, they'd ignite in your pocket.
To give you an idea of how self-ignitive white phosphorous is:
Dissolve white phosphorous in carbon disulphide (about the only thing it _will_ dissolve in). Soak up some of the liquid in a paper filter (or even paper towel).
Lay the filter out on something non-flammable. The CS2 will evaporate very quickly leaving pure white phosphorous behind. At temperatures above around 25C, it will self-ignite.
In WWII, some incendiaries were simply paper dipped in CS2/white phosphorous solutions. The CS2 would evaporate shortly after popped out of the drop cannister. In more than one occasion, civilians, thinking they were leaflets dropped by the allies, would surrepititiously pick them up and put them in their pockets so they could read them later. Minutes later, they'd ignite.
Phosphorus fluorescent paint from almost any printing shop. You can get material called 3M Luminous film which is 9mil..
Ampco Manufacturing uses Phosphorus fluorescent paint for printing.
It was a luminescent paint. Harmless as used in a watch, but the people that worked in the factories applying it got sick.
And that's only because they were pointing their brushes with the tongue and ingesting the paint. Ingesting too much of anything is unhealthy, do you want fries with that?
Bob
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