Radium salts from watch repair kit--rare element in glass vial==Seldom offered!
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Here's yet another extremely rare element sample... Radium! Well, not exactly, as pure Radium metal is illegal to own (I think). In fact, the only legal form of Radium to own is in the salt compound forms (Radium Chloride and Radium Bromide) that were mixed with other materials to form a paste used to illuminate clock faces in the dark. Here was the concept: Zinc Sulfide crystals could be excited by a radioactive source (like the Radium salt) and would light up...this worked well until after a few years the Zinc Sulfide crystals were "burnt out" (my terminology); that meant clock faces could be regenerated with new paste. As a serious element collector, I knew the only way I could have something to represent Radium in my collection was to get a bit of salt from a repair kit, which was rather rare in the first place. But over the years I've purchased three such sets. One had virtually NO Radium in it, as my old Geiger Counter showed...but the other two sets were fine. The most recent one cost me over $200! (If you want to buy one of these yourselves, keep watching eBay--where I found two of the sets, including the poor one!). In the 1970s the watchmaking industry abandoned Radium for "safer" ways of illumination, which was Promethium paint in the mid-1970s (shortlived, because of a 4 year half life!), then Tritium (much safer). What
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