Vintage radiumscope offers "Most Amazing Sight you ever saw" (Read: eyeball cancer)
This vintage toy ad — torn from the back pages of a 1942 comic book — invites you science-minded kids to place a miniature telescope to your eye, which just happens to contain "a small quantity of real radium."
Another winning quote from the ad copy: "The RADIUMSCOPE is also a wonderful night-guide. IT GLOWS WITH A WEIRD LIGHT IN A DARK ROOM."
The Radiumscope's the most amazing sight you ever saw! Of course, what you might mistake for "the destruction of thousands of miniature worlds" is, in reality, simply the radioactive cell death of your eyeball's photo receptors, experienced in thrilling first person!
Years later, two Radiumscopes would be pushed through a pince-nez, and the prototypical X-Ray Specs were born, marketed to the man who just can't get it up unless he can see a lady's scapula.
Most Amazing Sight You Ever Saw! [Lileks]
UPDATE: Daniel Rutter edifies us in the comments about the true, scientific nature of the radiumscope...
This is actually a spinthariscope; a speck of radioactive material sits on the other side of a zinc sulfide screen that glows when alpha particles hit it.So what you see is not some effect of radiation hitting your retina (which actually wouldn't stimulate it at all), but harmless visible-light photons, and not too many of them, either. It has been observed that even though you need completely dark-adapted eyes to see the feeble display from a spinthariscope, it's pretty amazing that you can see anything at all.
Edifying! Thanks, Dan. I'm still not crazy about douching out my eye socket with one, though.
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There could be a story in there (if there isn't already)
Some young kids send away for something like this as a joke after finding an ad in an old magazine.
They think nothing more of it until an old, dated package arrives at their door containing...
Neat, huh?
As always, thanks BBG!
This is actually a spinthariscope; a speck of radioactive material sits on the other side of a zinc sulfide screen that glows when alpha particles hit it.
So what you see is not some effect of radiation hitting your retina (which actually wouldn't stimulate it at all), but harmless visible-light photons, and not too many of them, either. It has been observed that even though you need completely dark-adapted eyes to see the feeble display from a spinthariscope, it's pretty amazing that you can see anything at all.
The "worlds destroyed before your very eyes!" thing is curious. It seems to be referring to the sci-fi trope that if you shrink down small enough, sub-atomic particles become planets, covered in life forms. But I'm not sure if that idea was really played around with much before Richard Matheson wrote "The Incredible Shrinking Man" in the 50s.
Strider, Simpsons did it.
At least I seem to remember they did, though I can't find a reference anywhere on the Interwebs. Of course, the Simpsons have done almost everything, so I'm relatively secure in my assertion.
The Simpsons did something similar in a treehouse episode, I think--one had a watch that could stop time that bart got from an ad in an old comic book. (Speaking of small universes, though, there's also a treehouse bit where lisa created a mini-world while simply trying to conduct a 'dissolve a tooth in soda' experiment.)
John Brownlee,
I've spent a good portion of the last two years paging through forty years worth of pre-WWII SF pulps for a doctoral dissertation on... well, actually, pretty much what this picture is about. Radioactive bric-a-brac and cultural attitudes encoded therein yadda yadda yadda. (That's a working title.)
I can't give you chapter and verse just now, but yes, the "worlds within the atom" trope predates "The Incredible Shrinking Man" by a few decades at least, so this ad might have been echoing that.
Incidentally, I know a lot of BBers are vintage SF fans, and if you want to stay that way, I heartily recommend that you stick to SMALL DOSES ONLY. Like radiation damage, the harm done to your brain by the cheap boilerplate crud in Awesome Space Wonder Stories Quarterly Digest is cumulative and eventually debilitating.
I figured it must have been, Semiotix, but its nice to have it confirmed. I assume -- as usual -- Matheson did it best, though.
Thanks for sharing such a cool ad!
Speaking as someone that received over 66cGy of radiation to kill the cancer in my head almost 2 years ago, you do see something when your eye is hit by a beam of radiation. I commented on the flashes in my eyes to the radiation therapists, who said that some people saw them, and some didn't - just relax and enjoy the fireworks show. A recent article in the journal Medical Physics says that the flashes may be due to Cherenkov radiation within the eye itself: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/18293564 .
You can still purchase one from United Nuclear for $30. http://unitednuclear.com/spinthariscope.htm
The eyeball flashes were also reported by the Apollo astronauts once they left the protection of the Earth's radiation belts. They reported that it interrupted their sleep. It take a good bit of radiation to make that happen.
As for the radiumscope or spinthariscope, please find it in yourself to resist the radiation = cancer meme. Radiation is complex, there are lots of different kinds, strengths, and they all have different penetrating abilities and hazard levels. Radiation != Cancer.
I have a spinthariscope made from Americium-241. It is very cool and it never fails to impress. Each flash you see is an individual atom decaying. There was a reason these were the top fad item of the turn of the century.
Also, it is completely safe. Alpha particles make the fluorescent screen flash and scintillate because 100% of them are stopped by the screen. Even if it didn't, the moisture layer on the surface of your eye would be enough to stop them.
You can buy a spinthariscope from United Nuclear.