Written By Will Grant
 

Ebenezer “Eben” McBurney Byers was the personification of the Roaring Twenties: Chairman of his own company, private box at the baseball, golf pro, ladies' man - total Great Gatsby vibes. 


Unfortunately, Eben had a fall one day leaving him with an injury that dented his athletic prowess. Conventional treatment failed and so his physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Moyar, suggested he try RadiThor, an energy drink advertised as “Pure Sunshine in a Bottle” and accompanied, as quackery always is, by the usual panacea claim. 


Eben loved it. He was back in fine form and for the next two years, he drank two or three bottles of RadiThor every day.


But what was in this miracle drink? Well, not a lot. Just some triple distilled water and at least 1 microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. That means radioactive water for those non-nuclear savvy folks. So let’s look at the research showing the safety and efficacy of radium water… *crickets*.


From 1918 to 1928, RadiThor was manufactured by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, owned by William Bailey, a con man known for peddling various miracle cures like Las-I-Co, which promised “Superb Manhood” for those identifying as a “man in name only”.


Naturally, Bailey added “aphrodisiac” to the long list of RadiThor’s promised effects, claiming it improved blood supply to the pelvic organs and had tonic effects on the nervous system resulting in vast improvements downstairs. This claim was perfectly timed given the early 20th-century hysteria surrounding the amazing benefits of “Mild Radium Therapy”, and some ground-breaking radioactive research claiming that mild radium exposure increased passion amongst water newts.


Knowing what we know now, how did Eben fair after voraciously imbibing RadiThor? Not well. Not well at all. 


It started with headaches and jaw pain, and rapidly progressed to widespread toothaches. X-rays showed that Eben’s body was slowly decomposing from the bones out as a result of his massive radium toxification. Decomposition was most severe in his lower skull, after two salvage facial operations, he was left completely without a jaw (!) and missing all but 6 teeth (there’s a picture in the video on YouTube… not for the faint-hearted).


In April 1932, Eben Byers died of radium poisoning and was buried in a lead coffin. 


Unsurprisingly, a cry went out to investigate RadiThor and other radium concoctions, and the swift collapse of all the radioactive patent medicines quickly followed. 


But somehow, radium water manufacturer William Bailey never stopped insisting RadiThor was safe. In fact, he drank more than Eben did and was “as fit as a fiddle.” He suffered no legal consequences for selling the stuff and died a very wealthy man.


Fun epilogue, 20 years after Bailey died (of bladder cancer), medical researchers exhumed him and discovered that his skeleton was absolutely ravaged by radiation. How he managed to avoid radiation poisoning whilst alive remains a mystery.


Perhaps in formulating his energy drink, he shouldn’t have taken the word “energy” quite so literally.

 
 
 

  • [00:00:00] Rod: Early days of the 20th century, the spiritual ancestors of today's energy drinks that were a little less limited in what they could claim and what they could put in and the one that really stands out for the 1920s took the energy part of energy drink extremely literally. What's in Radithor? Distilled water and one source says triple distilled plus at least one micro curie or 37 becquerel each Of radium 226 and radium 228.

    [00:00:26] The ingredients of the water were radium with a little miso thorium just for the, you know, tang, a little spice. A. K. A. Radithor was radium water.

    [00:00:33] Will: Oh my god.

    [00:00:35] Rod: So the rad doesn't stand for sick moves on a skateboard. It's for fucking radium. I've never been an energy drink guy. I don't understand them. I don't like the taste. I just, eh, never been an energy drink guy. The way I look at him, it's like, all I do is give you sugar and caffeine. And if I want that, I have a coffee because I'm not 12.

    [00:00:52] Will: But what if you're doing the sports?

    [00:00:53] Rod: Coffee.

    [00:00:57] Will: Probably not the best.

    [00:00:58] Rod: No. So modern energy drinks, they started to show up 1960s in Japan and Europe. So people were increasingly looking for, you know, simple, easy dietary supplements, energy boosters, as you'd expect. And so in 1962, Taisho Pharmaceuticals launched the very first modern style energy drink, or maybe one of very close to the first in Japan, Lipovitan D.

    [00:01:22] It's supposed to give you sustained energy, reduce mental and physical fatigue. The only one I saw first time I was in Japan, there were these vending machines, no surprise there. And the main drink, then it was like a Gatorade was called Pocari Sweat.

    [00:01:35] Will: You're thinking it's a bottle of sweat.

    [00:01:36] Rod: Yes, I am.

    [00:01:37] Will: But could you have just guessed based on the idea that they're selling it, that it's not a bottle of sweat. I know that other countries are different, but I don't think there's many countries that are selling bottles of sweat

    [00:01:47] Rod: Especially flavored, it came in flavors, strawberry sweat.

    [00:01:49] Will: I don't know. Of course I know that there are now entrepreneurs on the internet selling their sweat. It's like the cute viral gamers girls sort of thing. They'll sell their bath water or versions of that. And I'm sure there are versions of people selling

    [00:02:01] Rod: Fucking bath water. Sell it. I mean, I've got no problem with you selling it. Who's buying it?

    [00:02:06] Will: I don't know. People who are into it.

    [00:02:08] Rod: As Megadeth says, peace sells, but who's buying? I figured that with bathwater. SO the main elements in Lipovitan D -vitamin B, taurine, which I assume is basically bulls balls or something.

    [00:02:21] Will: I don't know. It sounds like Vegemite so far.

    [00:02:23] Rod: And ginseng. Not Vegemite.

    [00:02:24] Will: Not Vegemite. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

    [00:02:26] Rod: So, and as you know, it's still big there today. So, 1987 Red Bull built and launched in, do you know which country?

    [00:02:34] Will: Red bull. Oh, it's German. East German. Behind the wall?

    [00:02:36] Rod: Austria. I had no fucking idea. I seemed instantly and always American. I had no doubt. Red Bull American.

    [00:02:41] Will: No, I felt European to me.

    [00:02:42] Rod: 97, it hit the U S. 10 years, which surprised me. And so of course, now there's a plethora of other energy drinks. It's multi billion dollar global industry, et cetera. But of course, one particular study, there have been conflicting results concerning the effect of energy drinks on physiological and cognitive performance, and they quote a bunch of research.

    [00:03:02] So there's some research that says, look, the effects of these potions on, and they look at mood, concentration, reaction time, alertness, endurance, physical performance, and also tendency to increase risk taking behaviors. So some studies do reveal improvements in physical performance.

    [00:03:18] Will: Okay, cool.

    [00:03:19] Rod: Also memory and speed of attention. Like boom, I can attend quickly.

    [00:03:23] Will: That like a category of data like a meth user has got. I was going to say amphetamines. I want to be, I want to be measured on speed of attention because I can fucking snap to attention real quick. Everything. Over there. Yep.

    [00:03:32] Rod: I serial tasks so quickly. It looks like multitasking. Just a blur. Of course, there are also downsides in studies ranging from they don't do nothing to people, you know, scoffing far too much caffeine, sugar, et cetera. To cases where, as I mentioned a moment ago, some energy drinks seem to lead people to be more risk positive.

    [00:03:52] Will: You're thinking this afternoon, I want to do some train surfing. I'd take an energy drink beforehand just to get me in the game.

    [00:03:58] Rod: I'd take an endone, preemptive painkiller. Ability reducer, reaction time slower. So the sorts of things you normally find in these energy drinks, this is going to take a big, deep breath.

    [00:04:11] Guarana seed or Guarana seed extract, caffeine, maltodextrin, Taurine, Pax ginseng root extract, ginkgo biloba leaf extract, inositol, whatever, glucuronolactone.

    [00:04:23] Will: Confession, they're all whatever to me.

    [00:04:24] Rod: Yeah. Green tea extract. You've heard of green tea. Yeah. Yeah. guayaki yerba mate, milk thistle extract.

    [00:04:32] Will: Milk thistle? That's a Scottish bit there. Put your milk thistle in.

    [00:04:36] Rod: Put your thistle in here. That's not what I meant. epigallocatechin gallate, you know, B vitamins, C vitamins, antioxidant complexes, and of course, fuck loads of different kinds of sugar.

    [00:04:46] Will: So this the food that your grandmother ate.

    [00:04:48] Rod: Yep. That's why she's still alive today. And very strong. I mean, they're not all in everything. Many things could be in your little pick me up, but these days there's a lot of regulation as you'd be aware, and the claims that can be made about their effects are well regulated too so they're pretty safe.

    [00:05:03] Early days of the 20th century, the spiritual ancestors of today's energy drinks that were a little less limited in what they could claim and what they could put in. And the one that really stands out for the 1920s took the energy part of energy drink extremely literally.

    [00:05:26] Will: Welcome to the Wholesome Show, the podcast that will put literally anything into the whole of science to improve its performance. I'm Will Grant.

    [00:05:33] Rod: Hi, I'm Rod Lamberts. So Ebenezer, or Eben Byers, chairman of the A. M. Byers Company, which was in Pittsburgh, and they made wrought iron pipes, so he was also known as an iron master.

    [00:05:45] Anyway, he was also director of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, a director, and he was, the quote was, connected with coke, docks, and banking. I assume you mean coke like industrial, you know, coked iron or whatever they do.

    [00:05:55] Will: Oh yeah, you would be, you would be. One thing I know about iron, you gotta get some coke.

    [00:05:58] Rod: For years he apparently had a private box at a baseball field in Pittsburgh, it's Forbes Field or something, apparently that's a big deal, or was. He had a couple of houses and he liked to visit Palm Beach a lot. A lot of his obituaries and or bios spend a lot of time talking about his amateur golfing prowess, but that's probably because he was a us amateur golf champion in 1906. So he was good at golfing. He also was a horse racing enthusiast. He had stables in the USA and the UK, and apparently he was quite the ladies man. So the summary was he was the personification of the roaring twenties. He was the Gatsby or whatever.

    [00:06:30] Will: He's he loving golf. He's doing the stuff.

    [00:06:32] Rod: He's the guy, he's the guy. 1927 he was 47 years old. He's coming home on a chartered train after watching the Harvard Yale football game. So they had births upper and lower, so I assume they'd kind of sleeping racks or something.

    [00:06:44] He was in an upper one during the trip, and he fell asleep, and he rolled out and hurt his arm. Poor little fella. So the next few weeks he started to complain of muscular aches. They messed with his athletic prowess, particularly his golf games. And there are some sources that suggest his bedroom performance might've been off as well

    [00:06:59] Will: with his arm broken.

    [00:07:00] Rod: Injured.

    [00:07:01] Will: I mean, our arms is certainly useful.

    [00:07:02] Rod: So the injury and the run downedness did not respond well to regular medical intervention. So he'd been to the doc and the doc's like, let's, I don't know, jump up and down and breathe deeply. You need a steak. Didn't work. So his physiotherapist Dr. Moyer said, start drinking Radithor.

    [00:07:18] Will: Radithor. Radithor. Hem an's little brother.

    [00:07:23] Rod: Yeah. So Radithor is an energy drink, a restorative, and it had apparently curative properties. Like. It was good for according to the marketing spiels

    [00:07:31] Will: everything

    [00:07:32] Rod: to be fair, only about 150 things, at least asthma, constipation, flagging, libido, diabetes, mental illness, and 145 other ailments. It was advertised as pure sunshine in a bottle and claimed to be quote, a cure for the living dead, not dead. I assume what they mean is like, you know, run downedness. So, Eben took his doctor's advice and the first prescription that he got from the doctor started him on the path to becoming quote, Radithor's most famous customer.

    [00:08:01] Did it help him? So the quote from the 1930s Time Magazine article was, the dope eased the arm pain and braced Byers up. And so for the next two years, Byers drank two or three bottles of Radithor a day. And during that time, it's very clear there weren't a lot of details of, you know, like the intricacies of how he felt, but it's clear that he felt fricking stoked. He loved it. He sent cases of it to his business partners. One to at least one of his girlfriends.

    [00:08:24] Will: I think that's the other thing about these, you know, a lot of these quack cures is that there is always a moment where they're actually feeling way better than they were before.

    [00:08:32] Rod: Yeah. It sounds like you felt great. He even fed some of it at least to at least one of his racehorses. So although the beverage had no recognised or obvious addictive compounds, Byers appears to have become at least psychologically hooked. He was into it.

    [00:08:45] Year two, he'd had probably 1400 serves of Radithor. Then about that two year-ish, 18 months, two years, he started to get headaches, pain in his jaw, and he started to lose weight.

    [00:08:55] Will: Couldn't possibly be associated with the Radithor

    [00:08:57] Rod: no. Soon the headaches increased the number and severity, and he started to have horrible, widespread, like round his mouth, toothaches oh, and his condition continued to decline over the next few years. The question is why? What's in Radithor? Look, if it helps, not a lot, there's not a lot of ingredients. One is distilled water. And one source says triple distilled

    [00:09:17] Will: triple distilling. I don't know how that makes it better than single.

    [00:09:20] Rod: So basically it takes it everything that's not water up to three times.

    [00:09:23] Will: So that's good. So pure H2O

    [00:09:25] Rod: plus at least one micro Curie or 37 Becquerel each of radium 226 and radium 228. So it was mostly the ingredients of the water were radium with a little mesothorium, just for the, you know, tang, a little spice. A. K. A. Radithor was radium water.

    [00:09:41] Will: Oh my god.

    [00:09:43] Rod: So the rad doesn't stand for sick moves on a skateboard. It's for fucking radium.

    [00:09:48] Will: Fuck, they were so keen on radiation back then.

    [00:09:50] Rod: So it was manufactured between 1918 and 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories in New Jersey.

    [00:09:56] Will: Oh my God. So, so, so, okay radium Laboratories. Yeah. So clearly it's a bunch of scientists that are like, okay we know how to use radium. We're using it for x rays, maybe do some science experiments, some other stuff like that. You know what we should branch out and do is some energy drinks.

    [00:10:10] Rod: I love that you heard the word laboratories and assumed a block of scientists

    [00:10:14] Will: yeah. Fair enough. But who goes from, yes, this might be useful in seeing inside your bones to we should drink it.

    [00:10:21] Rod: Eat it. Fucking eat it. So the owner of the company of Bailey radium laboratories Inc was a chap called William J. A Bailey. And he was described at least in one source as a scholarly looking man with no scientific or medical degrees. No learned connections other than membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Which ain't nothing, but I don't think it took a lot to be able to join at the time. And apparently he claims in his interest for this association, the AAAS, a quote, Protean interest in medical science, chemistry, and physics. Protean, I know you know, it's a intermittent. He's also described by some sources as a born con man who had been peddling various miracle cures, especially for impotence.

    [00:11:02] Will: I'm shocked.

    [00:11:02] Rod: Four years. It's probable. It was a bit confusing, but it wasn't clear. He was probably someone who was fined about 10 years before this started going on for selling a goo called Las-I-Co for superb manhood. The ad is like, are you a man in name only? Oh, Las-I-Co for superb manhood, nervous stability, sexual weakness, failing memory, sleepiness and kidney troubles. Las-I-Co

    [00:11:25] Will: but that's the heart of how quacks are selling to men. And I know that there is a different, obviously

    [00:11:30] Rod: soft dick when you don't want it to be?

    [00:11:31] Will: But it's like, it will make you feel bad about all of these things.

    [00:11:35] Rod: Yep. You're less of a man.

    [00:11:36] Will: They don't invent new stuff. It's just going straight to people's anxieties and

    [00:11:41] Rod: Hitting them straight in the angst. So the key ingredient of Las-I-Co was strychnine. NOt uncommon in the day though, as a performance enhancer, it was really big in cycling,

    [00:11:50] Will: I remember. You've told us about this before. Horrifying. So what is strychnine doing in your blood that, that gives you a performance enhancement?

    [00:11:57] Rod: This might not be exact facts, but I think it kind of takes away your ability to feel some shit at certain levels. You don't quite connect with the horrible agony you're putting yourself through. That was my impression.

    [00:12:06] Will: That could be one version of performance enhancing.

    [00:12:08] Rod: It would be. So anyway, this is the sort of stuff he was into. So it was no surprise that he originally, or at least predominantly touted his miracle Radithor as an aphrodisiac.

    [00:12:17] So he mailed this pamphlet out to doctors in the mid twenties. The pamphlet was called Radithor, the new weapon of medical science. It claimed improved blood supply sent to the pelvic organs and tonic effects upon the nervous system generally result in a great improvement in the sex organs, supposedly.

    [00:12:35] And his timing was perfect, of course, because this was later in the 1800s. So the U S was apparently around the turn of the bit after the turn of the century, getting to the twenties riding what they called a mild radium therapy movement, mild radium. They're not idiots.

    [00:12:49] So it's really big in certain social circles. And the premise was radium in minute doses would prod a metabolic kick in your endocrine system. Oh, and it would infuse your depleted organs with energy. That's not untrue. It's not a lie. You are infused with an energy. And look, there were a few serious claims at the time, for a little while, that radioactive water could be beneficial.

    [00:13:09] So you're wondering how they made it. One is you dissolve radium salts in water. So salts of radium will dissolve. The other way they do it, other than dissolving radium salts, is to expose water to radium emanations.

    [00:13:20] Will: Oh, you open the water and you...

    [00:13:22] Rod: Ohmiopathic. Or you put radium near it.

    [00:13:25] Will: Put it near it, and the wave. I gotta say if I'm gonna drink one of the two I'll drink the exposed water rather than the

    [00:13:30] Rod: so here's the thing. Doctors thought they had evidence that the waters treated in one way or the other didn't matter, would cure chronic arthritis, gout, which you mentioned neuritis and high blood pressure. And at least one scientific paper claimed this is from the twenties, the radium water could increase the sexual passion of water newts.

    [00:13:47] Will: Wow. Well, it's the passion that I want.

    [00:13:50] Rod: Look at those two. I think they're lizards.

    [00:13:53] Will: Writing poetry to each other

    [00:13:54] Rod: banging in the water.

    [00:13:55] Will: No, it's not just the banging. Passion is more. It's like, I want to be with you. Like, not just, you know,

    [00:14:02] Rod: so anyway, the sexual passion of water needs apparently inspired a bunch of people. So Bailey's claim about Radithor being the results of he claimed this years of laboratory research. So it wasn't completely out of the blue because people were talking about it anyway.

    [00:14:15] Of course, it was emphatically not the product of years for laboratory research. I don't know if he had much of a lab. It certainly was called the lab. I think he had a factory or a place he radiated it. To his credit, he actually did put radium in the water.

    [00:14:27] Will: So he actually did what he said. He wasn't lying about that. He did that bit of it,

    [00:14:31] Rod: not a fraud. So regardless of whether people believe it or not, he sold at least 400, 000 bottles for a buck a piece in the twenties, which is, I think 90 bajillion dollars

    [00:14:40] Will: yeah, it's impossible to convert that. Like he is the great Gatsby

    [00:14:43] Rod: You could buy a country for a dollar back then. So he sold a lot of those. He was also associated at least probably before these but maybe after it's hard to tell with the manufacturers of Thorone tablets Which 250 times more radioactive than radium. REM tablets, which promised to restore quote happiness and youthful thrill into the lives of married people whose attractions to each other had weakened. Okay. More fucking radium. And my fave, the Radiendocrinator. It was intended to be placed over the endocrine glands, which have so masterful a control over life and bodily health.

    [00:15:19] Will: Where are your endocrines?

    [00:15:20] Rod: They're in your abdomen. Okay.

    [00:15:22] Will: It looks like a little magic book. It's like you're taking out merlin's boner box.

    [00:15:25] Rod: A little case. Nicely velvet lined by the looks of it when this little thing that is apparently radium again. It was first They tried to or started selling for a thousand bucks a pop, a thousand in the 20s.

    [00:15:35] Will: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so this is big money. Quacks this is my thing for you quacks. Could you just make it not harmful. Like if you're gonna sell shit, just try not to sell shit that will murder people

    [00:15:45] Rod: who said anyone died? Speaking of which, back to Eben Byers. He wasn't doing well. Hard to imagine, right? So a radiologist and a prominent radium expert from Columbia Uni looked at some radiographs that were taken of Eben, I assume they mean x rays or equivalent. They confirmed that he was slowly decomposing as a result of the massive radium intoxication. So the problem is when you eat, drink whatever radium, it ends up incorporating into bone Matter. It goes into your bones and that's a problem.

    [00:16:21] It's got a half life of about 1600 years, if you're wondering. So it takes a long time.

    [00:16:25] Will: So you can't poo it out quickly.

    [00:16:26] Rod: No, 1600 years and you poo out half. It's a long bog. So no surprises as this started to come to the fore, Byers being fairly well known, you know, man about town. There was a cry that said, look, we have to investigate Radithor and other radium concoctions. So the Bureau of Investigation of the American Medical Association started looking and they found people selling radium waters for cures for things like anemia, leukemia, boils, blackheads, and pimples. I mean, I had bad pimples as a teenager and if you'd said, if you nuke them, they'll go away. I probably would have tried it.

    [00:17:01] Will: And if you're a rich person, it's a dollar a bottle. You just go, you know, give me two.

    [00:17:05] Rod: So the American medical association and their council on pharmacy and chemistry withdrew their approval of devices that made radium or radioactive waters.

    [00:17:13] Will: Based on this?

    [00:17:14] Rod: Yeah. Related. I mean, I think there was a kind of a wave beginning and Byers was, you know, he was a touchstone. Many people got on board to expose radium dangers from here. So there was a doctor, for example in New York, he went on a radio show and he held the radioactive bones of a victim of one of these things, just the bones. And he held a Geiger counter in front of it over the radio to demonstrate the deadly sound of radium.

    [00:17:37] Will: That's not bad. Like as a prop. Bring in some bones into it. I know it's radio, like radio it's a little bit like live TV. That would be better, but bringing some bones in and going, look at how irradiated this person is.

    [00:17:49] I wonder, were they scared in the 1920s by Geiger counter in the way that just that clicking sound is, it's like, it's close to the velociraptor tapping on the ground. It's like the Geiger counter of just, Oh, you're walking towards something you cannot see, but it is killing you quick.

    [00:18:07] Rod: So Geiger counters may have had an effect on people even in the twenties. So the federal trade commission, the FTC filed a complaint accusing Bailey's laboratory of false advertisement or false advertising. And to back up their claim, they thought we'll go and talk to Byers and get testimony about the bullshit about Radithor.

    [00:18:26] An attorney for the FTC, a guy called Robert Winn went to Byers at his Southampton home, one of his homes. A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine. How are you feeling?

    [00:18:37] Will: Well, I'm kind of imagining Skeletor in his summer palace or something like that.

    [00:18:42] Rod: Skeletor at least had a complete skeleton. We went up to Southampton where Byers had a magnificent home. Then we discovered him in a condition which beggars description. Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, except two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating and holes were form actually in his skull. So they got testimony from that guy. And I mean, really what's the testimony, a photograph.

    [00:19:21] Will: That will do. That will do. Just to confess, the whole losing your bottom jaw, you know, it changes the shape of your head quite a lot. Losing your top of jaw too.

    [00:19:30] Rod: What does that even mean? Somehow there were teeth left. I don't know if there were any.

    [00:19:34] Will: You just left to the top bit of your skull and your brain and your eye. How are you still alive? Like I am long past the point where I'm like, okay. Put me back. Put me down in the ground.

    [00:19:44] Rod: I take me home to mother. It's horrifying.

    [00:19:46] Will: Oh, geez. Louise. Good on you, Mr. Byers for toughing it out and testifying, you know, once you're at the point of half my head is gone and you can see into my brain through my skull. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

    [00:19:59] Rod: Health drink. Energy drink. It's true. It was full of energy. So, Bailey's defense. But I only sold Radithor on Doxter's prescriptions. It's not my fault. Doctors prescribed it. Fuck off. So let's, so the doctor, Dr. Moyar who prescribed it to Eben, insisted it wasn't harmful and quotes from him. I never had a death among my patients for radium treatment.

    [00:20:25] I've taken as much or more radium water of the same kind Mr. Byers took. Now I'm 51, active and healthy. I believe that radium water has a definite place in the treatment of certain diseases and I prescribe it when I deem it necessary. He knew, he declared the Byers had died from a combination of blood diseases, which had induced gout. He knew

    [00:20:45] Will: face gout.

    [00:20:48] Rod: Gout of the jaw. My jaw fell off. Oh, it's gout. Seen it a hundred times. So 1931, the FTC, basically they dropped the cease and desist order, halting all production in Bailey radium labs of producing Radithor. Stop. Every bottle from every store that was found selling, it was taken away.

    [00:21:05] So you could also get it off the shelves, which is even more scary in some ways. And basically by December of 1931, radium infused drinks were removed from the market, they were gone. This was of course too late for Eben Myers. Yeah. So he died of radium poisoning in April of 1932.

    [00:21:21] Will: How long after the testifier?

    [00:21:23] Rod: About five months. Okay. So autopsy revealed that he had swollen kidneys. That was the best bit. Six remaining teeth. May have been related to the fact that both his jaws, of course, were rottened away. His brain was abscessed, not just his skull, his fucking brain had abscesses. And they measured, at the time at least, distributed through his bones 36 micrograms of radium. 10 was considered fatal.

    [00:21:45] Will: Well, considered by idiots, obviously, because, you know, you can survive on much more than 10.

    [00:21:50] Rod: Exactly, for at least a few years. Friend of his called Mary Hill died just before him of a similar cause. And there's a time article that said other of his friends are gravely worried because they've got bottles and crazy stuff scoffing it. So he was buried in a lead lined coffin to block the radiation.

    [00:22:08] Will: I know it's for science reasons, but lead line coffin. I've said it before. I'll say it again. Frigging cool. You know, it's the kind of thing in 2000 years, you know, when they dig it up and either there's padlock around your neck, or you're in a lead lined coffin, they're like this is saying something. Yeah. This is that nuclear semiotics.

    [00:22:27] Rod: 33 years later, 1965, MIT scientist guy called Robley Evans, they exhumed Byers body. They wanted to measure the radium.

    [00:22:35] Will: I've said. Leave it in the ground.

    [00:22:37] Rod: Yeah. No. Science. So Evans was an expert at measuring and mathematically modeling the body's absorption excretion or expulsion, whatever, of radioactivity. Oh yeah. So based on how much Radithor Byers said he drank, Evans model predicted it would contain about a hundred thousand Becquerel, which is more than the recommended daily dose. Well, sure. By about lots, but his remains actually had 225, 000 Becquerel. So either his radiation model was balls or Byers had understated. Anyway They put his bones back in the lead coffin and reburied. Why didn't this become a full on public health crisis because it's a energy drink. It's popular. Two good reasons. One was most radium drinks lied. There was no radium in them.

    [00:23:25] Will: Thank you frauds. Thank you. You actually did something good for once. You did good. Oh, Jesus Christ.

    [00:23:31] Rod: And a win for capitalism and it's positive effects on public health, which we talk about all the time,

    [00:23:37] Will: where is this a win for capitalism?

    [00:23:38] Rod: Just here because Radithor was super expensive so fuck all people could buy.

    [00:23:42] Will: Oh, only rich people died.

    [00:23:43] Rod: So the ones that actually had radium in it were only available to very few people. Cool. So capitalism is a public health benefit.

    [00:23:49] Will: Yeah. It killed the rich people. So take it all back. Let's just keep doing it.

    [00:23:53] Rod: You want to make people better, make only rich people buy dumb shit. I fixed it. So Byer's death pretty clearly facilitated the collapse of all the radioactive patent medicines. Like the people just went nuts. It's over. The industry's fucked. But Bailey, the original guy, the creator never stopped insisting it was safe.

    [00:24:12] After all, he said he'd probably drunk more of it than anyone else and he felt fine. He suffered no legal consequences for selling the stuff and died a wealthy man. So there's a good reason he was described by at least some people as the chief impresario in the radioactive patent medicine field. Fun epilogue though.

    [00:24:33] So he died in 1949 of bladder cancer, which sounds gross. Sounds like horrifyingly bad. 20 years after he died, he was exhumed. His remains were, quote, still hot when pulled from the ground. Oh, wow. And they described his body or his remains as having been ravaged by radiation. Ravaged.

    [00:24:52] Will: But he survived a long time?

    [00:24:54] Rod: Somehow. Some people do.

    [00:24:56] Will: Oh, my god. There are differential impacts of radiation on different animals, and there, there may be animals not so affected by radiation.

    [00:25:04] Rod: Cockroaches. Naked mole rats.

    [00:25:06] Will: Yeah. Well, those but also maybe mammals and potentially even within humans, there might be differential impacts. And, you know, we'll have to explore one day some of the Soviet studies that looked into... Differential impacts of radiation on different human animals. But the one thing in this is you can understand at the time and we still absolutely, and we should use radiation in medicine

    [00:25:27] Rod: I had something the other day for a scan. I sat there and I watched, they put the screen in front of me as they put this goo in me. I wanted to watch how it moved from kidneys to bladder, and I watched it in real time, it's fascinating.

    [00:25:38] Will: There is a core of radiation that actually is useful. It's just how wild they went in the 1910s and 1920s.

    [00:25:47] Rod: Don't give it to cowboys.

    [00:25:50] Will: Unless they just take out the billionaires.

Will Grant
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