Look Mom, I Glow in the Dark- Schmeg.com

   

I've been handling nuclear materials since I was a teenager, so I can at least marginally empathise with the Iranians - that it's "neat" (my word, not President Ahmadinejad's). What I was doing in possession of radium and uranium is another question entirely.

I bought them in a kit, just like millions of other kids. I think it was a chemistry set in general, but it had a strip of cardboard coated with radium and not a word of advice about radioactive contamination.

And I still have the spinthariscope, a plastic eyepiece in which you can watch the atomic disintegration of a tiny chunk of uranium encased inside. Inside the plastic, not lead. Through a plastic lens.

You sit with the spinthariscope in a dark room (I spent hours in the cubby-hole of my childhood house) until your pupils dilate enough that you can see the sparks flying off the isotope. They make terrific little streaks not unlike shooting stars.

This was "really neat" when I was about 14. Now that I'm 53 the effect is "superb", and the fact that the authorities allowed me to have this "toy" and my parents allowed me to spend so much time in the dark with it is, mmmm, let's call it "gratifyingly twisted".

My own children, their pupils permanently dilated by video games, don't show the slightest interest.

Spinthariscope

You can still readily buy spinthariscopes, though the vendors today fall all over themselves reassuring customers that they're completely safe, thus taking much of the fun out of it. Back in the '60s when I got mine - and especially in the '50s, when selling them to kids was completely outer limits - nuclear power was still edgy stuff. I remember the October Crisis of '62 very well, and the school next to mine hosted the town's massive air-raid siren, which was tested fairly often. I think we were supposed to go to the basement, if at home, and under the desk if at school, though I never got those great "duck and cover" lessons that American children thrilled to. I didn't know anyone who had a bomb shelter, but there were a lot of them where I grew up in Canada too.

Anyway, I dug a hole in the Internet hoping to mine some uranium-for-kids facts, and discovered that the AC Gilbert Co of New Haven, Connecticut, "experimented" (as it were) with atomising youth for about one year, 1950-51.

The firm had had such success with its famous Erector sets and chemistry sets that it decided to go fission (ha ha!) with the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab. It claims it was "unofficially encouraged by the government, who thought that our set would aid in public understanding of atomic energy and stress its constructive side. We had the great help of some of the country's best nuclear physicists and worked closely with MIT in it's development."

This is nothing like the kit I managed to get my hands on years later, because mine had no Geiger counter or "cloud chamber where atoms could be split". I'd have remembered that.

The toymakers sold this outfit for a massive US$50, and unloaded quite a few, but even then couldn't recoup their production costs. That's when certain components of the atomic set were integrated into Gilbert's chemistry sets, and that's probably how I went nuclear.

Before he started making glow-in-the-dark children, AC Gilbert fostered a generation of engineers by inventing the Erector Set. Before that he pole-vaulted to a gold medal in the 1908 London Olympics - he's the guy who came up with that little box in the ground that vaulters stick their poles into on take-off.

Chances are he became expert at the pole-vault while big-game hunting in Africa, another of his passions, although he could just as easily have vanished into thin air if pursued by a rhino because he was also an gifted magician.

Yale made Gilbert a physician, not a magician, but he preferred the wizardry stuff and opted to make magic sets rather than set bones. His Mysto Manufacturing Co eventually became AC Gilbert Co, which introduced the Erector set at the 1913 Toy Fair in New York City and then sold 30 million of them over the next 50 years. Gilbert died in 1961, but I couldn't find out the cause. With all his accomplishments it makes you wonder. Today there's an AC Gilbert Heritage Society, founded by Erector-set nuts who enjoy poring over his 1954 autobiography, "The Man Who Lives in Paradise".

The New York Toy Fair was also where Gilbert unveiled the Atomic Energy Lab, creating quite a stir. It was the most thoroughly scientific toy ever produced, and as such was over the heads of most kids. There was no way to market a "beginner's atomic energy lab". So it went bust, three of its parts transmuted into a chemistry kit with wider appeal.

The spinthariscope resulted from clumsiness, as is often unnervingly the case in atomic science. In 1903 Sir William Crookes, the guilty-looking fellow on the left, was puttering around with radium bromide, the most expensive material on the planet at the time. Working in total darkness for some reason, he spilled a scoop on a sheet of zinc sulfide, then used a magnifying lens to make sure he found every costly speck. Sparks were flying.

Crookes wanted to know if he was going crazy and investigated, and discovered that the flashes of light were photons. Individual alpha particles whizzing off the radium were smacking into the zinc sulfide and atoms were splitting in panic or joy, depending on how you look at it.

Crookes had not only discovered the basics for the spinthariscope but the first radiation detector, well before Mr Geiger came a-counting. Crookes and Julius Elster and Hans Geitel worked out the design and marketing plan for the spinthariscope (the name comes from the Greek word for scintillation), and before they could say "nuclear proliferation", it was making the rounds at fun-filled "academic parties".

The company that sells the United Nuclear Spinthariscope tells me that its "toy" not only contains no risky/expensive radium, it may not be uranium in my version either. It uses high-grade thorium ore mined at Alberta's Great Bear Lake, "the only naturally occurring radioactive material that will put on the dazzling nuclear display". (Wikipedia says it's americanum, the same stuff found in smoke-detectors, but who's to quibble?)

"As the source material undergoes natural radioactive decay, atoms of it continuously explode, releasing alpha particles travelling at 20,000 miles per hour. Although alpha particles can only travel a little over an inch in the air and can't even penetrate a sheet of paper, when they hit the zinc sulfide, photons are released, the basic components of light.

"This produces the thousands of tiny flashes (scintillations) of blue-white light you see through the magnifying lens. Alpha radiation is just common helium atoms that have lost their electrons, travelling at very high speed." This firm's spinthariscope has an adjustable focus, a modern improvement that makes me wonder even more about my eyesight, quite apart from radioactive bombardment of my cerebral cortex.

"It will continue to operate producing tiny visible nuclear explosions for at least 60 years," the manufacturer says. But hey, I was a junior physicist - I was never worried about lapsing shelf-life leaving me with a dud fission-viewer. Glow on, my little genie in the lamp, glow on.