Radium was added to food and drinks because it was thought to have health benefits.

Original photo by Igor Ilnitckii/ iStock

Antique still life with meat, sausages, salami, lard and a glass of vodka

Radium is, quite famously, not good for you. Its effects on the body are deleterious, not that anyone realized this when Marie Curie discovered the alkaline earth metal in 1898 — a scientific breakthrough that led to her winning the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Before long, the dangerously false belief that radium had health benefits began to spread: It was added to everything from toothpaste and hair gel to food and drinks, with glow-in-the-dark paints made from radium still sold into the 1970s. It was marketed as being good for any “common ailment,” with radioactive water sold in small jars that shops claimed would “aid nature” and act as a natural “vitalizer.”

Radium is the heaviest alkaline earth metal.

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The five other earth metals — beryllium (Be), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), strontium (Sr), and barium (Ba) — all weigh less.

Of course, none of this was true — exposure to even a small amount of radium can eventually prove fatal. Curie had no way of knowing this at the time, just as she didn’t have the slightest inkling that her notebooks would remain radioactive for more than 1,500 years after her death. She was known to store such elements out in the open and even walk around her lab with them in her pockets, as she enjoyed how they “looked like faint, fairy lights.”

Numbers Don't Lie

Atomic number of radium

Radium’s melting point (in degrees Fahrenheit)

1,300

Radium’s approximate half life (in years)

1,600

Weight of radium (in atomic mass units)

226

More Interesting Reads

Radium’s color changes from silvery white to ______ when exposed to air.

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Radium’s color changes from silvery white to black when exposed to air.

Marie Curie also won a second Nobel Prize.

Marie Curie wasn’t just the first woman to win a Nobel Prize — she was also the first person to win two and remains the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Her first award came eight years before her Nobel Prize in chemistry, when she and her husband Pierre Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their work in radioactivity. More than two decades later, their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry along with her husband Frédéric Joliot for synthesizing new radioactive elements.