Vintage radioactive wrist watches - Is Radium really nasty?

[jebem]

(01-20-2015 09:43 PM)Marcus von Cube Wrote:  It was only a few days ago that a so called "Radiumbecher" was detected by chance in a container with metal waste.

This thing was used to treat drinking water with radium. It's a piece of art if it weren't so dangerous.

Nice vintage piece of art!
I remember from my first years in Africa (1960), people used to drink water that was first to boiled and then put in these large ceramic containers using ceramic filters where the water had to pass by gravity only.
I wonder how much radioactive materials they put in those ceramic filters and containers.

(01-20-2015 10:30 PM)everettr Wrote:  My understanding is that the typical luminescent material, for example ZnS, breaks down over the years, so that the radium + phosphor mixture no longer glows, even though there is still plenty of radioactive decay. Do you observe any glow from your watch hands?

It might be interesting for you to try and detect radiation from your source with a webcam.

Thanks for the information.

No, my watch hands are not emitting light any more, so the phosphorescent material is gone.

Concerning semiconductors working as gamma particles detectors, I have been reading a few articles about PIN diodes as well.
I remember my work for WANG Computers in the 80's, where the ECC (error correction code) used extra 6-bits to correct 1-bit in 16-bit words. WANG used to say that even cosmic radiation could cause memory "soft" errors on the dynamic RAM modules. Hence the need to make sure an hardware automatic algorithm to fix those errors.