When 'energy' drinks actually contained radioactive energy
When 'energy' drinks actually contained radioactive energy
Back in the early 1900s, if you felt a bit sluggish you could reach for a beverage enhanced with radioactive elements to really add some pep to your step. It wouldn’t be a healthy choice, though.
RadiThor’s most famous customer was Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh industrialist and amateur golfer of some repute. Byers first became acquainted with RadiThor when he took it to help heal a broken arm. Although the product contained no narcotics at all, Byers became at least psychologically, if not physiologically, addicted to it.
In the end, Byers’ RadiThor addiction killed him.
When Byers died, he was put to rest in a lead-lined coffin, to block the radiation being released from the bones in his body. Thirty-three years later, in 1965, an MIT scientist, Robley Evans, exhumed Byers’ skeleton to measure the amount of radium in his bones. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so Byers’ bones would have had virtually the same amount of radium in them as they did on the day he died.