Lucy Jane Santos, the cultural historian, explains how to hold a radium party like the ones that lit up New York a century ago. At the beginning of July 2020 I held a radium party for friends and family to celebrate the launch of Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium. We had specially-created (slightly) glowing […]
Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium by Lucy Jane Santos
Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal. Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in […]