Margaret Harris reviews Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium by Lucy Jane Santos The uranium craze that hit America in the 1950s was surely one of history’s strangest fads. Jars of make-up lined with uranium ore were sold as “Revigorette” and advertised as infusing “beautifying radioactivity [into] every face cream”. A cosmetics firm applied radioactive soil to volunteers’ skin and used Geiger counters to check whether its soap could wash it away.
Most astonishing of all, a uranium mine in the US state of Montana developed a sideline as a health spa, inviting visitors to inhale “a constant supply of radon gas” for the then-substantial sum of $10. The story of this craze, and much else besides, is entertainingly told in Lucy Jane Santos ’ new book Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium . Santos is an expert in the history of 20th-century leisure, health and beauty rather than physics, but she is nevertheless well-acquainted with radioactive materials.
Her previous book, Half Lives, focused on radium, which had an equally jaw-dropping consumer heyday earlier in the 20th century. The shift to uranium gives Santos the license to explore several new topics. For physicists, the most interesting of these is nuclear power.
Before we get there, though, we must first pass through uranium’s story from prehistoric times up to the end of the Second World War. From the uranium-bearing silver mines of medieval Jachymóv, Czechia, to the uranium enrichmen.