head watchmaker Tony Williams deconstructs a Panerai Luninor Submersible.) His ambition lay in specialised diving equipment: anything from torches to compasses to depth gauges, and the icing on the cake was his own special compound, a glowing paint he called ‘Radiomir’. Although father Giovanni Panerai was content to continue selling other manufacturer’s pocket watches in his Florence store, son Guido had other ideas. The benefits were obvious, and the seemingly innocent chemical was viewed by many businesses as an opportunity one such business was to be found in the idyllic city of Florence. Any kind of dial-car, instrument, watch, you name it-got a splattering of the stuff. One obvious use for radium was nighttime illumination. Health spas-yes, you read that right-used radium-rich water in baths as a treatment-presumably to give patrons a healthy ‘glow’. Doctors stitched lumps of this exciting element directly to tumours, even injected it into the throats of children to cure inner ear infections. The work was of pure science.’ This statement was sparked by the immediate and widespread use of radium in industry: as well as its trademark luminescence, the health benefits, as they were understood at the time, were limitless. A fascinating substance, Marie Curie said of radium: ‘We must not forget that when radium was discovered, no one knew it would prove useful in hospitals. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre started this particular chapter with the discovery of radium in 1898, which earned them a Nobel prize each.

Seems like an obvious statement to make, but it only takes a short journey backwards in time to hit a point where the people at the forefront of scientific development were, in hindsight, killing people in the name of progress. Scientists seem to have a pretty good handle of what’s safe and what’s not these days. The power of radium at your disposal’ - Undark Radium Luminous Paint advert, 1921

Radium luminous paint