Uranium Glassware.

Radioactivity? What radioactivity? Before scientists understand the dangers of radioactivity, uranium was used to color glasswares glassware!

Uranium was first used to color glass in the 1830s and it has continued to be used for this purpose with the exception of a fifteen year (or so) period beginning in World War II. Prior to World War II, natural uranium was used, but when Vaseline glass production resumed in 1959, the switch was made to depleted uranium (DU). All of the items shown here contain natural uranium except the tube on the right which contains depleted uranium. At present (2004), a few companies in the U.S. are still making Vaseline glass (e.g., Boyd Crystal Art Glass, Mosser, Summit Glass and Fenton Glass), but it is exclusively of the decorative variety. No dinnerware is being made.

Buckley et al (1980) estimated that there were at least 4,160,000 pieces of decorative uranium glass produced in the US between 1958 and 1978 and 15,000 drinking glasses from 1968 to 1972.

Link


This stuff fetches a pretty penny on eBay, too! Antique collectors sometimes carry a small blacklight to check for authenticity when looking for uranium glass. I think I'll stick to cobalt and depression glass myself.
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Many people seem do have the impression that uranium or other radioactive materials actually glow green like that in natural light (I think the Simpsons title sequence is to blame here). You don't mention that the stuff only glows when ultraviolet light is cast on it in dark. Wikipedia actually describes the appearance of uranium as "silvery gray metallic" i.e. like any generic metal.
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In Athens GA there used to be a General Time clock factory. The girls who painted the radium dots on the clock faces were told to lick their brushes to make the point sharper for better detail. After the factory closed, it was declared a toxic waste site.
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The radiation levels of any Vaseline glass are minimal compared to many other consumer products containing naturally occurring radioactive materials. As a professional health physicist I find this posting poorly written and misleading as some other comments have eluded.

"Depleted uranium" is still radioactive. It merely has a reduced abundance of the isotope U-235 as that isotope was needed for the first reactors and bombs in this country's early atomic weapons/energy program.

See linked web site for a great collection of consumer items, etc. collected by Paul Frame of ORISE in Oak Ridge, TN.
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Yeah.
It's not really "radioactive" in the sense that it's anything dangerous.

As a professional spelling nitpicker, I find the previous post poorly written: "as some other comments have eluded"?

Perhaps you meant "alluded".
;-)
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I'd say it's more of a grammar or word choice issue rather than spelling "ted" so now YOU stand corrected as I am fairly certain I spelled eluded correctly, but in fact I did mean alluded. Yes, mea culpa or however the saying goes, but click on my name in comment #8 and see for yourself all the wonderful things radioactive that were once sold......
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LOL
I'd have to disagree.
If you spell the word "too", but you mean the word "to", or "loose" for "lose", I would call it a spelling error.

So now you stand corrugated.
:-)
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Jonathan... I bought a piece of uranium at a rock & mineral show. I'm sure radio activity is minimal. I have lots of uranium ~ aka Vaseline ~ glass. I can't get enough. Although now that people are aware of how cool it is, the price has skyrocketed.
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