The trouble with fantastical legends from antiquity is that they change over time. Storytellers embellish the accounts to make them more exciting or more meaningful. The oldest versions of these stories may have been lost forever, but the best yarns begin with a grain of truth. Evidence of those grains of truth emerge when archaeologists discover the remains of the places where those stories were supposed to have occurred.
The King Arthur legends may have been based on a real person, although not in the form he takes in the stories. The places associated with Arthur are real, and more discoveries are made in those places all the time. The city of Troy figures heavily in Greek mythology, and has been unearthed gradually over 150 years of excavations in Turkey. The lost city of El Dorado could be hiding right under our noses. The Pool of Siloam was lost in Jerusalem for thousands of years before it was discovered in 2004. Read about these and other ancient places that were relegated to mythology until they were found, at Smithsonian.
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From what I've seen before, it basically had four radiation detectors: Geiger-Muller tube counter (which unfortunately is and was kind of expensive, leading to cheaper kits with everything else), an electroscope, which is something you can build from household items, a phosphor based detector, and a cloud chamber. A cloud chamber lets you see paths of ionizing radiation and building one was one of the more fond memories I had from middle school. The kit also had a selection of small radioactive sources , something else still available from educational supplies (price has gone up a lot in the couple decades since I last bought some). These are not particularly dangerous as long as they are kept outside of the body, like a lot of things in our day-to-day life.
And for that matter, elemental and many other forms of mercury have virtually no evidence linking it to causing cancer in humans, with some evidence in animals for methymercury. It is still a very dangerous substance without care and not something I would give to a kid, but it is not dangerous because it causes cancer.