Fortress of Solitude

I visited The Wizard's "Fortress of Solitude" (aka his rented storage garage) the other day. Man, it was chock full of gadgets and gizmos and curios of all kinds, most of them probably dating back to the 50s and early 60s.

There were old radio sets, scientific instruments, a couple of old computers, some aerial reconnaisance cameras, and boxes--lots of boxes. Also of interest were crates containing huge vacuum tubes. Some of these I recognized as Coolidge or X-ray tubes. What I was interested in, however, was the computer I saw him using back in the 70s when I first met him. The one that had the GUI, and a mouse! Didn't find it on this trip, but there are plenty more boxes to look through.

Of course I brought my Geiger counter. You can't be too careful when examining devices that made their way up through the atomic age. It seemed that everyone was nuke-crazy, and couldn't wait to be the first to come out with the first atomic-powered coffee maker (don't laugh there really was one on the drawing boards) or home nuclear reactor. And of course Theo was in on the craze for awhile (as were many scientists of his time who wanted to be at the cutting edge of things), until the ugly realities of fallout and radwaste and M.A.D. reared their collective heads.

Anyhow I made a point of separating anything that set off the meter into one corner of the storage unit. Thankfully most of the items I found were only mildly radioactive. The only item that worried me (it was emitting around 200-300 mr/hr) took a while to find because it was so small. I had to move several boxes, and of course it was at the bottom of a big stack of them. Inside a nice little wooden box were several vials, each of which contained a small bead of metal in solution. There were a few other assorted radioactive sources in the bigger box as well, and it's a good thing that I had my counter, because there was no label on the box indicating radioactive material. I shall have to contact someone regarding the proper disposal of these items.

By the way, don't get a radiation detector because you'll worry yourself silly testing all the items in your house (as I did) and getting alarmingly high readings off of the most seemingly innocuous things.
Theo, who worked within the defense sciences, went nearly mad in a similar fashion back in the 60s. He had all kinds of equipment designed for precision measurements of radiation, and was worried sick about the fallout swirling around the atmosphere from above-ground tests performed by China, Russia and the U.S.
He would test all of the food he brought home from the supermarket. He said that much of the world's soil contained trace amounts of fission products, thanks to the clouds of fallout that soared up into the jetstream and were carried to every point on the globe. He was afraid of radionuclides working their way into the food chain.
He told me once that he found a head of broccoli emitting 30 rems (5-600 rems will kill you)! He surmised that it must have come from one of the "downwind" states such as Utah or Colorado.
He stopped drinking milk (the cows, he said, ate fallout-dusted grass), and gobbled iodine pills like candy. He told me that iodized salt was unheard-of before the 50s and 60s testing. He said it was the government's way of getting it into our diets so that we wouldn't absorb the radioactive kind.
He almost went stark raving mad, because he felt there was no escape. As a result he joined many of his colleagues in supporting the Test Ban Treaty, and felt a little better once atmospheric testing ceased.
Still he would get furious at the French when they would test in the Pacific in the seventies, or when India began testing, because we, living in California, would get a hefty dose if the winds shifted the right way.

Myself, I think that man will eventually evolve and get used to fission products, even the non-soluble ones. It's just that in the interim thousands of years between now and that time, man will have to deal with a lot more cancers, I'm afraid.