The Breitling Watch Source Forums

I'm amazed that anyone in North America is offering radium, I thought it was banned because of it's rather nasty habit of causing cancer.

Personally I would go with SL because it doesn't age.

And in terms of watches vs. antique furniture - furniture isn't designed to have parts replaced at 5 year service intervals, watches are.

I wasn't sure about that, which is why I didn't name the company. I don't know the laws surrounding it, but one thought is it could just be the production of it is banned, but the continued use of extant supplies of radium is not. (The company refers to it as "vintage" radium on its website.) I know it can cause cancer for the person applying it, if safeguards are not taken, but does it pose a threat to the watch wearer?

Does radium? With a half life well over a millennium, I would think it would last a good long time. Unless there are other factors to consider that might make it degrade sooner.

I discount radium as a serious modern product - personally I don't want to walk around with a radioactive carcinogen 1/2 inch from my skin.

Well, when you put it that way....

Radium??? Available these days?? That astonishes me to be honest. As far as I was aware, the use of radium in watches died out on the 60's..... and for very good reason - it's very radioactive, has a half life of over 1600 years, and decays into radon gas which is itself very radioactive. Handling radium was actually blamed for Marie Curie's death, so it's really not something to mess about with.

And besides, even if it wasn't hugely radioactive, it actually oxidies from pure white to black in air, so it's pretty rubbish for watch dials anyway!

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Driver8

Site Moderator

Driver, as is usual, I do more research on these things after I post about them. As far as I can tell, the big danger with radium comes from (1) ingestion, and (2) inhalation. So even if wearing a radium-painted dial on one's wrist didn't pose any particular danger (and I'm not saying it doesn't), evidently over time the paint degrades into dust, due to the radioactive particles splitting up and bumping up against each other. That poses a significant danger to anyone who would work on the watch in the future. Also the dust could work into the movement and basically contaminate the whole thing - making it radioactive forever. So, good luck trying to find anyone who would actually want to work on the watch, or who wouldn't sue you if they did and ended up getting lung cancer as a result. No, now that I read more, I can see it is not a good idea at all.