In the future, Hot Plates are HOT Plates

March 16, 2017 8:55 AM

Vaseline Glass, gets its name from the Vaseline color typically associated with the original pieces. It’s original name was Uranium Glass, as Uranium dust was typically ground up and added to the glass as a colorant. Josef Reidel is the name often thrown around for inventing it in 1830, however this is up for debate. Oh, also, yes, URANIUM DUST IS IN DECORATIVE FLATWARE

There is enough uranium and radioactivity in these pieces to set off of Geiger counters (typically about 250 cpm) which raises some eyebrows on their safety, however the general rule of thumb is the background exposure is fine, just don’t grind down the dust. The numbers have been run and the highest risk population would be manufacturers and truck drivers due to the constant, high volume exposure. Of course, this is a low risk population as the manufacturing of Vaseline glass is functionally ended.
Uranium glass was once made into tableware and household items, but fell out of widespread use when the availability of uranium to most industries was sharply curtailed during the Cold War in the 1940s to 1990s. Most such objects are now considered antiques or retro-era collectibles, although there has been a minor revival in art glassware. Of course, the the EPA recommends not eating out drinking out of uranium filled glasses.

Reddit Page showing off Uranium Glass Collections
Radioactive Vases for the low low price of…

Previously

posted by Suffocating Kitty (27 comments total)

(thank you Filthy Light Thief and Etrigan for taking a look at my post!)
posted by Suffocating Kitty at 8:56 AM on March 16, 2017

Vaseline, in turn, getting its start from chemist Robert Cheseborough who figured out how to turn petroleum jelly white. Or white-ish.. German Wasser, Greek έλαιον, olive oil.
posted by BWA at 9:21 AM on March 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Happy to help, it's a great post on a really interesting topic!

Hopefully this will be the only use of the tag "geigercounterwentoffinmydiningroom" (and here's Suffocating Kitty's story related to the tag).
posted by filthy light thief at 9:33 AM on March 16, 2017

Not just glass - don't forget Red Fiestaware.
posted by jferg at 9:36 AM on March 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

Oh, this is cool! I knew about these, but not so much of the background. My PhD advisor made a hobby of checking out one of our lab's rad meters on the weekends and going hunting for uranium glass at local antique shops and flea markets. He's amassed a bit of a collection over the years[*], and periodically trots out a piece or two to show people who aren't familiar with it, which can be an interesting reaction to watch. They really are a lovely and sort of unusual green color.

[*] As the one link in the post says, the dose from a household-type collection is still pretty low -- he did run the numbers one time, in conjunction with his radiation badge records from work, and concluded that the largest exposure he'd ever gotten in 3 decades of radiation work was actually probably from sleeping next to his wife after she'd had radioactive iodine treatments.
posted by dorque at 9:52 AM on March 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

These are also useful for GO/NO-GO testing of oilfield natural gamma detectors.

Or so I've heard.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:57 AM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

I got a pair of decorative shot glasses made out of this material as a wedding gift. Needless to say, they've never been inside my house. I took them into a safety office at the lab where I work, and received a tremendously (too) informative discription of the merits of various types of Geiger counters and radiation sensors. Basically, they're benign. But still.
posted by newdaddy at 10:02 AM on March 16, 2017

I first saw a demonstration of this stuff at the visitors center at ... Three Mile Island.
posted by lagomorphius at 10:35 AM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I find out about this because my mother in law has a large stash that is in our dining room and it set off a Geiger counter.
posted by Suffocating Kitty at 10:45 AM on March 16, 2017

Wait, Three Mile Island has a visitors center?
posted by TedW at 11:02 AM on March 16, 2017

Now I have an irresistible urge to shop for uranium glass. Great.
posted by desuetude at 11:13 AM on March 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

I've always wanted to have a place where I could put a uranium glass chandelier with black light bulbs in it.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:26 AM on March 16, 2017 [10 favorites]

There's a whole case full of these in the decorative arts section of the Met in New York...like, enough that it's kind of worrisome that they're all stored together on display.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:46 AM on March 16, 2017

As long as there's a screwdriver in between them, you're fine.
posted by Etrigan at 11:55 AM on March 16, 2017 [25 favorites]

The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History has a small but growing collection of Uranium Glass. Definitely worth a visit if you're coming through town.
posted by endotoxin at 12:16 PM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

There were uranium glass Snoopy figurines? Huh.
posted by etherist at 12:56 PM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm a marble collector. Which means I also collect all kinds of glass. One of the early American marble makers, Akro Agate, branched into children's tea sets. There are complete tea sets of Uranium glass tea sets. Akro Agate calls them Lemonade Oxblood. The picture is 6 Akro Agate marbles sitting on an Akro Agate tea set plate.

Natural Light
Black Light
posted by jgaiser at 1:10 PM on March 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History has a small but glowing collection of Uranium Glass.

ftfy
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:18 PM on March 16, 2017 [2 favorites]

Wait, Three Mile Island has a visitors center?

Sure. Come take a tour.

It's not clear if the visitor center is actually still open, but I visited it not too many years after the accident. (I grew up not too far from there.) There was also a gift shop in a trailer across the road from the entrance. I got a t-shirt.

Oddly enough, for school trips, even before the accident, we always got bussed off to Peach Bottom instead of Three Mile Island, even though it was farther away.
posted by lagomorphius at 4:26 PM on March 16, 2017

You can buy this stuff on eBay. It's safe, as long as you don't eat it, and as mentioned above it's also fluorescent.

They only quit making it when the countries nationalized their uranium supplies early on in the Cold War.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:27 PM on March 16, 2017

I'm not sure it quite 'sets Geiger counters off'. If I stick the tube from my counter into my uranium glass piano foot, it gets a little more busy, but not much above background. Even my uranium ore sample (from a car park in Cornwall) only has a couple of remotely hot spots - the real zinger is my thorium-doped gas mantle. That will slow down a solid-state disk, if you put it directly on the flash chips (I think because it hits the error correction.) But don't go buying gas mantles just because you want some thorium action; most, if not all, modern mantles are doped with yttrium instead, despite that giving a dimmer, yellower light. Because thorium.

None of my other uranium glass pieces are very radioactive, so collect away. You can even buy contemporary work in the stuff, but because it was really very popular in late Victorian/early Edwardian times, there's still tons of it out there second-hand.
posted by Devonian at 5:44 PM on March 16, 2017

So our Geiger counter hit 255 cpm when placed inside one of our pieces.
posted by Suffocating Kitty at 5:45 PM on March 16, 2017

Wish mine did. Mind you, I took most of the measurements using an old counter (Contamination Meter No. 1) which was well past its youthful best. I should recheck with my newer (it has transistors!) model. It also has an optional off-scale alarm - red light and piercing bleep - which I can actually trigger at the lowest scale with the gas mantle. It's great fun doing that while demonstrating to dubious visitors the various emitters in the living room - "Oh... er, no, don't worry, that's quite normal. Hold on, I need to make a phone call. Why not go into the kitchen and fix yourself a drink?"
posted by Devonian at 6:05 PM on March 16, 2017

A better tool for hunting out vaseline glass than a Geiger counter in thrift stores is a UV torch/flashlight. I have a tiny one I made from a trade show giveaway keyring light that I swapped in a (visible, near-)UV LED. Wandered into the local Sally Anne, gave it a quick waft over the glassware shelf, and picked up a uranium glass plate for 25¢. It makes my geiger counter tick quite a bit faster than background.

I'm told that Elliot Lake, Ontario has places you can pick up immensely hot rocks if you know where to look. All the uranium mines there are no longer worked (combination of meagre yields plus no competition with the massive Athabasca deposits). Some of the parks have "walking round this park is the equivalent of a chest x-ray" signs. Fun place.
posted by scruss at 7:28 PM on March 16, 2017

I've got a few pieces, as well as one WWII piece that was made to look like uranium glass but does not contain uranium. Without a black light it looks just like the other pieces in the pattern.
posted by oneirodynia at 7:32 PM on March 16, 2017

There's a whole case full of these in the decorative arts section of the Met in New York...like, enough that it's kind of worrisome that they're all stored together on display.

Critical Glass.
posted by longdaysjourney at 8:04 PM on March 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

The coolest application of this stuff was neon signs, and the distinctive color of uranium (or canary) glass tubing containing mercury-argon was known as Airplane Green.
posted by Rash at 9:01 PM on March 16, 2017 [2 favorites]