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I posted an article and some graphics about watches and radium somewhere on this forum. After my thorough research, I concluded that it is of no concern. Don't lick a dial or hands. Don't flake it off and inhale it. Anecdotally, my Dad worked on radium watches every day for 30 years. He died at 93...no indication of radium sickness.

That case is great for anyone whose afraid of radium dials.

We live in a radioactive world. It is all around you. Holding a dial against your skin will not give you a radiation burn. It won’t send you into the hospital. A single CT scan will give you a dose of 10-30 mSV. Just eating a banana will expose you to 0.1 uSV. The typical US resident receives 3 mSv a year from natural background radiation. In places like Kerala in India, they receive a natural background dose of 30 mSV a year (half from Radon and half from gamma emissions). There are no observed health effects in the population. One study estimated a dose from wearing a wristwatch with a 1 uCi radium dial worn 16 hours a day as 14 mSv a year. Smoking 20 cigarettes a day gives you a dose of 53 mSV.

This is kind of what I was hoping to hear. Thanks, it's just hard not to be at least a little panicked when half of the crowed says I've sealed my coffin and the other half says I am okay. On this forum I saw a picture of a dude holding a watch movement with the dial attached out of its case and the dial had that old school (defiantly radium) numbered indices. He even flipped the movement around so the dial was touching his skin! This guy acted like it was no problem. This was extremely confusing for me to see as we had this entire conversation above.

By using the phrase 'half-lives', I assume that it is radium? If so, the half life is 1600 years, so it will still be very active. It can be removed safely with the hands in water. It looks like there may also be dots of lume on the hour markers.

a month of a panic attack you should get some professional help. It's not good for your health Depending upon where you live I have a website. The website has everything You need to know about radon in other words you get a test kit or seek out a professional to help you out. I'm guessing anything they have to detect radon would probably find the radium. https://www.epa.gov/radon Then what you really need to do is purchase yourself a really sensitive Geiger counter. This way can check all the places that you're worried about and for the future you can check any of the watches You might be considering purchasing conceivably if it's sensitive enough you might not even have to open up your eBay packaging could just send it back.

Thanks guys a ton for your replies. I've been really anxious about watch making recently not gonna lie lmao. When it comes to safety of course. First radium scares, and then I started to rethink my cleaning methods and disposing methods for my L&R cleaning solutions. (Considering they are absolutely not the safest of household chemicals). By the way. I use two rinses because that is at least how the pros do it? No? My watch making heroes all use two rinses too be as thorough as possible when dissolving the cleaning solution. (As it can leave a sticky residue). That's why I at least use one cleaning solution, then put my parts in two separate rinses. If you guys really think its not necessary then I will probably stop doing that. As it's kind of a pain to tell you the truth haha.

I am wondering what you think about this dial? Do you think it looks like a radium dial? On the bottom of the dial it says RA swiss made RA . The watch is from 1969 we think? Sorry for the bad pictures?

It is paint, but I am not afraid of radium.

Yes, plus radon gas. However, the risk is very low IMO. I posted on the "radium" thread on this site, a study done that included wearing (in a variety of ways), working on watches both as a professional and hobbyist, etc. The yearly exposure is quite low, even for a professional watchmaker (150 mrem/yr). My own sense of risk is anecdotal. My Dad was a watchmaker and serviced watches 55 hrs/week from 1947 to 1980 and then at about 10 hrs/week for the next 10 years. He died at 93 of natural causes. I am certain that there was radium everywhere at the shop. Nevertheless, I use caution and would urge others to do so as well, because the human body is complex and we are not all the same--some may be very sensitive to the effects of radium.

The only radium watch I keep (1940's Universal Geneve) records about 0.9 micro Sv/h at the crystal, but this drops to background just a few inches away. Aware of the Radon danger, I keep it in an airtight plastic bag, and open it outside. (Not sure if the radon can get through plastic bags?)

Radiation (although a more serious situation) is a bit like lubrication in that there can be many opinions along a spectrum with no true right answer. On one hand there is no absolute "safe" level of radiation exposure, but on the other hand a risk/benefit analysis can be done so as not to simply turn our backs on anything involving radiation that has benefits for our lives. (Sorry if that came out preachy!) In industry and medicine, when we need to work with radiation the guiding concept for exposure is "ALARA" which stands for As Low As Reasonably Achievable. The tools to accomplish this are Time, Distance and Shielding. So for those that want to minimize their exposure to the (sometimes quite significant) radiation coming from old lumed hands and dials, those concepts can be used. Keeping it outside of your body is the first concern (there would then be zero distance) so masks, gloves, disposable plastic drapes, etc. are useful as mentioned in posts above. Keeping things damp can minimize contaminated dust generation, so if you are sanding or scraping off old lume, keep the tools and parts wet. But even then, there is radiation being emanated from lume even in a closed watch or a sealed bag of hands, so precautions shouldn't stop there. Doing things quickly, and maybe not using your "hottest" vintage watch as a daily wear item can leverage the time aspect. Thought of in this way, you can find other ways to avoid prolonged exposure, such as not storing your stash of old hands in the drawer right below the working surface you spend hours hovering over. I do think it's a good idea for everyone working in this area to have one of the inexpensive radiation meters - you can't balance the risks if you don't know the relative magnitude of what you are working with. There is another wrinkle - Radon (a radioactive gas) is generated as radium decays, and one study found that a collection of a dozen or so radioactive watches in a poorly ventilated area could lead to elevated radon levels, so how and where you store hot materials can also take that into consideration.

It would be nice to hear from someone who has been trained to work with radioactive materials to comment on how to handle radium watches. We need to find a friendly nuclear engineer. Anyone know one?

are you saying that we all react equally to radium ?. Interesting . Lol no the gorgeous husky is having a crazy moment, eyes open and teeth showing. . I may be wierd at times but why would i have a photo of a dead husky for a profile picture .

Sorry N-E-W, I was called away to dinner. What I was going on to say is that the radiation sensitivity to animals including humans (the LD50/30 - 50% die within 30 days) is species dependent (elephants are more sensitive than humans) but does not depend upon the genetic makeup of the animal. We can all safely wear radium watches whatever the condition of our hearts. btw did the dog die?

After fixing them up (before I knew they were radium) I sold them all. Lol. maybe next time

To be absolutely safe, send me your radium watches and I will bear the risk.

The old zinc sulphide is mixed with the radium and cannot itself be removed. The fresh zing sulphide was just layered on top of the old mixed lume. Thanks for the genetics lesson, but off topic.

Hi. From the little research I have done it appears that Timex watches from the 50s and early 60s "could" have radium in the hands/dials. I think this is an early 60s watch. There is no glowing lume now. I don't see any radium burn on the dial. Am I OK to start taking the watch apart. Any help on the year would be great also. Cheers & Thanks in advance, Fuzzy

on the card it gives me it says 5-50 cpm is considered normal for this counter. Again assuming because it detects Beta and Gamma. I'm in the states. Particularly NJ. It says 0.13 - .16 in Sv/h. I highly doubt this is because of working on a few radium watches. "Normal background radiation (as measured by the Leiger), is around 20-30 CPM (counts per minute, or about 0.14 uSv/hour)" https://reimaginingeducation.org/what-is-safe-cpm-radiation/ This quote is from the website link above ^

i studied this quite extensively since i use to have cancer and received radiation treatments, and i work on vintage military watches which always contain radium. Radium can not be absorbed through the skin so touching is not much of a risk as long as you are not licking your fingers or picking your nose after handling a radium dial. but there are two ways to absorb radiation from lume. 1: Ingestion- through this process 80% flushes out from digestion. 20% gets absorbed into the blood and is distributed to organs and eventually will metabolize in the bones like calcium. It will then break down over a period of months in the form of both alpha and beta. 2: Inhalation- 100% absorbed through the lungs then 20% broken down through liver. 80% will metabolize in bone. it will still break down the same way but will take longer because more has been absorbed. so contrary to popular belief radium will not stay in the body forever, therefor limiting how much and how often you are exposed to it will determine if you are at risk. the story of the radium girls. these women who would sharpen their paint brushes laced with radium with their lips to keep the tips sharp for luming watch dials ingest a whole lot of hot radium per day. at least 100-200 dials per day, then they started realizing that it would glow so they thought it would be cool to use it as make up. and not all of these women ended up with cancer. so short answer is a definite NO! do not worry. just use gloves and a mask if you feel like you want to be careful. and DONT lick the dial LOL

100 years is a little on the long side. If I remember when I'm at work again I'll look at the watch we could probably come up with a date of when the watch was made that would give us a clue. we run into problems with the subject. For instance how strong is the radium it has a half-life of thousands the years so that's not the issue of the half-life but how strongly did they mix it up? If you looked at the hand I had that was on the paper it's barely burned at all. Versus burning the crystal in the examples but as a guess that radium is probably a much higher concentration. Radium hands in a glass vial there's not a lot to burn other than the paper around it but I'm guessing they're too far away.

I went on an ill-advised shopping spree on eBay last year because i was very interested in some early 1900s watches. And only after they arrived did I find out about radium. I bought a Geiger counted and found most of what I bought to be quite reactive. I thought the concern with working with radium was accidental inhalation of radium particles into the lungs? Is that something I don't need to worry about as much? Any thoughts about how to "clean" off the radium safely -- I assume outside? I've left all that material sealed up in a metal container facing a lead block since I took those readings...

the problem with radiation is typically you don't see it. There are examples of people seeing the effect of radiation usually the outcome on the people were very bad. really the best way to figure this out would be to find somebody with a Geiger counter preferably a sensitive one. Find out how much lead you need to isolate yourself from the radium. Unless of course you just isolate the item from you in the house or wherever you are. Then of course there is the other problem if you put it in your landline box you going to keep opening it up to look at it you might have to get some lead glass and that's probably going be considerably thicker than the lead itself. They might just be better to have a picture of it someplace in and put the item somewhere else away from people. then I have some pictures for you since you like pictures. The radium burn on the card that the hands are on isn't really that spectacular. Most people probably wouldn't even notice I just happen to know what it is. We also don't know how long they've been there we can guestimate when they last made hands with radium. that I knew we had something lurking in the shop I found it. As we can see a nice watch I should've set the hands C Elledge burning was on the dial I didn't think about that did very clearly see the crystals when burned.

My name is Terry and I have been following Marks You Tube Watch Repair Channel for some time. I have worn watches now for 55 years, since I was 10 in 1966. That is when my father gave me his new Timex "electric" watch that he was unhappy with because it would not keep running due to the severe vibration from the steering wheel in the Freightliner trucks he drove which caused the watch to stop running numerous times. I have been fascinated with time pieces ever since that first watch and it is one of my more enjoyable hobbies. I followed in my fathers footsteps and have been a truck driver now for 44 years and counting. Fortunately for me, todays trucks ride a lot smoother and watches are a lot more rugged. When I was 13 I picked out a Mondaine Dive watch at the local watchmakers store that was in a glass case with all the other rather mundane looking dress watches. That Diver had the requisite tough looking black dial marked Mondaine, 17 jewels, automatic, incabloc, "waterproof" 666 feet and real glow in the dark, "Radioactive" radium hands and markers and a date complication at the 6 that were under an acrylic bubble crystal. The bezel turned both directions. The back of the watch had the "speedo dude" a skin diver engraved in the center with 200 meters, automatic, stainless steel, antimagnetic, Swiss Made engraved around the circumference. And the most impressive thing to a 13 year old, a screw down crown. What more could a kid ask for? The acrylic bubble crystal would scratch yes, but every time Heinz Geisler the watchmaker who sold it to me got hold of it he would polish out the scratches with a cloth and I assume some fine rouge. I used to call the "time lady" at Bell to listen to her say "At the tone, the time will be" to keep track of how my watch was running. I could then tell Heinz if it was fast or slow a "few" second per day and he would exclaim 'But it's not supposed to be that accurate" but then he would put it on a vibrograph, open the back and tweak it a little, hand it back and say "see how it runs now". It was always better after he worked on it. I think that Mondaine had an ETA 2783 movement in it. Spent that summer of 69 body surfing at Huntington beach wearing that watch. I wore that watch for 10 years before i lost it. Wish i still had that one. Bought a Seiko quartz diver in 1980 for $180 because i could not swing the $250 for the 6309 automatic next to it in the case. I have worn various Seiko divers ever since. The latest is a 773 Turtle. Recently bought a couple of micro brand watches. One being a Vaer D5 Arctic diver with a Myota 9039 movement and the other a Dryden Chrono Diver with a Seiko VK63 mechaquartz movement. The Vaer with old radium tint super luminova reminds me of the early style Mondaine diver without crown guards and with a domed crystal. There are more stories about me working on or better yet "trying to work on" and in one case, murdering a watch but that's for another time.