I Miss the Good Ole’ Days When Toys had a 5,000 Year Half-life

When I was a kid we had lawn darts (giant weighted spears that you would throw in the air and try to avoid get­ting impaled) and Creepy Crawler (an oven designed for mak­ing lit­tle toy mon­sters out of molten plas­tic) and my par­ents thought they might be dan­ger­ous but noth­ing beats the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Yes, your kids can bask in the glow of radioac­tive mate­r­ial as they learn the won­ders of Atomic power! The kit was only avail­able from 1951 to 1952 for the ridicu­lous price of $50 (1950’s cost) before some­one decided that kids’ han­dling radioac­tive mate­r­ial was prob­a­bly not the best way to insure their future, although the extra hands that many early adopters devel­oped came in handy later in life.

The set came with four types of ura­nium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud cham­ber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an elec­tro­scope, a Geiger counter, a man­ual, a comic book (Dag­wood Splits the Atom) and a gov­ern­ment man­ual “Prospect­ing for Uranium.”

Kids these days are so sheltered.