by D.E. Johnson

One of my true pleasures in writing historical novels is finding odd facts to share. My  book Detroit Breakdown, sent me down a rabbit hole that I didn’t want to leave. My protagonist was stuck in an insane asylum called Eloise Hospital, which, at the time (1912) was experimenting with radium on tubercular patients.

In the early Twentieth Century, scientists discovered that most of the world’s healing hot springs were radioactive. Radon gas (the byproduct of radium deteriorating) was leaching into the water. The springs healed, they were radioactive, ipso facto radiation heals! Soon experiments commenced using radiation to cure health problems. Success was found with both tuberculosis and cancer. Radiation became a sensation on par with electricity in the late Nineteenth Century and the telegraph fifty years earlier.

As I researched the radium treatments at Eloise, I started coming across strange curatives that used radium or uranium. The more I looked, the weirder they got. Consider the following:

The Revigator (1912 – 1930’s)

A uranium-lined water jar that would irradiate water overnight. Their advertising claimed, "The millions of tiny rays that are continuously given off by this ore penetrate the water and form this great HEALTH ELEMENT—RADIO-ACTIVITY. All the next day the family is provided with two gallons of real, healthful radioactive water … nature's way to health." The Revigator Company recommended a daily minimum of six large glasses. It was a smash. They opened branches across the United States and sold tens of thousands of water jars to the public. And not only were Revigators irradiating the water, they also released large amounts of other toxic elements, such was arsenic and lead, into the water.

Radithor (1918 – 1932)

The most successful of the radioactive curatives with approximately 400,000 bottles sold, Radithor was made of distilled water with a high concentration of two different radium isotopes. Patients were to drink a bottle after a meal. It was advertised to cure stomach cancer and mental illness, as well as restore “vigor and vitality” (a common theme of radium curatives). A playboy/industrialist named Eben Byers was Radithor’s best-known victim. Byers hurt himself falling from a train berth in 1927, and his doctor recommended Radithor to help him heal. (Not coincidentally, doctors received a 17% kickback from Radithor prescriptions—and the stuff wasn’t cheap at $30 a case.) After the first bottle, Byers felt peppier. He figured that if one bottle made him feel better, three would really work. He set out on a three-bottle-a-day regimen of Radithor. When Byers died a painful death from radiation poisoning in 1932, The Wall Street Journal ran this headline over their article:

The Radium Water Worked Until His Jaw Came Off

Degnen’s Radioactive Eye Applicator (1910’s)—Created by M.L. Degnen, the inventor of the Radio-Active Solar Pad, this product, which looks like a pair of wire-rim glasses with opaque lenses, was available in three strengths, and was advertised to cure headaches and difficulty in focusing, as well as nearsight, farsight, and oldsight. It was recommended that the user close his eyes when using the Applicator.

Radione Tablets (1920’s)—“Strength of Iron—Energy of Radium.” Just what they sound like—Radium tablets. For energy! (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. See Vita Radium suppositories and Radiothor for indications.)

Radium Bread (1920’s)—Baked by the Hippman-Blach Company in what is now the Czech Republic, this bread was made with radium-enriched water.

Tho-Radia Face Cream (1930’s)—Popular in France, Tho-Radia made a full line of beauty products and perfumes containing both thorium chloride and radium. Is your skin dull, listless? Want a little shine? Try Tho-Radia! The man the company claimed invented the product line, Doctor Alfred Curie, was not a member of the famed Curie family, nor was he even likely a real person.

The Scrotal Radioendocrinator (1930’s)—My second favorite product. For a mere $150, you could purchase this gold-plated device, filled with radium, which you would place over your endocrine glands (for men they specified under the scrotum) overnight, for improved endocrine health. The inventor, William Bailey, claimed to have drunk more radioactive water than any living man. He died in 1949 of bladder cancer.

And my hands-down favorite …

Vita Radium Suppositories (1930s)

You don’t need to try too hard to read between the lines of this advertising copy to see that Vita suppositories were allegedly the answer to men’s problems in the bedroom.

“Weak Discouraged Men!

“Now Bubble Over with Joyous Vitality Through the Use of Glands and Radium

". . . properly functioning glands make themselves known in a quick, brisk step, mental alertness and the ability to live and love in the fullest sense of the word . . . A man must be in a bad way indeed to sit back and be satisfied without the pleasures that are his birthright! . . . Try them and see what good results you get!"  (Vita Radium Suppositories are shipped in a plain wrapper for confidentiality.)”

These companies had the cure for what ailed you. Unfortunately, no one had a cure for the cure. It’s easy today, a hundred years later, to laugh at the idea of these curatives. But I guarantee you that people in the 1910’s laughed at the ridiculous products that were used a hundred years earlier. What scares me is that a hundred years from now people will be laughing at the harmful products you and I use today.

Which ones, do you think?

The following essay appears in the Fall 2013 issue of Mystery Readers Journal.

When I began researching early Twentieth Century Detroit for my historical mystery series, I came across all kinds of information about electric cars. I had some vague notion that electrics existed back in the day, but I really had no idea how significant a part they played in automotive history. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, there were almost twice as many electrics on the road as there were gasoline cars, but twenty years later, the quieter, cleaner-running vehicles had all but disappeared. The electric car was a superior design, simpler and more reliable. Yet during an age when gasoline-powered vehicles broke down so often they came from the factory with a repair kit, electrics were wiped out.

That smelled like a conspiracy.

After watching Who Killed the Electric Car?, my mind filled with possibilities. As an unpublished author, I needed a conspiracy. At the top of my wish list—a cabal led by Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller conspiring to wipe out electrics. Imagine a conference room at the Standard Oil Company, with Ford and Rockefeller and their henchmen. Rockefeller closes the blinds, strolls to the head of the table, and says, “Gentlemen, we have a problem.” Then, though a series of shady business dealings, they work behind the scenes, manipulating the industry like a pair of puppet masters, probably ordering the murders of a few men along the way, until they squeeze the electric car companies (the good guys) out of business. For the book, I’d need a hero—some dashing electric car whiz kid who’s out to save the world, until he’s crushed by the nefarious forces of evil, led by Big Oil.

Can you say “bestseller?”

I started digging in with Henry Ford. It wasn’t until late 1908 that he hit on his first successful vehicle—the Model T. Prior to that, he had little to gain with the death of the electric. Okay, so how about later? Turns out Ford wasn’t against his company producing electrics. He and Thomas Edison, who were close friends, discussed the possibility of Ford Motor Company manufacturing electric cars on numerous occasions, but Ford’s engineers were never able to design one they could build cheaply enough for his taste. Further, while Ford had his share of faults (and a few other people’s shares as well), he was a loyal friend. Edison was building batteries for electrics, and it’s hard to imagine Ford cutting him off at the knees like that. I kept digging, but I wasn’t able to come up with any evidence of Ford’s involvement in the conspiracy.

So on to Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Talk about a guy with a motive—in the early 1900s he controlled more than 90% of the United States’ oil production and only a little lower percentage of the sales of refined oil products. He had a lot to lose if electrics supplanted gasoline-powered cars. So what did he do?

Nothing.

Damn it. I could see that number one spot on the New York Times list going up in smoke. Still, I wanted to know. Was it the pope? That would work. How about Teddy Roosevelt? Not quite as sexy, but still good. Andrew Carnegie? J.P. Morgan?

Nope.

It was me. And you.

The consumer killed the early electric. Aided by Charles Kettering.

Early electric cars were expensive. The cost of batteries, the technology of which has changed little to this day, was extremely high, putting the price of electrics at a serious premium to gasoline-powered cars. The good news was that automobile owners were rich, because most gasoline cars cost about two year’s wages for the average worker, and most electrics were 50% higher than that. The folks who bought these things were the upper-class, and they could afford any car they wanted. So, if the manufacturers of electrics stuck to the high end, they would have been okay, right?

Well, no.

There were other problems, such as charging. First of all, you had to be somewhere that had an electric grid, not a given in the early Twentieth Century. Next, you had to leave your car all night to charge it. No quick stop at the gas station and off you go!

Range complicated the problem. Most of the early electrics were rated at around fifty miles per charge. That was enough for most uses, but not all, and very few people owned more than one car. By the 1910s, the range of electrics had doubled to 100 miles or more per charge, but still; after 100 miles—if you dared try to take it that far—you were stuck for eight hours or so while your batteries charged. And again, that’s assuming you were somewhere that had electricity.

So, electric cars were expensive, took a long time to charge, and had limited range. Sound familiar?

But they had one thing going for them—women dug electrics. Why? Because of the reasons you might think: they were quiet and didn’t spew noxious fumes. There was a bigger reason, though. They could be started with the flip of a switch. To start a gasoline-powered car, you had to bend down in front of it, grab hold of the crank, and give it a spin. Talk about unladylike. Woman drivers at this point in history were already progressive, really on the cusp of impropriety. To perform a task such as starting a gas car was unthinkable.

The electric car manufacturers focused on their primary demographic—rich women. By doing so, they made electrics de facto women’s cars. It’s not like the men of the early Twentieth Century cornered the market on machismo—men have always wanted to be “manly,” but this was the period in which Teddy Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” was the model. Men were men, and by George, they weren’t going to be driving a woman’s automobile.

Then, in 1911, Charles Kettering went and designed a self-starter for gasoline cars that allowed drivers to start them by flipping a switch. That was the beginning of the end. Women began choosing their automobiles for reasons other than how they started, and a much wider array of gasoline-powered vehicles offered many tempting choices. By the time World War One wrapped up, electrics were all but gone from the American landscape. Only a few electric car manufacturers survived into the Twenties, and only one that I’ve found (Detroit Electric) made it past the Great Depression, and they scraped along by the skin of their collective teeth until 1939, when they finally gave up.

Conspiracy? Unfortunately, no.… Sigh. Bye bye NYT #1.

It wasn’t Ford or Rockefeller or Roosevelt or Carnegie or Morgan. Or even Kettering.

As the great philosopher Pogo so famously said, “We have met the enemy … and he is us.”

Award-winning author D.E. Johnson has published four novels in his Historical Detroit mystery series: The Detroit Electric Scheme, Motor City Shakedown, Detroit Breakdown, and Detroit Shuffle. His interest in the automobile industry is genetic—his grandfather was the Vice President of Checker Motors. Johnson is currently working on a crime novel set in early 1900s Chicago that has absolutely nothing to do with the auto industry.

I could cite a great number of historical novels here, because there are so many that are outstanding, but I’ll choose only two: Ironweed by William Kennedy and The Road to Wellville by TC Boyle.

Ironweed, which won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, completes Kennedy’s “Albany Cycle”, a marvelous three-book series set in and around Albany, New York. The cycle starts with Legs, the story of 1920s and 1930s gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, as told by attorney Marcus Gorman. The second, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, takes the titular character, a small-time and tarnished gambler during the Great Depression, through a harrowing kidnapping story.

The cycle finishes only a few weeks after the end of book two, with Ironweed, the story of Billy Phelan’s father, Francis, who returns to Albany with Helen, his companion and fellow hobo.

In his youth, Francis was a baseball player with major league potential and ambitions until he lost a finger in a fight. He fled Albany after dropping his thirteen-day-old son, Gerald, killing him. Decades later he returns to Albany to face the ghosts of his past, both literally and figuratively. Here’s how the book starts:

Riding up the winding road of Saint Agnes Cemetery in the back of the rattling old truck, Francis Phelan became aware that the dead, even more than the living, settled down in neighborhoods. The truck was suddenly surrounded by fields of monuments and cenotaphs of kindred design and striking size, all guarding the privileged dead. But the truck moved on and the limits of mere privilege became visible, for here now came the acres of truly prestigious death; illustrious men and women, captains of life without their diamonds, furs, carriages, and limousines, but buried in pomp and glory, vaulted in great tombs built like heavenly safe deposit boxes, or parts of the Acropolis. And ah yes, here too, inevitably, came the flowing masses, row upon row of them under simple headstones and simpler crosses. Here was the neighborhood of the Phelans.

Ironweed is a story of guilt and redemption, or such redemption as one can find in this life. It is at once violent and tender, hateful and loving. In my opinion, this is a masterpiece of American literature. My favorite book of all time.

The Road to Wellville is a very different book. I hadn’t read any of Boyle’s previous novels when I came across it lying on a new fiction table at a local bookstore. The cover looked interesting, and the cover flap info showed it was set in Battle Creek, Michigan, which is only about 30 miles from where I live. I read a few random pages and decided I immediately needed to devour it.

The Road to Wellville is one of those rare books that create grief about halfway through – a book so good and so much fun to read that I start to feel sad that I am going to finish it and will no longer be able to look forward to reading it every day. I come across those only every few years, and they all get reread.

Boyle brilliantly skewers the health industry of the early Twentieth Century with the story of Will Lightbody, who is dragged to the Battle Creek “San” (sanitarium) by his grieving wife, who had recently miscarried their child. John Harvey Kellogg, the founder and head doctor of the San, leads the patients with his brand of healthfulness, much of which is on the mark, with a few notable exceptions like radium treatment. Kellogg was a real man and was very influential at the time. He created the breakfast cereal industry and could certainly be described as a force of nature, which Boyle brings to the fore in this book. Here’s how it starts:

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastrically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset woman in the front row.  He was having difficulty believing what he’d just heard.  As was the audience, judging from the gasp that arose after she’d raised her hand, stood shakily and demanded to know what was so sinful about a good porterhouse steak–it had done for the pioneers, hadn’t it?  And for her father and his father before him?

The Doctor pushed reflectively at the crisp white frames of his spectacles.  To all outward appearances he was a paradigm of concentration, a scientist formulating his response, but in fact he was desperately trying to summon her name-who was she, now?  He knew her, didn’t he?  That nose, those eyes… he knew them all, knew them by name, a matter of pride… and then, in a snap, it came to him: Tindermarsh.  Mrs. Violet.  Complaint, obesity.  Underlying cause, autointoxication.  Tindermarsh.  Of course.  He couldn’t help feeling a little self-congratulatory flush of pride–nearly a thousand patients and he could call up any one of them as plainly as if he had their charts spread out before him . … But enough of that–the audience was stirring, a monolithic force, one great naked psyche awaiting the hand to clothe it.  Dr. Kellogg cleared his throat.

If you want to know what he says, you’ll have to get the book. ;>)

(As seen on WritingHistoricalNovels.com)