Kip wrote:I keep everything.......bad habit, but I love it.

It was a decent watch, still ran, but very hot. My geiger counter went crazy near the radium dial and my wife wanted the radioactivity out of our house.

28800bph wrote: My geiger counter went crazy

Radium was formerly used in self-luminous paints for watches, nuclear panels, aircraft switches, clocks, and instrument dials. A typical self-luminous watch that uses radium paint contains around 1 microgram of radium.

In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed by five dying "Radium Girl" dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters' exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer. This is because radium is treated as calcium by the body, and deposited in the bones, where radioactivity degrades marrow and can mutate bone cells.
During the litigation, it was determined that company scientists and management had taken considerable precautions to protect themselves from the effects of radiation, yet had not seen fit to protect their employees. Worse, for several years the companies had attempted to cover up the effects and avoid liability by insisting that the Radium Girls were instead suffering from syphilis. This complete disregard for employee welfare had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.