My wife is about to take a group of Girl Scouts camping and needed a propane lantern. When I went to install the wicks, a warning label informed me that the wicks were radioactive. Being a nuclear medicine tech, I had access to a Geiger counter, and brother, they weren’t kidding. Is Saddam taking his vengeance by slowly wiping out campers in this country? What gives?
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But you know what? Radioactive lantern wicks aren’t a modern threat. Properly known as thorium gas mantles, they were perfected in 1891 by Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929). Gaslights using the thorium mantle (typically a thumb-size cloth bag coated with a thorium compound) offered a big advantage: because the thorium could incandesce at extremely high temperatures without melting, they were far brighter than ordinary lamps. Soon they were being used for household illumination in gaslit cities everywhere. Gas company moguls told themselves: This will enable us to kick the electric light’s butt.
OK, doomed effort. But the thorium mantle did enable the American gas lighting industry to survive a surprisingly long time. At its peak, it sold 40 million mantles annually. Mantles were manufactured in quantity here as late as the 1940s–later in other countries. Some streets in London (and at least a few in the U.S.) are lit with gas even now.
