By the way, the danger from radium isn’t penetrating radiation (the author is correct, alpha particles don’t even penetrate the dead layer of your skin), it’s the fact that your bones treat radium like calcium, and lock it away for later use; alpha particles then bombard your bone marrow from one cell away. Any dust you ingest (mucus with trapped, inhaled particles usually gets swallowed) will be very unhealthy.

The salts of cobalt, cadmium and osmium produce light at different frequencies; he isn’t thinking about them for radioactivity. The first two are toxic, and the third is exorbitantly expensive (pricier than platinum!), which might be the difficulty he’s having. The first two aren’t hard to get at all: Ni-Cd batteries have metallic Cd (at least, when fully charged…), and Li-ion batteries have cobalt oxide (with varying quantities of intercalated lithium…it’s purer, again, when the battery is fully charged).

That being said, it’s amazing what people can come up with using limited resources. Interesting project, for sure.

I have a ZX80, boxed with manuals, in my computer shed. It was sent to my dad by Clive Sinclair himself when he wrote a letter to the company asking for a free one.

wonder if he’ll build a tape deck to load games onto this bad boy :D

Does anyone actually own one? ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80

3) IIRC, those salts have color
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_(color)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_pigments

The radium excites the compound they pulled from the sign, which is some sort of ‘glow-in-the-dark’ material rather than something just shiny.

1) After re-reading several times, it appears that the road sign is only a source of some luminescent compound, and doesn’t actually contain radium. The author just happened to have a vial of radium salts handy! (The vial is shown in the original article, and the contents don’t resemble the material extracted from the sign.) So where the heck do you get that? Do they just sell that kind of thing over-the-counter in Russia??
2) How does applying electricity to this paint cause it to glow brighter? It can’t make the radium *more* radioactive, can it? Or does it directly stimulate the luminescent compound – in which case, why is the radium needed at all?
3) Mentioned is the possibility of making an RGB display from what I assume are radioactive “salts of cobalt, cadmium or osmium”. But the radioactive material only charges the luminescent compound, so using a different radioactive material wouldn’t change the color; you’d need to change the luminescent compound instead. I don’t understand the need to steal road signs or obtain exotic nuclear materials, as luminescent powders are relatively cheap and freely available in a variety of colors.