In addition to its use in nuclear reactors and weapon manufacturing, uranium has some unusual applications ranging from dentures to medical treatments.
In the United States in the late 1880s, the La Belle glass company developed a type of glass called Ivory or Eggshell by increasing the proportion of uranium oxide, creating a more opaque effect. Heat-sensitive chemicals such as gold were added to the mixture and then re-fired during production, resulting in a color transition effect from transparent gold to milky white at the edges. Despite a variety of shades, the gold-green effect became the most popular choice among buyers. Many other companies also used uranium to color glass during this period, competing to create new colors and color transition effects.
Uranium creates fluorescence in glassware under ultraviolet light. (Photo: James L. Amos).
However, one of the strangest uses of uranium was reported in 1847, when Scientific American noted that uranium, along with platinum, titanium, and cobalt, could be used as colorants for dentures made from feldspar and quartz. By adding uranium at the final stage of glass production, just before firing, the dentures would exhibit a golden-orange glow. This was a favored effect, even though historically, dentures were typically made from ivory, gold, silver, mother-of-pearl, and covered in copper. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this type of denture was replaced by more natural-looking porcelain teeth.
Uranium oxide, along with a small amount of other metal compounds, was also considered an important medicinal remedy. This hypothesis has a long history dating back to Paracelsus, a Swiss-German physician, botanist, and alchemist known for using toxic minerals and metals in medical treatments. Regarded as the father of toxicology, Paracelsus believed that good health was a balance of four “essential humors” in the human body: blood, phlegm, tears, and bile. If these were out of balance, illness would ensue. In the 16th century, Paracelsus posited that the way to treat illness was through “like cures like,” as long as the appropriate dosages were controlled to mitigate harmful effects.
Some researchers claimed they could use uranium to produce specific symptoms, thus suggesting it might be useful in treating diseases. For instance, nephritis is a serious complication of diabetes, and researcher C. Le Conte observed that “sugar in the urine of dogs was poisoned by small amounts of uranium nitrate.”
Samuel West, a physician at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, reinforced the potential of using uranium for kidney treatment when he published clinical trial results involving uranium in the British Medical Journal in 1895 and 1896. West administered uranium salts dissolved in water to 8 patients after meals. Initially, he started them on 1-2 grains of salt and gradually increased it until they consumed 20 grains 2-3 times a day. West noted the disappearance of glycosuria, or glucose in the urine, with many patients showing improvement in symptoms. However, some trial participants experienced gastrointestinal issues. When treatment was discontinued, the symptoms returned immediately.
Although it was impossible to conclusively determine the results of such experiments, uranium continued to be used in medicine for various diseases.
