The roller coaster price of radium

The cost of radium varied enormously between 1899 when it was first offered commercially and the 1960's when it was no longer used for the treatment of cancer. Moreover, from the 1960's it was viewed as a major radiation hazard which presented many difficulties, worldwide, in providing adequate radioactive waste disposal facilities. These problems effectively gave it a negative value because of the disposal costs. The peak cost of a milligram of radium was 180 USD, just before World War I. The article is completed by scientific information about the sources from radium sales literature in the early 1920's from the United Kingdom agent for the Standard Chemical Company in the USA, and in the early 1930's from the Belgian radium supplier, the Union Minicre du Haut Katanga. Such radium commercial literature is now extremely rare. (authors)