I on the other hand want to orient myself in the night, to calculate my desperation when sleep will not come. In the past I have made do with a phone, but a phone is not a watch or a clock; it just does a poor impression of both. My first thought to solve this privileged problem was a Timex with Indiglo, that electroluminescent staple of the 90s.
But Timex three-handers are notoriously loud tickers, so that was out. Then I thought of tritium. Watches with tritium gas-filled tubes glow all night, every night, for a decade or two.
Eventually I found this traser sic P Humans are overachievers. Even before the first nuclear bomb exploded, clever primates were thinking about making something far more powerful.
Fission only gets you so far, it turns out; if you really want to make a bang, fusion is the way to go. And tritium, which is just hydrogen with two extra neutrons, makes great fusion fuel. Mostly fused hydrogen at work here, yielding a 50 megaton kaboom. This image is apparently a still from a PR video the Russian atomic agency released in , I guess trying to remind people of the good old days.
Back when radioactivity was the exciting future, we figured out that if you mix radium, which has a half-life of 1, years and blasts out ionizing gamma radiation as it decays, with a phosphorescent compound, you could make glowing paint. What fun! People put it on watches and clocks, on their faces and lips and finger nails. Radium was so hot that it quickly cooked off the phosphorescent component of the paint, leaving us with the dead but now-desirable yellow-beige pigment that is recreated on vintage-inspired watches with modern, safe, boring lume.
