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The Hottest Spark Plugs Were Actually Radioactive

In the middle of the 20th century, the atom was all the rage. Radiation was the shiny new solution to everything while being similarly poorly understood by the general public and a great deal of th…
Hackaday
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in reply to diana πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈπŸ¦‹

Karl Auerbach
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Karl Auerbach
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You mean that I can build the igniter for a fission bomb out of old spark plugs?

(BTW, Polonium was also used in those "Discwasher" brushes that we used to use to clean dust out of the groves of vinyl LP records.

in reply to diana πŸ³οΈβ€βš§οΈπŸ¦‹

Mark Wollschlager
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Mark Wollschlager
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according to Wikipedia:

Polonium spark plugs were marketed by Firestone from 1940 to 1953. While the amount of radiation from the plugs was minuscule and not a threat to the consumer, the benefits of such plugs quickly diminished after approximately a month because of polonium's short half-life and because buildup on the conductors would block the radiation that improved engine performance. (The premise behind the polonium spark plug, as well as Alfred Matthew Hubbard's prototype radium plug that preceded it, was that the radiation would improve ionization of the fuel in the cylinder and thus allow the motor to fire more quickly and efficiently.)[79]
[80] 79 "Radioactive spark plugs". Oak Ridge Associated Universities. 20 January 1999. Retrieved 7 October 2021.
80 Pittman, Cassandra (3 February 2017). "Polonium". The Instrumentation Center. University of Toledo. Retrieved 23 August 2018.
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