Microbe Killer No. 2 - Part 2

The slow death of the cure-all and fast demise of its maker

After starting to explore the history of this stoneware gallon jug found in my parent’s basement, I had many more questions which require a part 2: now that I know what’s in the bottle, what’s the recipe exactly and is it harmful? Did William Radam have a wife/family and what became of them all? And most importantly, what happened to this Microbe Killer to cure any ailment?

Luckily the internet loves a good shyster story and there’s plenty of both the scanned original ads/articles from the heyday of this German emigre turned Texas nursery owner turned Microbe Killer mastermind/maniac—and all the commentary since.

Only two years after Radam patented his dubious cure-all formula in 1886, he was rich enough to move from Austin, TX to a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park. It seems his real business was the art of the con as the ubiquitous ads for these products were constant in newspapers across the country . And not in the way you might think – not people suing for damages when Aunt Bessie starting frothing over with pink drink but Radam himself going to court to shut down naysayers (a real doctor who calls him dangerous) and public decrying against jealous copycats.

“Beware of Fraudulent Imitations” says this ad/article put out the Microbe Killer team, in the face of wannabe competition. “The success of the Radam’s Microbe Killer has brought out many worthless imitations. Some of them are positively injurious, and we give warning, that the public may not be deceived. See that every jug has our trade-mark on it.”

And just in case you missed it, here’s that unmistakable trade-mark again. Which I had pegged as a man beating a skeleton, but that’s not just any skeleton. It’s the Grim Reaper himself with his scythe in pieces at his bone feet. So, Radam’s getting mad at the deception by his competition but his medicine has conquered immortality!

More from this ad, a full page of text in the (Roanake?) newspaper that could fool some folks into thinking it’s a real article with its pseudoscience jargon: 

“Contagion, Infection is created by absolute experience and scientific experiments and proofs, by the existence of minute organism or microbes. The Contagion, or microbe being particular and minute particles being irregularly scattered about in the atmosphere it is evident that the inhalation of one or more of those particles is purely a matter of chance. Yet such inhalation, no matter how healthy and strong the man or animal thus inhaling it, it will, as a matter of course be stricken down sooner or later, by the myriads of microbes that will: according to the contagious gaseous matter inhaled, breed into his system To exterminate those it has been found that liquids strongly impregnated with gases and alkali have been the most efficacious, and it is but a matter of time when a liquid, strongly impregnated with those substances will be discovered that will effectually destroy the microbes or Germs of Disease.”

Is it just me or are the good people of America about to be sold on drinking bleach? Now that we’ve impregnated enough fear here in the masses of the very air we breath, enter the cure, from someone as qualified as My Pillow guy:

Wm. Radam of Austin, TX, a florist and botanist by trade from grew up in his father’s “world-famous nurseries,” began studying microbes that caused plants to droop and die, eventually “found the true origin of the germs of disease, and by a secret inspired by Nature’s close study was as that exterminator of the dreadful scourge. Microbe—as recommended by the greatest authorities, and world famed authorities, on the subject, who all admit that to exterminate that pest and scourge requires just such a liquid, surcharged with gases, as William Radam’s Microbe Killer.”

And then the testimonials, for which he will award $1,000 should you prove any ingenuine: People who seem to be attesting to recovering from all kinds of things like a man in Galveston, TX who had a combo of “dysentery, bloody flux and internal tumors” that had left him given up for dead, when a friend suggested the Killer. His weight went from 86 lbs to 146 lbs and he is “restored to my usual good health.” Or, the man (it’s all men in this ad for some reason) in Algiers, NO, who said his son was afflicted with the “most hideous and loathsome of diseases, leprosy, and of a character most malignant” and now everyone’s invited to come see how he’s improved.

Now I’m not going to read the whole 480 pages thesis on Microbes and the Microbe Killer Radam publishes some years into the launch of this product, as something of a the longest pseudoscience marketing ad of all, but should you want to: the w whole volume is digitized. Along with a dubious before and after of the author, looking quite the same but one suggesting he’s cured, and chapters for every disease imaginable, Radam spends a good amount of time being defensive and offended claiming he’s received no complaints, and imitators are just proving his point:

“I have told how I also cured everybody who used the microbe killer in time and according to instructions, using it in sufficient quantities to purify the blood and to build up the system. Nobody can deny I have done this; nobody does deny it. My imitators are evidence in my favor, for if I had not succeeded I should not have been imitated, and they have by their conduct testified to the merits of the microbe killer. The medical press and physicians generally take such an interest in me as they never took before. They decry me as an ignorant man, one who knows nothing about medicine, or any thing but the raising of beets and cabbages, a useful thing to know, by the way, and an honorable business too. Possibly florists and nursery-men could tell the doctors a little about things that belong to their profession, and which they ought to know, for botany is not taught in their medical colleges here, although in Europe it is justly esteemed an essential part of a medical education. Then after abusing me for ignorance, they cry that I am killing people with poisons, and in the same breath they pray: ‘Oh, Heaven aid us and make these microbe killers harmless! Lord, protect our profession!” (pg. 138)

He adds that if he was killing anybody, he’d in jail. 

Advertisement in Roanoke Times, March 28, 1894 showing how just a magnifying glass can reveal the scary death particles in us and surrounding us.

Another ad, again not very differentiated from the front page articles of the newspaper around it, is this below from December 24, 1890 in the Virginia newspaper, the Staunton Spectator, adding to the list of things it can cure, “any disease that causes you anxiety or inconvenience,” and “any disease that your doctor has pronounced incurable.”

The real model comes at cost of $3 a gallon, unlike the imposters that are cheaper. 

So how does one “impregnant” liquid with gas? Like this:

There’s a great article on this on the well-titled Quakwatch.org site: https://quackwatch.org/hx/tm/10-2/

The patent revealed how he managed to ape nature’s lightning. Inside a large closed tank the inventor built an oven. Into the bottom of the tank he poured water, and into the oven he placed a mixture of chemicals: four ounces of powdered sulphur, two ounces of nitrate of soda, an ounce of black oxide of manganese, an ounce of sandalwood, half an ounce of chloride of potash. The chemicals were burned, the products of their combustion mingling with the vapor of the heated water and being absorbed by the water remaining in the tank. When the combustion was over, the water was allowed to cool. Sediment and floating particles which had spilled over from the violent burning were removed. The water was drawn off and tinted a pale pink by the addition of wine. The sovereign remedy was ready for bottling.

Such a process of manufacture was so haphazard that no two Microbe Killer batches would contain the same proportion among the ingredients. Yet on one thing all future analysts were to agree, that the lion’s share of Radam’s remedy was water. A Department of Agriculture chemist was to place the percentage at 99.381. As for the rest — what rest there was — a doctor was shortly to suggest that a product identical with a batch of the Microbe Killer which he had analyzed might be produced for less than five cents a gallon by adding to a gallon of well water about an ounce of red wine, a dram of impure muriatic (hydrochloric) acid, and four drams of impure oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid). Such was Radam’s man-made pink lightning.

So my notion that maybe at least people could get drunk on this is also a big no. A placebo at best, but at least it gets people drinking water? Maybe no one could die from this (these are only traces of corrosive poisonous acids which might irritate one’s stomach lining), but they might die from not taking other more viable medical paths. Not only does Radam quickly move his operation from TX to NY (and live in a mansion on Fifth Ave overlooking Central Park) but he supposedly eventually opens 17 factories in the states and more worldwide to meet the global demand. It seems any negative press as the medical and science community chastises him in the journals is also good press that gets him more publicity, and people meanwhile are quaffing this by the gallon (multiple times: “cures” can require 15-30 gallons!).

Radam, in talking of his competition seems to reveal the truth of his success: “The public likes to be humbugged.” 

“This city of New York abounds with men,” Radam reported (in straight-faced goose-plucking prose), “who live entirely, and live well, on the money they squeeze out of the pockets of individuals who are silly enough to trust them.” This was sad but it was true. “People should not be led away by every charlatan who jumps up before them and talks; but as long as the world lasts there will probably be fools in it, and fools are a godsend to rogues.”

Eventually there was a Food and Drug Administration and thank goodness it became problematic to make false claims:

Article in The National Library of Medicine sums up what became of this:

In the end, Radam’s extraordinary success in marketing this product not only made him rich—it also made his product an early target of efforts to monitor food and drugs. In April 1910 twelve cases of Radam’s Microbe Killer were seized, on the grounds of “false, exaggerated, and misleading” labels, and the contents were destroyed. Four years later, in July 1914, and following amendments in the Food and Drugs Act in 1912, a shipment of Radam’s Microbe Killer was seized by government agencies. After a hearing by a jury, more than 800 cartons and boxes of the Microbe Killer were destroyed. Yet advertisements for Radam’s Microbe Killer appeared even as these goods were being seized. On October 3, 1919, the Seattle Star published an advertisement from Bartell Drug Stores, which offered a No. 2 bottle of Radam’s Microbe Killer, regularly $1.00, now on sale for 83 cents.

https://onbeyondholcombe.wordpress.com/2014/06/08/346/

MALCOLM A. GOLDSTEIN clears up all the fine details for me in this great history of Radam of his dubious bottle empire. Radam did have a wife – they were both German emigrees who landed in TX — and drumroll please, Ida long outlives her husband who dies at the age of 57 in 1902 at the height of his product’s fame for curing all. Hmmm. The Radam couple has no kids since two died in childhood, so add to that Radam’s own bad health situation that had doctors threatening he would die soon, and he was very compelled to stop death itself. You would think him not at all being successful with that personally would stop things, but the company persists. Ida remains the owner but retreats to TX, letting others manage this (various names are listed as President through the years) as the profits deplete. She resurfaces in the papers when she comes back to the city to withdraw $63,000 in bonds from a NY safe and misses her train, leaving the bonds in her taxi in her hurry. Apparently a stranger hands them in at Penn Station and the package is returned her 8 months later (so in the midst of the Depression now) she must have been relieved. She dies soon after in 1931 at the age of 79. 

And the YouTube: