Golf legend believed radiation could heal his arm. He ended up drinking 1,400 bottles

In 1927, Eben Byers was a successful Pittsburgh businessman and former amateur golf champion who had everything going for him. The wealthy socialite won the U.S. Amateur Golf Championship in 1906 and lived a life of privilege as chairman of the Girard Iron Company. But his life took a dark turn after a simple accident during a train ride. When he fell from his sleeping berth and hurt his arm, Byers looked for relief from the pain that would not go away.

According to Wikipedia, his doctor told him to try Radithor, a medicine marketed as a health drink that promised to cure many health problems. The product was made by William J.A. Bailey, a Harvard dropout who lied about being a doctor of medicine. Radithor was simply radium mixed with triple distilled water. Each bottle had at least one microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. Bailey sold over 400,000 bottles at $1 each between 1925 and 1930, making himself rich with a profit margin of about 400 percent.

Byers became sure that the drink worked and started drinking multiple bottles every day. He believed it gave him what he called a “toned-up feeling” and even shared cases of Radithor with friends and gave some to his horse. By the time he stopped in October 1930, Byers had drunk about 1,400 bottles of the radioactive water over three years. 

The results were terrible. His teeth fell out, his jaw started falling apart, and he lost a lot of weight. When a Federal Trade Commission attorney visited him in September 1931 to get his statement, the lawyer saw something horrible. Attorney Robert Hiner Winn described it as “a more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.” Winn said that Byers’s “whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed” and that “all the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.”

How radium poisoning destroyed Byers from the inside

Radium is very similar to calcium, which means when someone swallows it, the body stores it in the bones. While radium gives off alpha radiation that has low ability to go through things and cannot pass through skin, swallowing it let the radioactive material get past this natural protection. 

The alpha radiation caused very bad damage to cells in specific areas, leading to bone cancer and tissue breakdown. A medical exam after Byers died on March 31, 1932, showed that his body still had 36 micrograms of radium in it. Medical experts say that a deadly dose can be as little as 2 micrograms stuck in the bones.

The death of Byers got a lot of media coverage and made the public more aware of the dangers of radioactive products. The Wall Street Journal later ran a headline that read “The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off.” 

His case made the Federal Trade Commission issue a cease and desist order against Bailey Radium Laboratories on December 19, 1931, stopping production of Radithor. The tragedy led to stronger powers for the Food and Drug Administration and marked the end of most radiation-based patent medicines in America.

Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin at Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh to keep the radioactive contamination contained. When his body was dug up in 1965 for scientific study, researchers found he was still very radioactive, measuring 225,000 becquerels. 

His death, along with the cases of the Radium Girls who had similar fates in watch factories, helped create modern workplace safety rules and protections against radioactive materials. The once-celebrated golf champion’s tragic end became a warning story about the dangers of products with no rules and the importance of scientific checks in public health.