Hello from my part. I thought I can be more formal today and have the jacket but it's

way too warm so I'll leave it next to me.

Thanks for coming. I have been working on history of women in science and gender in science

for many years. So today I consider this talk as a major gift. It's a great honor to be here.

So many many thanks to the office for diversity and the quality of FAU. Many thanks to Professor

Kiers and the whole president for the invitation. And many thanks to all of you who are here today

although it's a very nice afternoon instead of enjoying it outside and having beers outside

at the back. So many many thanks. I said used by radio. How radio activity entered the

US bedroom. I chose this this tightly specifically to be a seductive tightly and get you here.

So I'm not sure whether I'm going to fulfill the promise but indeed the tightly and the

talk is about how radio and radio activity influenced the sexual lives and the gender identities

of the Americans during the early part of the 20th century. Let me start with this picture.

So some time years ago I cannot even want to think how many years ago. I was looking through

websites and looking about radiation and radium. And so I studied upon this picture that you

see here. This is a photo album, a collection of photographs from the standard chemical company.

A company that was the most important radium industry in the US throughout the very first

half of the 20th century. The photo album comes from probably 1915, 1920. This is the time

period of the pictures that you can someone could see inside. The photographs together with

many many other radio active objects and artifacts belong to the collection of let me see

the exact name, health physics, historical collection of the Orchids associated universities

and the person that collected everything and it's very important to thank him and acknowledge

his research here is Paul Frang. He's a curator, he's a health physicist at Orchids. And already

in the 80s he started collecting radioactive objects and artifacts creating this collection.

He documented extensively all of these documents and as a historian of science, as a historian

of radio activity, I personally thank him for doing so because he actually preserved the

most important part of the US history in radio activity. When I was looking through the

photographs, I stopped on this one. I thought this is a very weird photograph, something

that attracted my interest and the reason is because you can see only many in this picture

sitting around in the beginning, I wasn't aware of what exactly this is and the original

caption was interior view, standard radio memoratorium, patience being treated. Nothing

seems actually that this is the case, that all these people are treated because they are

sitting around very casually, very comfortably, they are reading, they are sitting around

one across the other and the only thing that someone could notice, I'm not sure whether

it's obvious. In the middle there is a glass bottle with a faucet actually, the big one

and then smaller bottles around laying on the table. I leave it there. And then as I was

looking for more material, I read in New York Times an article that was published in 1914,

it was reporting about a meeting where William Cameron, a physician who was the director

of the medical clinic of the standard chemical company, the company that the album belongs

to, he said at that meeting that the Pittsburgh-Freek clinic, at the Pittsburgh-Freek clinic,

there is an emanatorium in which the patients, brief air, filled with radio memorination,

passed through water. Another method is that of bathing in modern heavy charge with radio

memorization. So the whole thing was that these guys were sitting around drinking radio-active

water. It was not unusual. The rest of the news was not unusual and it started not in the

US, but it started in Berlin, it started in Austria, it started in Europe. Scientists,

such as Rutherford, Stefan Mayer and other important physicists of that period, concluded

based on the research that radio-memanations, what is a radio-memanation, is the gas that

radium emits and today we call this radon. So the QDCs actually termed this as radio-memanation

and these were affecting these emanations, were affecting the human health. Physicians

of the time found out and they were not just a few or unnoticeable, but some important

physicians at this time thought that radio-memanations can affect and can cure the sexual