In the early decades of the twentieth century, as radium fever gripped scientists and entrepreneurs alike, one Philadelphia businessman joined the race for the glowing substance that promised medical miracles and industrial riches. His name was Dicran Hadjy Kabakjian—an Armenian immigrant and inventor, whose ambition outpaced the safety knowledge of the era.
Kabakjian was neither a famous physicist nor a well-funded industrialist. He was part of a smaller, largely forgotten world of independent experimenters—men who believed that with enough perseverance and chemical ingenuity, they too could produce a substance worth more than its weight in gold.
What Kabakjian did not know, and what few in his day fully understood, was that radium was a danger unlike anything that had ever been handled in small workshops or private homes. In trying to refine it, he contaminated both places so thoroughly that decades later federal surveyors would still find his walls, floors, and pipes ticking ominously on a Geiger counter.
When Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of radium in 1898, the world was dazzled by its faint green glow. Physicists and chemists everywhere scrambled to probe this strange new realm of radioactivity and search for practical uses for the element. Kabakjian was no different. With a background in physics, he quickly established himself as one of the leading American authorities on radiation and its properties.
In 1913, he developed a process for extracting radium salts from carnotite, the yellowish clay-like uranium ore mined in Colorado and Utah. His method called for crushing the ore into a fine sand and treating it with strong acids, a technique that could recover nearly 90 percent of the radium present—far more efficient than existing extraction processes. Kabakjian sold the exclusive rights to this method to the W.L. Cummings Chemical Company, where he served as their “chief radium consultant.”
In 1915, Cummings established a radium-refining facility in Lansdowne, housed in a wooden building beside the train tracks near South Union and Austin Avenues. Powerful grinding machines reduced the ore to fine sand, which workers then manually shovelled into towering two-story vats. There, the sand was subjected to a series of chemical treatments designed to coax out minute quantities of radium. The plant processed as much as two tons of carnotite ore a day, yet its yearly yield amounted to only about three grams of radium—roughly the mass of a modern penny.
While such a return might seem miserly for the effort involved, the economics of the era told a different story. A single gram of radium commanded an astonishing $100,000—well over $2 million in today’s money. And Cummings’s operation was one of only six radium-producing facilities in the entire world. The business flourished for a time, and both Cummings and Dr. Kabakjian enjoyed the profits.
But the success was short-lived. In the early 1920s, richer ores were discovered elsewhere, and despite Kabakjian’s continued refinements to the extraction process, Cummings could no longer compete. The refinery shut down for good in 1922.
Kabakjian, however, saw an opportunity in miniature. Although his method was no longer viable on an industrial scale, it remained profitable for small-batch refining. So in 1923, he set up a modest radium-processing workshop in the basement of his elegant three-story Victorian duplex, located not far from the shuttered refinery.
Kabakjian purchased ore by the truckload, which arrived at his home every few months. His two sons, Armen and Raymond, hauled the heavy sacks into the basement, where they ground the ore into sand. Even the daughters took part in the operation. Alice heated the sand until radium crystals began to form, Louise weighed the crystals and packed them into fine-gauge platinum needles, and Lillian kept the accounts. Kabakjian and his wife oversaw the entire enterprise from start to finish.
A piece of carnotite in sandstone, mined in Colorado. Credit: James St. John
The radium they produced was sold to doctors and hospitals for the rapidly growing field of cancer radiotherapy. During the Second World War, the family even supplied radium to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where it was used in industrial x-ray work to detect microscopic cracks and flaws in ship components.
By the 1940s, Kabakjian’s health began to decline, forcing him to close the family business. He died in 1945 at the age of seventy. An autopsy later revealed that he suffered from fibrosis of the lungs, caused by years of inhaling fumes from the strong acids used in his refining process.
After his death, the Kabakjian family sold their three-story house and moved to a smaller residence. The property passed to the Tallant family, who were initially unaware of Kabakjian’s long history of radium work in the basement. When Anna Tallant learned of it from neighbours, she quickly moved out, selling the house once again, this time to another unsuspecting buyer, the Kizirian family, in 1961.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pennsylvania began identifying former sites where radioactive materials had been processed, checking them for lingering contamination. Dr. Kabakjian’s name surfaced during the review, and one day investigators from the Department of Health arrived at the Kizirian home carrying Geiger counters. The family was stunned to learn what their house had once been used for, and even more alarmed when the instruments began to chatter. Radiation levels throughout the property were far beyond what could be considered safe.
The basement, where Kabakjian had conducted most of his refining work, was the worst. One basement sink emitted so much gamma radiation that inspectors refused to come within several feet of it. But the contamination was not confined to the cellar. The first-floor dining room, the front porch, the garage, and even the driveway all showed elevated readings.
State authorities ordered the Kizirians to clean up the property, but Harry Kizirian had no way to cover the estimated $10,000 cost. At the time, state and federal clean-up programs funded only military and industrial sites, not private homes. The Bureau of Radiation Protection ultimately announced that the house would have to be demolished.
Desperate, the Kizirians hired a lawyer, who persuaded a congressman to intervene. His efforts succeeded in securing a joint state–federal decontamination effort led by the U.S. Air Force. Clean-up began in 1964, and by the time the work was completed, more than 120 drums of radioactive material had been removed and shipped to a disposal facility near Buffalo, New York.
Fortunately, the Kabakjian and Kizirian families, along with others who had lived or worked in the house, were tested, and no long-term health effects were found. As part of the investigation, the bodies of Dr. and Mrs. Kabakjian were exhumed for analysis. Tests revealed that the professor’s remains contained 5.7 micrograms of radium—at the time, the highest concentration of radioactive material ever recorded in a human body.
The initial clean-up cost the state $200,000, yet even after a thorough decontamination, the house still emitted enough radiation to raise the long-term cancer risk for anyone living there, particularly the risk of lung cancer from inhaling radon gas and microscopic radium particles. The Kizirians were barred from returning, and because further remediation was impractical, the state decided the house would ultimately need to be demolished.
But demolition did not come immediately. The structure remained standing as a curious piece of local lore for nearly twenty more years. When the Environmental Protection Agency returned in the 1980s with fresh surveys, the results were alarming. A resident living in the house would have received an annual dose of roughly 1.6 rem—about ten times the accepted limit. The surrounding soil was also heavily contaminated with radium, thorium, actinium, and protactinium.
The most serious dangers came from radon gas and radium dust trapped inside the house. Once inhaled, these internal sources irradiate the body from within, posing far greater risks than external exposure.
Dismantling finally began in 1987 and concluded in 1989. The clean-up cost the government $11.6 million. Workers removed 1,430 tons of radioactive rubble to a nuclear waste site in Utah, along with an additional 4,000 tons of contaminated soil. More than 6,000 tons of clean soil were brought in to replace it, and 246 feet of municipal sewer line had to be excavated and replaced.
Following the demolition of the Kabakjian house, the EPA turned its attention to the former W.L. Cummings Chemical Company refinery on Austin Avenue. During the investigation, officials discovered that Cummings had, years earlier, disposed of waste sand containing trace amounts of radioactive material by giving it to local contractors. The sand had been mixed into mortar, stucco, plaster, and concrete—meaning that an unknown number of homes in Lansdowne and nearby communities had been built or repaired with radioactive materials containing radium, thorium, and possibly uranium.
EPA crews spent weeks driving through the neighbourhood in a van outfitted with external radiation detectors, scanning houses from the street in search of radioactive stucco. Their survey ultimately identified 21 contaminated sites. The agency repaired one house, demolished and rebuilt ten others, and permanently condemned and relocated the residents of eight more.
With these actions, the radioactive legacy that began with Dicran Hadjy Kabakjian was finally brought to an end.
Luckily, no one who had purchased contaminated concrete in the 1920s appeared to suffer serious harm. Most problems were confined to the Kabakjian home, where several individuals later developed illnesses that, while impossible to conclusively link to radiation, remain unsettlingly suggestive
- Anna Tallant, who lived in the house from 1949 to 1961, died in 1969 of breast cancer at age 54.
- Raymond Kabakjian, Dicran’s son who spent most of his youth in the house, died in 1977 of abdominal cancer at age 65.
- Raymond Kabakjian Jr., Dicran’s grandson, died in 1983 of bladder cancer at age 37.
- William Dooner, who delivered carnotite ore to the Kabakjian home for two decades, died in 1984 at age 71 from lung cancer.
References:
# The Hot House, The Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope
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