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Taylor, Smith & Taylor (TS&T) Taylorstone Cathay Atomic Starburst pattern circa 1964, seen at yesterday’s North Star Auction preview. Not as crazy expensive as Pyrex’s Atomic Starburst, but still a neat pattern.
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Top 5 Best 16 piece dinnerware set
A 16 piece dinnerware set is perfect for any home. It serves four people. The set has dinner plates, salad plates, bowls, and mugs. You can use it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
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Secretly radioactive dinnerware
Uranium glass is steadily becoming, I think, a well-known thing. That probably dashes any hopes I had of finding some in a thrift store, it’s such neat stuff.
But when you focus so much on the uranium part, it’s easy to forget just why it’s in there in the first place! And the reason for it is why there’s dinnerware that looks completely unlike ‘standard’ uranium glass which will still happily tick under a Geiger counter. Or even an entire bathroom.
Typical uranium glass looks mostly like regular glass, with maybe a bit of a yellow or greenish tint. When you hold a UV light to it, it will glow in bright green! So take a UV light with you when thrifting; maybe you’ll find some uranium glass.
Of course, the most famous part of it is that it’s mildly radioactive. If you have a Geiger counter, it’ll gently tick to show a low amount of radioactivity.
Funnily enough, use of uranium in glass dates all the way back to Roman times: A mosaic was found with uranium-embedded glass in a Roman villa.
So why uranium? It certainly wasn’t because radiation adds flavor. A lot of food today is intentionally irradiated to sterilize it, but it doesn’t impact flavor or safety, and uranium glass is entirely too mildly radioactive to actually do anything harmful.
It’s because of the color! Uranium oxide is a lovely yellowish color, and it works into the glassmaking process nicely. Uranium glass became popular in the 1800s, hitting a peak around the 1930s (so you might hear 'Depression glass’ as including uranium glass, though it’s not all uranium).
After the 40s, uranium glass fell out of vogue because for some reason governments started restricting the supply of natural uranium. No clue why they would ever do that to our much-needed glass colorant, what other uses could they possibly have for it?
Anyways, the color properties are useful in ceramic glazes too! So there’s a line of ceramic dinnerware called Fiesta which, for many years, used uranium oxide in its glaze formula, mostly for the brilliant red color. So antique Fiesta dishes may also be slightly radioactive.
Uranium also got used in uranium tile, just basic ceramic tiles glazed with uranium oxide. That caused problems when someone tried to bring a uranium oxide-glazed toilet into Oak Ridge National Laboratory and it set off the radiation sensors.
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Tangible Traces of Railroad History
For nearly a century, the Pennsylvania Railroad was more than a transportation network — it was a living monument to American industry. Its polished rails stitched together the Great Lakes, the Alleghenies, and the Atlantic coast, carrying not just passengers and freight but a sense of national purpose. Known proudly as “The Standard Railroad of the World,” the PRR represented confidence,…
