I had a grandfather who dabbled in Meta-invention? making machines that made other machines. Thousands of motors. Everything was always whirring in our cellar. New materials were brought continually from the place where my grandfather worked. We must have been the only family on the block to store radium. (you never know when it might have come to the family's rescue.) But these small grey boxes, thickly lined, weren't even filled to capacity - the locks still locked and the hinges failed to bulge and loosen. Surely radium was the least of the collections.