Past to Present: March 2025
Hello!
We live in a strange time when a few very wealthy people hold power over every corner of the internet, and I have spent the last month trying to carve out a space where it isn’t part of the deal to help fund them while they whip up hatred and intolerance so have deleted my accounts on various platforms. Some were easy to do and some are proving harder - google am looking at you!
Which is a long winded way of saying hello from the new home of my newsletter. It is going to take a little bit of time to work out how to make things pretty but lets dive in…
In this months newsletter you will find -
History Business
Coming up
Article: The History of Uranium Glass
Cocktail of the month
History Business
It’s been quite a month all round, from moving to Buttondown for the newsletter, to trying out new email clients (Canary Mail- good interface but my goodness their chat bot is thrown in your face - hard pass), new office suites (LibreOffice -so far, so good) and really giving BlueSky a go (love it!). But there is one thing have really been struggling to replicate which is building up a community - this is something so important to me as a freelance historian. Not being able to find anything that fitted the bill I created my own space on Discord. This is going to be an online place for historians to chat, vent, share and network and if you would like more information please do email me at hello@lucyjanesantos.com
I also had the thrill this month of seeing the end result of a project that has been in the works for a few years. As part of Women’s Voices: A Celebration at The Playground Theatre in London there was a showing of the documentary Obsessed With Light which is all about the dancer Loie Fuller, who I have written about quite a lot over the years (am obsessed!)
Obsessed With Light is absolutely fascinating and highly recommend you catch it if you can.
Coming up
March 18th: Webinar for the New York Adventure Club
The London Underground: History of the World’s Oldest Transit System
March 20th: In person event
"What think you, Your Majesty?.” Quacks, Medical Radium and Harwell ATOM Festival
March 25th: Webinar for the New York Adventure Club
If Looks Could Kill: Dangerous Beauty Throughout the Ages
30th March: In person event for the Art Deco Society UK
The Deco Echo: From total style to out of style and back again
April 1st: Webinar for the New York Adventure Club
Miracle or Menace? The Early History of Cocaine
April 8th: Webinar for the New York Adventure Club
The Radium Era: Rise and Demise of Radioactive Quackery
Article: A History of Uranium Glass
In September 1789 Martin Heinrich Klaproth, a lecturer in chemistry from Germany who specialised in the analysis of minerals, extracted a black powder from a sample of pitchblende and, since his experiments showed that it was chemically indivisible (i.e. he couldn’t separate anything else from the sample), he announced that he had found a new element. As Klaproth wrote: ‘Up till now seventeen individual metals have been recognised. I now propose to increase this number by adding a new one.’ This he named ‘uranium’ after Uranus, the most recent planet to have been discovered.
Of course, once something new has been discovered there is often a race to monetise the substance. And uranium had some unique properties that meant it was easily and quickly utilised in all manner of things. However, it’s greatest use was really in the ceramic and glass industries with a number of companies exploring the use of uranium glass in the second quarter of the nineteenth century who found a way of making beautifully coloured glass by adding the salts of uranium to the molten glass mixture.
Read more over on the Museum of Radium
Cocktail of the Month
My cocktail of the month will be the Aviation, the recipe for which was first found in print in 1916 but likely dates to much earlier than that. Join me on BlueSky on the 5th April for a deep dive into this blue (or purple depending on ingredients) wonder!
And the best cocktail I drank over the last few weeks was an amazing Martini at Claridge’s. It was perfectly dry but - much more importantly - they keep the gin in the freezer so is ice cold. It really makes a huge difference.
Speak soon!
My books
Chain Reactions: The Hopeful History of Uranium
Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium
Nobody’s Perfect: Behind the scenes of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (Forthcoming, 2026)