29 points

The third sentence makes it clear it’s fake

  • Geiger counters aren’t rhythmic, they’re random
  • How would the audience know the beat matches the counter?
  • Random music doesn’t sound good, the audience would be more excited for good music

Disappointed in the people who believed this.

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8 points

And even if it worked, you wouldn’t need a radiation source more dangerous than a banana to make a geiger counter go click enough to play along.

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9 points

Well… This is jazz… I’m skeptic as well, but what if it was some sort of experimental modern jazz where the musicians would try to predict the next click?

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5 points

You can’t predict the next click, that’s what random means. This would never have gotten far enough to appear in front of an audience. They would have tried it at rehearsal and realised it was impossible.

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2 points

It would be Musical Roulette essentially

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2 points

The Geiger counter can be pre recorded, creating the illusion it was life, yet allowing the composition to be crafted around it

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7 points

It does have a rate though. Each click is random, but overall they’re at a predictable rate. Still, it wouldn’t be useful for music really. I could see someone trying to make it happen though. I’ve heard of dumber things.

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58 points

I believed this was real until I searched for it 😂 To be fair to my own credulity, Plutonium Jazz would not be the most insane thing people did with radioactive materials back then. The “medicines” alone make Plutonium Jazz sound pretty tame.

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1 point

Live performances at Chernobl when?!

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10 points

If there were hazardous levels of radiation, the clicks would be a squeal, you wouldn’t be able to match a rhythm to it

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4 points

Right. If you were to attempt something like this, you’d be better off with something like a chunk of granite than plutonium.

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140 points

I believed it. Sadly it’s not real: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/plutonium-jazz

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8 points

Sadly??

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39 points

It seems believable given the story of the “Radium Girls”, workers who painted radioactive paint on watch dials to make them glow. They’d lick the tips of the brushes when they got too frayed… which eventually led to cancer.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/style/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html#:~:text=Women painting alarm clock faces,brush and ingesting radioactive radium.

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8 points

To be fair, the factory management knew that it was dangerous but didn’t tell the workers and encouraged them to lick the brush.

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17 points

Whoa. Eating radioactive material isn’t great at all.

From a different time, too: An X-Ray shoe fitter

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4 points
*

Thanks, Woke.

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10 points

A department store still had one of these when I was a kid, but it wasn’t used. It was, however, in occasional use when my brother was very little in the early 80s. My mom has pictures of him with his foot in it.

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2 points
Deleted by creator
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6 points

Phew.

I came to the comments for this hope.

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