The Visionaries, Madmen, and Tinkerers Who Created the Future That Never Was
KIX ATOMIC "BOMB" RING
image from orau.org
Intro
As I write, the internet is abuzz with the rediscovery of a forgotten toy. The stories have been met with amazement, wonder, even anger. How could people in 1947 have sent out millions of a cereal box premium to kids, knowing that it contained deadly radioactive material?
Well, they did and they didn't. The stories are true, but the telling is half truth at best, with much left out. Yes, kids could get an Atomic “Bomb” Ring – note those quotation marks -- for 15¢ and a boxtop from a Kix cereal box. Yes, the ring had a compartment that contained a speck of Polonium-210, a truly radioactive material. No, it was not harmful and not one report of harm was reported then. No, it therefore isn't harmful today either. How in the world did the Lone Ranger get dragged into this mess? And how could a second Atomic “Bomb” Ring get offered with nobody on the internet noticing?
I have the answers. Here is really truly all of the known story of the Atomic “Bomb” Ring, as seen by postwar kids still able to be enthralled by the apparition known as the atom bomb.
NOTE: When I say all of the story, I mean all, starting from the beginning. If you’re impatient click here to skip ahead.
If You Want It, Here It Is, Come And Get It!
Seemingly getting something for nothing is probably one of the first psychological ploys humans invented. Merchants in ancient marketplaces tempted customers this way, driving bargains almost too good to be true. These were face-to-face encounters, however. It took the arrival of the confluence of capitalism and the industrial revolution to broadcast somethingness to the masses.
Wendy A. Woloson’s history of the concept is forthrightly titled Crap, with a subtitle of A History of Cheap Stuff in America. (That sounds insulting until you read that in the trade the stuff sold by the gross to be used as premiums was termed “slum.”)
Something took many guises. It might be an item lesser priced as a combo in a store, a bauble included free as part of a mail order, a prize inserted into a package, a premium to be written for accompanying a boxtop, an expensive good made affordable by collecting trading stamps, lotteries, competition prizes, or any other idea an avaricious merchandizer might conceive of. Sellers were stunned by the knowledge that adding an item of little cost and overstated value could drive sales of the true product, negating the amount spent on the addition.
Kids, with few possessions they could call their own, were the most exploitable market. Woloson:
Long before Cracker Jack began inserting miniature prizes into boxes of caramel-coated popcorn in 1912, retailers realized they could entice kids with trifling things. As early as the 1870s candy shop owners began offering free toys with purchases of even the cheapest penny candies in order to cultivate “friendships” with their young customers. …
[Kids only cared about “the possibility of possession without the cost” [said a 1909 article.]
Cereal made a natural connection with children. Parents would buy cereal almost automatically and not especially care which cereals they bought as long as the child would eat it. Competition among cereals began early, pioneered by Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in 1909, which started with a store giveaway of copies of The Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures Book whenever two boxes of the cereal were sold and soon offered it as a write-in for one thin dime. Some 2.5 million were said to have been sent out by 1912.
image from ebay.com
For whatever reasons, the idea was not followed up until 1933 when General Mills wanted to tout its recently invented Wheaties cereal, already calling itself “The Breakfast of Champions” and starring famous athletes on the boxes. The company ingeniously, if somewhat belatedly, tied in to two extremely popular mediums: radio and comic strips. Percy Crosby’s Skippy, featuring the boy in the title, had been a national hit for a decade and spawned a 1931 talkie of the same name, making Jackie Coogan a child star for the ages. In 1932, General Mills sponsored a children’s radio serial, also named Skippy, and contemporary ads reference the radio show rather than the movie. (The lag is still somewhat of a mystery, and some sites online assign the cards to the more logical 1931. However, every collectible guide I looked at confirms the 1933 date.) Twelve different baseball card-like images of Skippy, many of them showing him playing sports, including baseball, could be found in packages of Wheaties. Collect them all.
Premium rings appear a year earlier, the first being the Lone Wolf Tribe ring. Lone Wolf Tribe was an incredibly obscure children’s program, sponsored by Wrigley’s Gum from 1931-1933. No episodes are known to exist, apparently. The show “offered dramatized versions of the American Indian way of life told by radio host Chief Wolf Paw.” Despite its brief appearance, more than a dozen premiums were offered, from books to badges and this now historic sterling silver ring. The ring was not cheap crap. It cost a fabulous 35 “wampum” – empty packs of gum. With gum costing a nickel even during the Depression, 35 packs required either $1.75 or some serious scrounging.
For the next decade, radio shows aimed at kids made rings a standard feature, prompting listeners to prove they used the sponsor’s products, whether, gum, candy, or cereal, by sending in tangible evidence of purchase, sometimes along with money. Collectibles today include rings across genres, including shows about Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, western hero Tom Mix, animal expert Frank Buck, FBI agent Melvin Purvis, Superman, modern western Sky King, and even pulp characters like Green Hornet and The Shadow.
At Last: Enter the Kix Atomic “Bomb” Ring
Image by Todd Coopee, www.globaltoysnews.com
The bomb burst upon the world in hundreds of color ads included in Sunday comic sections in newspapers big and small on January 19, 1947 and for the next two Sundays.
That’s not the more famous one at the top of the page, the one with the comic strip embedded, which didn’t appear until February 9, 1947 and continued two weeks after that.
(Technically – I said all the history – the first mentions I can find were small parts of the Kix ads in January 5, 1947 comic sections, shown cropped from an original below. The ads pictured the Kix box that displayed the ring but sent kids to stores for details rather than including an entry box for name and address. Hake states that "a Kix box dated 1946 with Atomic Bomb ring offer is known" but admits "most distribution began January 1947.")
National ads continued until March 30 with local mentions by smaller stores touting the product in-house appearing until May 22. The trail fades after that.
General Mills, or their ad agency, went all out to grab eyeballs with the January 19 ad. Any kid leafing through the comics section that day would be transfixed by the sight of an Atomic "Bomb" Ring seemingly bursting from the flat page.
Under the Awesome! Amazing! Atomic! headline is hype that is somehow even more awesome and amazing.
It’s super! It’s stupendous! It’s a seething scientific sensation! ACTUAL ATOMS – splitting like crazy inside this ring. And you can see wild luminous atomic effects! It’s terrific!
Inside the “gleaming aluminum shell” was a “sealed atom chamber in warhead.” Looking into the lens is not dangerous though, it’s “perfectly safe. Atomic materials in Atom Chamber are harmless.”
Note that instead of a boxtop, the ad asks for the “word Kix cut from box.” A mistake, perhaps? The Kix logo was possibly too big for a standard envelope and harder to cut out than the lid. In any event, the next ad backtracked and asked for the more standard boxtop. The screaming hype was replaced by calmer descriptive prose. The comic strip… I’ll come back to that in a bit because it’s vitally important to telling the complete history.
Though the "science" is obviously fake to modern eyes, it’s not clear if even most adults in 1947 would understand that atoms were not being split inside a toy. Atomic power had been a national topic for less than two years. The intricacies of splitting atoms were no longer classified government secrets but unquestioningly involved more than basic high school science. Moreover, years of amazing scientific discoveries and their futuristic aspects, lovingly detailed in newspaper Sunday supplements as well as science fiction in pulp magazines, movie serials, radio shows, and comic strips, had assured the population that advances came quickly and easily. After the war’s introduction of rockets, jets, radar, and atomic bombs, what couldn’t be true in the modern world?
A side jaunt into real science: the hidden spinthariscope
Reality was far more prosaic. Inside the casing of the “bomb” lurked nothing more than a spinthariscope.
I know. If I had ever heard of one I’ve long forgotten its existence. The definition of a spinthariscope “is a device for observing individual nuclear disintegrations caused by the interaction of ionizing radiation with a phosphor or scintillator.” Radioactive elements disintegrate naturally over time by shedding particles, either alpha particles (two protons plus two neutrons) or beta particles (in which a neutron turns into a proton and emits electrons). The change in proton number turns it into a different element, making the transition period observable. Uranium-235, the much-talked about core of the atomic bomb, sheds alpha particles. Any individual atom does so randomly but the whole, remarkably, does so at a statistically calculable rate, known as the half-life. In the case of Uranium-235, the half-life is the time it takes for half a sample to emit alpha particles, thereby changing them into atoms of the element thorium, part of a longer process that eventually produces stable, non-radioactive lead.
Radioactivity is not quite the same as splitting atoms. The first is built into the element; the latter must be induced. Finding a way to send neutron “bullets” into an atom to split it into two smaller atoms while releasing much energy in the process was the discovery that led to the atomic bomb.
A spinthariscope developed from a discovery by famed physicist William Crookes, who showed that the alpha particles emitted by a radioactive element could cause flashes when they interacted with that “phosphor or scintillator,” adding energy that coursed out in the form of photons of light. Individual alpha particles are low-powered, easily stopped by a mere sheet of paper. What’s interesting is that the resulting light from this tiny source could be visible, at least in a darkened room. Spinthariscope flashing can easily be found online. Here's a short clip that is mesmerizing.
Whoever made the Atomic “Bomb” Ring used polonium as the source of radioactivity. Polonium-210 is much more active than Uranium-235, having a half-life of 138 days rather than 700,000,000 years. (Polonium-210 converts directly into stable, nonradioactive lead and so loses potency quickly over time.) The tiniest speck of polonium would generate loads of alpha particles and flashes. (Satellites sometimes use polonium as a source of concentrated energy.) The speck inside the ring was tiny indeed. All knowledgeable sources agree that it posed no potential harm to anyone at the time or later. (Unless, possibly, if the ring were ground up and swallowed, and maybe not even then.) I can find no information concerning where the manufacturer obtained the polonium, although it apparently was the best source available in 1947 for the purpose. Spinthariscopes were widely known in the scientific community so designing one merely adapted a current commodity.
When it arrived, kids could adjust the brass ring to the size of their finger and just flash it about. More adventurous children surely took the ring apart to look for the secret compartment. They may have overlooked the obvious. The secret compartment was nothing other the red plastic tail-finned rear of the "bomb". Very little larger than a speck of polonium could be hidden in there when two halves were put together. The front half of the "bomb" consisted of solid transparent plastic infused with polonium and a sheet of phosphors covering the open end.
image from Hakes.com
HERE'S HOW RING WORKS
1. Take ring into dark room or closet. Close door so that no light can enter.
2. Wait until pupils of eyes dilate -- this may take from 2 to 10 minutes. Best and quickest results are obtained at night.
3. Twist red tail-fin on ring until it slides off "bomb".
4. Hold ring close to your eyes. Look into Observation Lens which seals the atom chamber.
5. Keep your eye glued to Observation Lens. As soon as your eye becomes accustomed to the dark you'll see the thrilling spectacle of atomic energy in action.
The theory was sound and the practice should have been. The fault lay in the instructions, which called for following a five-step process and the patience of a fly fisherman. Exactly the qualities exhibited by a seven-year-old feverishly getting their tiny paws on the exciting prize newly arrived in the mail. Most of the decades-after memories I found from now oldsters lamented that the spectacle promised was a total dud. As always the promise was far shinier than the reality.
America was awash in radio promotions in the 1940s. Kix itself issued a brass Pilot Ring with a slide-off secret compartment as recently as 1945. Yet an Atomic “Bomb” Ring sent off tingles that were irresistible. Kids responded as if summoned by a giant cereal box Pied Piper. A June article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune revealed that “Orders already have exceeded 3,000,000.” A syndicated Associated Press article in October 1948 gave a final figure of “more than 3,500,000.”
Adults showed they were just as vulnerable to the Ring's allure and implications. (See The Barrys strip below.) The Ring burst onto the scene a few mere months after the House Un-American Activities Committee had generated a full year of headlines investigating a supposed Soviet atomic bomb ring. True, the Committee found zero evidence of any such ring. Evidence schmidence. Then and now, what felt true must be true. Given normal paranoia, amplified by numerous fictional depictions, no doubt few people in the country believed in the absence of organized spies. Atomic Bomb Ring would have had more impact than any other three-word phrase at that moment. Adults had to acknowledge the commotion, albeit with a tinge of humor, as in this column entry by Sylvia Strum Bremer in the February 26, 1947, Davenport [IA] Daily Times.
My favorite is this extremely tongue-in-cheek article that appeared in The Daily Worker on July 26, 1947. The Daily Worker was the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of America. Author Ted Tinsley surely was playing off the lack of evidence for Soviet spies when he promised to let his secrets out slowly for the next ten years, ring by ring. The irony deliciously deepens when you learn that the very leftist Tinsley was then and for the rest of his career employed by the Veterans Administration, where he wrote speeches for General Omar Bradley and radio jokes for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, among normal PR work.
Did I Miss Something? Where's the Lone Ranger?
If you’ve been paying as obsessive attention to those contemporary reports as I uncontrollably have, you might have noticed one omission so wild it well deserves the adjective “glaring.” The Lone Ranger is not referenced once. Not anywhere, by anyone, at any time in the 1940s that I can find. Why then does every modern citation refer to the "Lone Ranger Atomic “Bomb” Ring"?
Icon of western icons, the Lone Ranger. Although no successful media adaptations have appeared for more than half a century, few older adults today could ever hear the trumpets’ fanfare in Rossini’s 1829’s William Tell Overture without instantly thinking of the Lone Ranger, thanks to its use as the opening theme in the radio and television series. (Some savvy music director no doubt picked this, the fourth part of the Overture, because it is in musical terms a galop, named after the horse’s pounding hooves when racing in a gallop and used for a then fashionable fast dance, the ancestor to both the polka and can-can.) “Hi-yo, Silver, away!”, “Who was that masked man?”, and his silver bullet logo were known to all ages.
image from LiveAuctioneers.com
The character was created for a local radio show in 1933, which almost instantly started the promotional machine by sending out publicity photos of the character. The show quickly gained popularity and picked up its first sponsor later that year: Silvercup Bread (coincidence or canny marketing?). The local station, Detroit's WXYZ, served as one of the founders of the Mutual Broadcasting System network. As the show went to larger and larger audiences, the pace of premium offers increased exponentially. Ted Hake's Official Price Guide to Pop Culture Memorabilia lists 180 items through 1940.
The show moved to NBC’s Blue network starting in 1942, shortly after General Mills became its sponsor, pushing its Cheerios, Wheaties, and Kix cereals. The first cereal box tie-in, Hake's #181, appeared in 1941, a Kix "Name Silver's Son" contest poster. Unfortunately for kids, the number of premiums diminished because of the war. They still had a chance to obtain ring after ring. From 1941-1946, they were tempted with an Army Insignia Secret Compartment Ring, a Flashlight Ring, a Meteorite Ring, a National Defenders Look-Around Brass Ring, a “USN” Navy Photo Ring, a Weather Forecasting Ring, and more. And then came Hake's #240.
Back we go to that comic strip in the February 9, 1947 ad at top.
Four panels - not including the first and last text panels - tell the story of how “Tommy Thwarted the Enemy Agents”. Tommy’s unnamed father, apparently a scientist, urgently needs to get his new “top-secret atomic formula” to General Vanhattan. He takes the obvious course and hides the formula in the secret message compartment of Tommy’s Kix Atomic “Bomb” Ring and sends him off on foot through the night. Two thugs at “enemy headquarters” somehow know about Tommy’s part in this plan – someone’s a traitor! – and pounce. Fortunately they merely accost the preteen Tommy rather than shooting him dead in the street and the cops nab them before he can be kidnapped or tortured. Whew! What luck! And what luck that Kix has rings with secret compartments that nobody in the country except those who read their national advertising could be aware of.
Bilge aimed at juveniles, to be sure. Heroic kid sidekicks thrived in 1940s popular culture, put there partially for audience identification, partially for the hero to have someone to talk to, and partially to be kidnapped regularly and add urgency to the plot. Even the Lone Ranger had a kid sidekick introduced in 1942, his nephew Dan Reid, Jr.
Speaking of the Lone Ranger, no possible calls to coincidence could account for the similarity of the Kix comic strip to the plot of a four-part serial just concluded on the radio show.
The Lone Ranger was a 30-minute broadcast three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The four shows therefore spanned a week, from Wednesday January 15, 1947 to Wednesday January 22, 1947. No titles were announced at the time, but modern lists have those details. All are findable on Youtube.
* 01/15/1947 - From Outer Space
* 01/17/1947 - The Butterfield Stage
* 01/20,1947 - The Silver Bullet
* 01/22/1947 - Rays of the Sun
The plot for the serial involved ore from a mysterious meteorite – from the constellation Andromeda! -- that had been found in California. No references to atomics could be made in a supposed 19th century setting, but the ore contained a new element that could produce tremendous energy. The last episode's title, "Rays of the Sun," contained dialog that any knowledgeable adult would interpret as a reference to the sun's fusion power, already being talked about by scientists and, of course, Buck Rogers (where the good Dr. Huer is apparently reversing the polarity).
Wichita Herald, June 23, 1946
The government needed to ship the ore to St. Louis to be examined by scientists but two previous attempts had been intercepted and stolen. Someone’s a traitor! Therefore they brought in the Lone Ranger to guard a third shipment. An identifying code had, in addition, been hidden in … a hollow compartment attached to a ring. Spoiler. The good guys win.
With Kix the current sponsor of the radio show, the similarity is beyond doubt. All that’s unclear is why Kix didn’t alert listeners to the programs in the first set of ads that appeared before the serial started. Or the second set that appeared before the final two episodes. Surely arrangements could have been made to coordinate the show and the ads; sponsors had almost complete control over programs.
Kix didn't have to worry about the audience not getting the message. The promotion succeeded beyond anything they could have imagined. Months passed with orders still flooding in. Nevertheless, in the world of promotional cereal boxes, like those of daily comic strips and radio shows, the grind never stopped. Kix boxes merely went on to the next promotion. In 1948, a series of twelve boxes featured cut-outs that could be put together to create three-dimension versions of various animals, including Baldy the Regal Eagle. This is what writers refer to as "bathos".
Wait, There’s More!
Various sources give a variety of dates for the end date of the promotion but I can’t find any evidence that Kix or stores continued it after May 1947. That the Associated Press gave it a mention in 1948 indicates that General Mills continued to honor submissions for another year. So does a March 25, 1948 daily comic strip, The Berrys.
Yet the production run of the Atomic “Bomb” Ring must have been prodigious to fulfill those millions of seemingly neverending orders. Did the manufacturer overproduce without an understanding that the need would swiftly decline after the newspaper ads stopped goosing demand? Or did they see an opportunity to squeeze more money out the public?
For there was an aftermath, one that appears never to have cited in all the decades since. An open secret, a resissue of the Atomic “Bomb” Ring began in 1949 totally removed from either General Mills or the Lone Ranger. Advertised in dozens of newspapers, an Atomic “Bomb” Ring (still with quotes embedded) pops out of any search for the year 1949. Why it remained buried for so long is another mystery among the many in the history of the ring, but it is hidden no longer.
David Platt's column in the May 1, 1949 New York Daily World was supposed to be about Hollywood, but contained a weird insert paragraph.
Speaking of phony Americanism, the Blevins Popcorn Company in Nashville, Tenn. is marketing a new popcorn box with an "atomic bomb ring." They're advertising this new corn as a "nationally-tested, self liquidating premium for children containing an adjustable ring with harmless radioactive materials." Atombombing is such fun!
The Blevins Popcorn Company of Nashville is not a name to compare with General Mills. Started in 1945 by food broker James Blevins to market a better, fluffier popcorn to movie theaters, the company thrived as a regional supplier. Within a couple of years Blevins had devised a home ready-to-pop version notably marketed as Pops-Rite.
Platt somehow got hold of advance promotion, because the first ad I can find didn't appear until June 28, 1949. Here’s a slightly sharper image from a later ad in September of that year.
Nashville Banner, September 21, 1949
The condensed wording managed to convey the same tantalizing appear as the lengthy General Mills copy.
It’s a super sensation!
HAS A SECRET MESSAGE
COMPARTMENT and Concealed
OBSERVATION LENS!
And …
you’ll see
REAL ATOMS
splitting
like mad!
The final ad in the database appeared on December 29. All of them appeared in Tennessee and points south. Nothing from 1950 pops up, pun intended, so the promotion presumably exhausted the supply by Christmas orders. Nor do any later memories about the Ring mention Blevins or popcorn or anything disconnected from cereal boxes. This should have been the Ring's fate. Hake lists a total of 388 Lone Ranger items through 2003. How many of the others are still being talked about today?
The Cyclic Universe
One theory about the universe postulates that it appeared as a tiny object, swelled to encompass everything, and will eventually shrink to nothingness before expanding again.
For decades after Blevins stopped its ads, mentions of the Atomic "Bomb" Ring fell into a void of near nothingness, punctuated only by an occasional mention in somebody's nostalgic reveries.
Only specialist collectibles handbooks and price guides like Hake's provided the rare sighting, a line touting the ring among a thousand pages of other lost treasures, once tossable crap and now valuable exactly for their rarity.
One fleeting -- and frankly exasperating -- exception appeared in 2018, again in newspaper comic pages. Tom Batiuk created the strip Funky Winkerbean (either the best or the worst title in comic strip history, he joked) in 1972 and eventually placed it in 400 newspapers. Over time his world changed from making fun of contemporary teenagers to a broader look at adults. He had a deep love for comics and comic strips and turned some of his characters into comics writers. A couple of them were contacted in March 2018 by super-rich comics collector Chester Hagglemore to revive his favorite Golden Age comics company Batom (Bat-Tom, get it?) and rename it Atomic Comics. (Batiuk apparently changed the name to Atomik Komix over time but I’m sticking to 2018.)
Funky Winkerbean, March 17, 2018
The glacial pace of daily comic strips meant that readers had to wait six months before the first comic appeared, starring Atomic Ape. It didn’t sell. Chester always has a scheme. Turns out he had bought “several boxes” of Atomic “Bomb” Rings on “Fleabay.” Perfect for handing out as promotions for Atomic Ape.
After sending out dozens of rings, one of the in-strip writers finally thinks to check the internet.
Funky Winkerbean, October 3, 2018
Funky Winkerbean, October 4, 2018
The dialogue implies that not only did the Ring contain deadly radioactive material but that it still did 2018.
As I said above, the rings were harmless in 1947 and losing polonium at a rate of half every 138 days. That’s about 189 halvings. That’s 57 zeros before the first number appears, if I can trust Google math. Small is the understatement of all understatements. The odds are unbelievably large that literally every last atom of polonium had disappeared decades before.
This was 2018. The truth about the Atomic “Bomb” Ring and the half-lives of polonium were readily available at the time, the proverbial few clicks away for Batiuk. Sending this scaremongering and scientifically ludicrous information out to a national audience was utterly irresponsible. Some readers had to have been frightened about a harmless vintage toy they happened to have in their possession.
Batiuk retired Funky Winkerbean in 2022 and is still alive and active online. I can’t find any mention of his retracting this claim.
Tune In Next Time
Wendy A. Woloson actually mentioned the Atomic “Bomb” Ring in Crap (2020) and followed it with this apt sentence: “These efforts to ‘bribe’ children, in the words of one contemporary marketing professional, resulted in ‘many commercially beneficial things’.” Today the benefits mostly go to posters on eBay and Etsy who sell the rings for as much as $200.
Every bit of popular cultural detritus eventually filters down to Reddit. The ring gets hits from 2023, but it really took off this year. Subreddit posters from r/toys to r/elementcollection to r/vintagetoys to r/radiation to r/todayilearned and many more (no, r/lotr, Tolkien did not intend the One Ring to represent… oh, never mind; somebody already said it) raised their brows and rolled their eyes at what marketing had wrought in the early atomic era. The popularity of Reddit means that the Atomic “Bomb” Ring is going through another series of half lives. The universe of mentions is slowly shrinking again, until the next revived explosion of interest.
Hi-yo, Polonium, away!
October 10, 2025