Aug. 19, 2010 - One of the most successful of the frontier quacks, at least from a commercial standpoint, was William Radam, a Prussian immigrant who migrated to Texas, in 1872 and invented a concoction he called the Microbe Killer.
Radam was a gardener and he established a small nursery on 30 acres of land near Austin. He quietly tended his gardens and ran his modest business for the better part of 20 years before he came down with malaria. The drugs that doctors gave him did little ease his symptoms, and he soon added rheumatism and sciatica to his list of complaints. Two of his children died during this time, and Radam found himself a sick and broken-hearted man.
Determined to cure himself, Radam read medical journals in search of a treatment that might restore him to health. An article about microbes triggered a connection in his mind between the plants he had tended most of his life and the diseases that were robbing him of vitality.
Radam decided to kill the diseases in his body the same way he attacked the bugs that bedeviled his plants. Disease, he decided, is fermentation and fermentation without microbes cannot occur. Using his gardening books for reference, he began working on a cure for not only his diseases, but those of mankind. He felt that "if I could discover anything that would kill blight, fungi, and microbes on plants without injuring them, I should also be in possession of something that would cure me."
Having noticed that the air seemed cleansed and he felt better after a lightning storm, he sought to basically capture lightning in a bottle. He tried various concoctions until he came up with one that he liked. He drank copious amounts of the stuff and after about six months declared himself healed of the diseases that had laid him low.
Still, Radam was wary about touting his cure, lest someone take it in combination with doctor-prescribed medicines and die. He allowed a couple of sick Austinites to be "treated" with his formula in such a way that he could say, in a court of law, that he did not give the medicine to the deceased patients. Both were quite ill when Radam's medicine was spirited away to them, but both patients recovered. Radam thought he might be on to something.
In 1886, he patented a "new and Improved Fumigating Composition for Preserving and Purifying Purposes." The patent stated that the value of his exlir was not to preserve health, but to preserve fruits and meats. He had captured lightning, according to the patent, with a combination of water, powdered sulphur, nitrate of soda, black oxide of manganese, sandalwood and potash treated in an oven. To the resulting mix he added a bit of wine, to give it a pink hue. He called the final product a "Microbe Killer" and sold it under that name.
He sold a lot of it. He ran advertisements in popular magazines and newspapers and published his own book, "Microbes and the Microbe Killer" in 1890. Demand soon exceeded what he could produce alone, so he opened 17 factories across the country and shipped the Microbe Killer out by the trainloads.
In 1888, Radam built the famous Koppel building at 322 Congress Avenue in Austin, which, after several incarnations, still stands today. Radam moved to New York City and lived in a mansion overlooking Central Park. He was rich and famous, but also the subject of the controversy he had always expected his Microbe Killer would inspire. He ended up $5,500 short in a series of court cases and appeals, but felt the courts had vindicated him.
Meanwhile, sales of the Microbe Killer continued unabated. Radam opened factories in London and Melbourne. He died a wealthy man in 1902, and is buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Austin. Even after a book was written exposing the Microbe Killer as essentially worthless, Radam's heirs continued to rake in a considerable amount of money from sales of the stuff.
That came to an end in 1912, with the passage of the Sherley Amendment to the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, which decreed that any label that was misbranded was also illegal. The Bureau of Chemistry got busy analyzing various nostrums, but the one firmly in the government's cross-hairs was Radam's Microbe Killer.
In 1913, federal agents raided a freight car and confiscated a large load of his potion. The government figured out that the entire load had cost $25.86 to produce and was worth more than $5,000 on the market. In December of that year, 539 boxes and 322 cartons of Microbe Killer were destroyed.
The Microbe Killer turned out to be mostly water with a little red wine thrown in for color and a dash of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids. The formula was worth a million dollars to Radam, but not a nickel to the people who bought it for five times that amount.
