The Golden Age, “Aluminum in Soil, Vegetation, Animals, Humans”
“It is apparent from the above various quotations and statements that aluminum, in either the organic or the inorganic form, produces poisoning to the soil, poisoning to the vegetation, poisoning to the animals eating such vegetation, and poisoning to human beings consuming the drug.”
The lead article of the issue, carried under the masthead 'Volume X ... Wednesday, February 20, 1929 ... Number 246' and headed by the text of Genesis 3:17. Its author was Charles T. Betts, a Toledo dentist who sold a book called Aluminum Poisoning; he was not a Bible Student officer. The article closes by linking aluminium to cancer, and is immediately followed by a reader's letter thanking the magazine for an earlier article, 'Aluminum Poison by Way of the Kitchen'.
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Provenance and verification note for The Golden Age, Aluminum in Soil, Vegetation, Animals, Humans
Confidence note. Read in the OCR text layer of the archive.org scan on 19 September 2026; the passage is on the leaf mapped to printed page 326, whose running head reads '326', in the issue whose masthead reads 'Volume X ... Wednesday, February 20, 1929 ... Number 246'. Scanner hyphenation closed up. The scan's OCR renders 'organic' as 'organie' and this has been restored; no other word has been altered. The OCR renders the author's initials as both 'Q. T. Betts' and 'C. T. Betts'; elsewhere in the same volume he is 'Dr. Chas. T. Betts'.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item 'golden-age-1929' (bound volumes X and XI, 1929), uploaded by [email protected] to the 'opensource' collection. Page numbers taken from the item's _djvu.xml leaf mapping joined to _page_numbers.json and cross-checked against the printed running heads and issue mastheads.
Notes. The reader's letter on the same page ('Interior Aluminum Plating Not So Good', by I. M. Moll) refers to an earlier Golden Age article, 'Aluminum Poison by Way of the Kitchen'. The 1926-1928 volumes of The Golden Age are not on archive.org, so the first article of the campaign could not be dated.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-hlth-ga-1929-0220-betts-aluminum-soil