Panerai

This appeals to me for reasons I cannot fully explain.

Panerai are an old brand of upmarket Italian slash Swiss watches that are avidly collected by wealthy business folk.

You can buy new ones, and many do, but it’s the old ones that aficionados really lust after.

The founder of Panerai knew Marie Curie and shortly after she discovered radium he figured out how to mix it with copper-doped zinc sulfide to make a glow-in-the-dark watch.

Which just happened to kill everyone involved in making the watches and everyone that wore them.

The old Panerai watches don’t glow anymore because the zinc sulphide crystal structure has been degraded by all that radium which is still emitting it’s radiation and will do so for the next few aeons.

But the best bit is this …