Polonium were marketed by Firestone from 1940 to 1953. While the amount of radiation from the plugs was minuscule and not a threat to the consumer, the benefits of such plugs quickly diminished after approximately a month because of polonium's short half-life and because buildup on the conductors would block the radiation that improved engine performance. (The premise behind the polonium spark plug, as well as Alfred Matthew Hubbard's prototype radium plug that preceded it, was that the radiation would improve ionization of the fuel in the cylinder and thus allow the motor to fire more quickly and efficiently.) Polonium is
Field with one element objects. While there is still no field with a single element in these theories, there is a field-like object whose characteristic is one. F cannot be a field because all fields must contain two distinct elements, the additive identity zero and the multiplicative identity one. Even if this restriction is dropped, a ring with one element must be the zero ring, which does not behave like a finite field. Instead, most proposed theories of F replace abstract algebra entirely. Mathematical objects such as vector spaces and polynomial rings can be carried over into these new theories by mimicking their abstract