Medically, a quackery fad for radium was happening in the 1920’s, which included radium water as a vitalizer, radium injections and pills, creams, and suppositories.Īs you can see a lot of people were swept along with the supposed positive benefits of this new product. It was advertised and recommended in it’s day for all kind of uses including watches, clocks, door bell buttons, theatre seat numbers, gauges, even fish bait etc. The base material, pitch-blende, was mined in Colorado and Utah and it takes 15 tons of pitch-blende to produce one gram of radium in the form of a salt. In 1914 Dr Sabin Von Sochocky discovered the luminous paint formula and founded the Radium Luminous Material Corp (N.Y City) and sold the product under the name “Undark”. Whereas an estimated 4,000 unprotected workers were hired in the U.S & Canada to paint watch faces with Radium. The Chemists with the U.S Radium Corporation used lead screens, masks and tongs. I want to pursue the social, medical and legal consequences for the Dial Painters who unwittingly worked with this dangerous radio luminescent substance Radium, whilst the owners of the factories and their scientists carefully avoided any exposure to themselves. I don’t want to spend much time on the physics of radioactivity, or it’s earlier developers Pierre and Marie Curie (who died of Leukemia in 1898) as time doesn’t permit. Hundreds of women died, suffered life-long illnesses and grotesque disfigurement from their exposure to Radium, which is present only in uranium one. The history of mostly woman dial-painters that created these wonderful luminescent dials is one of huge tragedy, deceit and arrogance by large corporations. This was a glow of a luminous paint formula which included Radium, a radio-active substance. In regards to the 7 displayed, death and disability has always lurked in both the painted hands and numerals.Īs a boy I can remember snuggling under the blankets in my dark bedroom and marveling at the beautiful greenish glow of my wristwatch. I have a long held passion for collecting watches and clocks, some of which I have brought along this evening. 'Oops' is never good occupational health policy.This is the transcript of a talk that Terry gave to the Auckland Medical History Society on 2nd August 2007. "We really don't want our factory workers to be the guinea pigs for discovery. ![]() By the time World War II came around, the federal government had set basic safety limits for handling radiation.Īnd, she says, there are still lessons to be learned about how we protect people who work with new, untested substances. At 107 years old, she was one of the last of the radium girls.īlum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Keane was among the hundreds who survived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S. Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum.
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