The extreme rarity of radium made it a prestige item, in 1903 the New York Times reported that a single gram cost $2,000. There was even a nightclub in Brooklyn called ‘The Radium Club’ and casinos began playing radium roulette played in the dark with a ball and roulette wheel painted with glowing radium. It became a plot device in novels and influenced the naming of consumer products ranging from fertilizers to cigarettes to cosmetics. The radium craze permeated almost every aspect of American society, it featured in everything from religious sermons to cartoons and films. However, by the early 1930s radium’s unknown dangers became tragically clear. It came to represent America’s burgeoning modernity and symbolise the country’s progress. Within forty years radium had permeated American society to the point where it was so engrained within the popular consciousness that scarcely a person in the civilised world was unfamiliar with the word radium. The radioactive metal’s unusual and unique properties captured the imaginations of both the scientific community and the public. Radium had been discovered in 1898 and was quickly hailed as a miracle element. Hughes testified that all five women had ingested so much radium that their breath was toxic.At the beginning of the 20 th century America became gripped by a dangerous phenomenon. Their attorney, Raymond Berry, hired 30-year-old physicist Elizabeth Hughes who used an electroscope to measure radioactivity in the breath of the five dial painters. Newspaper headlines dubbed them the Living Dead and the Radium Girls. It took Fryer two years to find an attorney to take the case, but once she did, four other women - Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice - joined. "Studies by officials in New Jersey proved that the women were suffering from radiation poisoning, and that it had come from the radium they were exposed to in their workplace."īy the late 1920s, five women sued USRC in Orange, New Jersey, starting with Grace Fryer. "When one of USRC's senior chemists died of aplastic anemia in 1925, it became obvious that there was a connection," Stemm says. submitted a falsified version of the report to New Jersey officials and suppressed its findings, continuing to refute the idea that its radium dial paint was making anyone sick. "Radium poisoning caused the victims' jaws to disintegrate over time, eventually killing them."īy the time the first dial painter died in 1923, the medical community had begun to suspect that radium exposure was the cause. "This extremely painful and disfiguring condition was the most common of the diseases suffered by the ," Stemm says. The women's employers at Radium Corporation assured them the paint was harmless, but many of the women soon fell ill, some severely with necrosis of the jaw. "To ensure a sufficiently sharp point, the women were told to use their lips and tongue to shape the brush." They had to do this repeatedly throughout the day to keep that fine point, which meant the women ingested radioactive paint constantly. "Once the paint was mixed, the extremely fine detail painting required very sharply pointed paint brushes," says Stemm. Some of the women even used radium paint on their teeth to brighten their smiles. They were soon known as " ghost girls," because the radium dust made their skin, hair and clothes glow. The women would mix their own paint from radium dust and other ingredients. "Estimates of the total number of women employed in the industry between 19 vary, but a number approaching 10,000 is not unreasonable." "At the height of the industry in the early 1920s, about 2,000 women were employed," says Stemm. Their small hands were suited to the detailed work, and the jobs paid well. USRC hired young women to paint these instruments with radium paint.
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