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Radium Girls

What's terrible about the story is how the people who knew about the dangers took care to proctect themselves and avoid contact with it, while letting these women come in contact and even lick the stuff.
 
Yup radium was some bad shit. It would have probably been fine if they hadn't licked the paintbrushes.
 
And I thought the folks that used tritium for paints had it bad. It has a short life but can do some nasty damage once in the body from inhalation of the powder or ingestion like the radium girls.

Glowing body parts....reminds me of the "phossy jaw" match factory workers (phosphorus poisoning). Nasty shit!
 
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I heard about this in junior high. This goes hand-in-hand with Upton Sinclair's exposing the meat packing industry 15 years before. Corporations can be horrifically malevolent when their decisions remain behind closed doors.
 
Gilbert Chemistry sets came with a spinthariscope with a radium disk (1.2cm) on the end probably good for 20mrem/hr gamma(!) as recently as the late 1960s. And those Big Ben alarm clocks had dials that were pretty hot all about the same time. I never forget the one on the nightstand when I was very young. Its glow never faded however you could see it flickering prominently. Upon closer examination you could see bursts of light like tiny explosions all over the painted areas. These were the scintillations from alpha bursts on the zinc sulfide surface! 😱
 
Rubycon said:
Gilbert Chemistry sets came with a spinthariscope with a radium disk (1.2cm) on the end probably good for 20mrem/hr gamma(!) as recently as the late 1960s. And those Big Ben alarm clocks had dials that were pretty hot all about the same time. I never forget the one on the nightstand when I was very young. Its glow never faded however you could see it flickering prominently. Upon closer examination you could see bursts of light like tiny explosions all over the painted areas. These were the scintillations from alpha bursts on the zinc sulfide surface! 😱
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Do you know any video sources of this? I'd really like to see it. Not first hand of course...
 
There was a documentary about this several years ago on PBS. For some reason I was thinking about it this morning. Wierd...
 
It's like the hat factories, asbestos mines, and friction match factories. Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to be chummy with an auctuary to find out which industries I should be avoiding. I recall hearing that even though the cause of health problems from asbestos had not yet been determined, the insurance companies were quick to pick up on the correlation.
 
I remember reading about this several years go. pretty sad how they were treated by the Company which was more interested in profits and not thee employees health.

There are plenty of people that would like to roll back regulations so that something like this could happen again.
 
Back in undergrad, I took a radiochemistry class. In addition to learning the "radium girls" story, my professor passed out all sorts of old advertisements. One of them was for a radium/water concoction emblazened with the slogan, "bathe your insides with liquid sunshine!"

People are idiots. It is amazing that the human race has survived for so long.
 
soxfan said:
Back in undergrad, I took a radiochemistry class. In addition to learning the "radium girls" story, my professor passed out all sorts of old advertisements. One of them was for a radium/water concoction emblazened with the slogan, "bathe your insides with liquid sunshine!"

People are idiots. It is amazing that the human race has survived for so long.
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Yes the ill famed Revigator. :biggrin:

You know people would still do this if regulations were not in place to protect them. "Audiophile" products come to mind. Ever read the descriptions for wires? :biggrin:
 
Rubycon said:
Gilbert Chemistry sets came with a spinthariscope with a radium disk (1.2cm) on the end probably good for 20mrem/hr gamma(!) as recently as the late 1960s. And those Big Ben alarm clocks had dials that were pretty hot all about the same time. I never forget the one on the nightstand when I was very young. Its glow never faded however you could see it flickering prominently. Upon closer examination you could see bursts of light like tiny explosions all over the painted areas. These were the scintillations from alpha bursts on the zinc sulfide surface! 😱
Click to expand...

I had both of these when I was a kid. Also played a heck of a lot with mercury-probably from the same chemistry set. For safety I did all my experiments on a sheet of abestos (looked like drywall) my father brought home from the lab. I'm surprised I don't have two heads.
 
Can't watch the vid at work but looked up "Radium Girls" and read the wiki link. Sounds like the typical US company at the turn of the 20th century to the depression, doing everything to exploit the worker while racking up the profits. It does remind me a lot of The Jungle and it makes you wonder how many other stories there are just like this one but have never been told because the people either died or were threatened to keep their mouths shut.
 
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