The messed up truth about the Radium Girls

[kestrel9]

This is about an abandoned set of Radium based products and the history of their use:

THE MESSED UP TRUTH ABOUT THE RADIUM GIRLS

"...It's worth noting that this wasn't just a case of a corrupt company telling their employees their working conditions were safe — at least, not at first. Radium was thought to be super healthy: it was often marketed as a cure-all, and there was a shocking number of products that hit the market just full of radium. And, you know, death."

https://archive.is/N2nEZ



"...It didn't take long for entrepreneurs to see the potential value in the luminescent properties of radium. Just a few years after it was discovered, William J. Hammer mixed it with zinc sulfide and created a paint. While he didn't patent the invention, Tiffany & Company did. According to the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, it was wildly popular in Europe first, and the people who worked with it would glow as they walked through the streets at night.

It wasn't until 1914 that radium-based luminescent paint started to be produced in the US. By 1921, the main manufacturer had already expanded a few times and moved, changing their name to the United States Radium Corporation and patenting the name "Undark" for their paint. Other companies started popping up as well, using named like "Luna" and "Marvelite" for their paints. 

They weren't just making paints, they were doing the painting, too. According to NPR, US Radium hired scores of girls and young women — as young as just 11-years-old — to paint watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. As if just working with the paint wasn't bad enough, they were also encouraged to put the brush between their lips and twirl it into a point. It was the best way to get truly precise numbers and brush strokes, but with each lick of the brush, they were swallowing radium.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no safety precautions put in place for working with this material that we now know is deadly. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, it wasn't long before US Radium was even getting military contracts to paint watches and instrument panels, and that meant more work for the girls. That should have been a good thing, but it absolutely wasn't.

The workers, of course, didn't know this — they were assured the paint was harmless, so they often just had a little fun with it, too. The Atlantic says it was common for the girls to paint their fingernails and teeth with it, because who wouldn't love to glow in the dark? Later — much later — when Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker did a study to see just how much radium the girls were actually covered in, he found something terrible. Workers would be so covered with the paint and radium dust used elsewhere in the plant that they would glow completely. The dust got everywhere: it wasn't just on their hands and faces, it was on their clothes, their undergarments, and even on their skin beneath their clothes.

And all along, they were assured it was safe.



***
It really started in earnest in 1904, when LD Gardner began marketing a health water he called "Liquid Sunshine." According to the New York Historical Society, belief in radium's healthy benefits was rooted in a massive misstep in logic. Early experiments using radium to kill cancer cells had been a success, and if it could kill cancer, surely, it could kill whatever else was ailing you ... right? Real doctors started experimenting with it as a cure for things like tuberculosis and lupus, while the quacks started marketing their own so-called cures for everything from acne and baldness to impotence and insanity.

People drank radium water and brushed their teeth with radium toothpaste, and radium cosmetics were all the rage. Children played with toys painted with radium, and performers on the New York stage danced and twirled in costumes that glowed. Radium was in such high demand that prices soared. By 1915, a single gram cost what would be around $1.9 million in today's money, and that means many of the products didn't contain real radium — fortunately for consumers.


Further details of the case of the Radium girls... Yes it's awful and yes they had to be buried in lead lined coffins...

THE RADIUM GIRLS' SICKNESS CAME SLOWLY
Read More: https://www.grunge.com/181092/the-messe ... paign=clip

[kestrel9]

A local article about the history of the Radium Girls. It's shocking that one company was not fined until 1976.

https://www.nprillinois.org/equity-just ... is-tragedy

"Luminous hummed along for decades, until 1976, according to Clark's book. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined it that year for having radiation levels "1,666 times" the allowable amount. After failing to make the necessary improvements, Luminous closed. An April 2, 1984, United Press International article, which called the company a "death factory," reported that former workers were suing the company; cancer ran high among the former dial painters. "To escape financial liability for environmental pollution and industrial diseases, Luminous Processes shuffled corporate assets into other holdings, in much the same way that Radium Dial had in the 1930s," Clark wrote.

In 1978, the same year Luminous Processes closed in Ottawa, Peg Looney's body was exhumed. Earlier, when the Cold War threatened nuclear attacks, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began to study radiation's effects on humans. Dial painters, living and dead, were perfect study subjects. Looney's family gave permission for her body to be exhumed and researched by Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont for the study. "The family was told that they brought her body back encased in lead because she was still so radioactive," Halm says. Halm's mother had saved one of Looney's white gloves that Halm liked to try on occasionally. "She threw it away. She was afraid it was contaminated."

"Looney and the other ill-fated dial painters had helped start a "movement that ultimately led, not until 1971, to the adoption of the federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) Act, which was the big change in having federal workers' safety laws," Grossman Jr. says. He worked for the U.S. Department of Labor for 30 years on workers' rights cases."

[kestrel9]

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/ ... cy/519408/

2017 A Century Later, the Factory That Poisoned the ‘Radium Girls’ Is Still a Superfund Site

PDF https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/pha/ottaw ... 072506.pdf
Public Health Assessment
OTTAWA RADIATION AREAS
OTTAWA, LASALLE COUNTY, ILLINOIS
EPA FACILITY ID: ILD980606750
JULY 25, 2006

[kestrel9]

This link has more photos of product ads and additional news coverage of the Radium Girls legal case and the corruption surrounding their deaths. https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/07/ ... othepaste/

"The suits and scientists behind the U.S. Radium Corporation were probably the worst. Knowing very well that UnDark’s key ingredient was approximately one million times more active than uranium, they were careful to avoid any exposure to it themselves..."

"In the early 1920s, the radium girls started to experience the first symptoms of their demise. Their jaws began to swell and deteriorate, their teeth falling out for no reason. There was a horrific report of one woman going to the dentist to have a tooth pulled and ending up with an entire piece of her jaw being accidentally removed. A local dentist began to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of deteriorating jawbones among women in his town and soon enough discovered the link that they had all worked for the US Radium plant, licking radio-active paintbrushes at one time or another.

When the women began exploring the possibility that their factory jobs had contributed to their illnesses, university “specialists” requested to examine them. Former factory girl Grace Fryer was declared to be in fine health by two medical experts. It would later be revealed that the two experts who had examined her were not doctors at all but a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll and one of the vice-presidents of US Radium.

Studies had also been conducted to evaluate the factory’s health conditions, which had reported nearly all surfaces sparkling with radioluminescence and unusual blood conditions in virtually everyone who worked there. Those reports were doctored to state that the girls were the picture of health.

With the help of doctors and dentists on their payroll, the company rejected claims that their workers were sick from radium exposure. They tried to pin the girls’ deaths on syphilis to smear the reputations of the young unmarried women who had come to work for them. Inexplicably, the medical community went along with all of it, fully cooperating with the powerful companies."