Radium effects watch dial painters year8/11/2023 ![]() ![]() 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. This is the transcript of a talk that Terry gave to the Auckland Medical History Society on 2nd August 2007. Remember, you can keep track of all of the previous entries in this series on the site here, or on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s dedicated page. Today, the element has few practical uses, and is mainly used as a radiation source for medical applications. Once the dangers of radiation were more widely appreciated, use of radium in consumer products ceased. These women suffered from the horrendous effects of radium poisoning as a result of their work and had to fight long legal battles for the companies that employed them to admit responsibility. The case of the radium girls, the women who were tasked with painting watch dials with luminous radium paint, is well-documented. Some of these products posed clear risks to the public, while others endangered those who produced them. Glow-in-the-dark watch dials used radium paint, and it was also used for supposed health benefits in products including toothpaste and even chocolate. Consequently, it was used in a number of applications in consumer products. Radium was discovered at a time when the dangers of radioactivity were not known. The curie, a historical unit of radioactivity, is based on the radioactivity of one of radium’s isotopes, Ra-226. ![]() It’s a highly radioactive metal which occurs naturally as a consequence of the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Radium was one of the elements discovered by Marie Curie along with her husband, Pierre. ![]()
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