Dark Lives Of 'The Radium Girls' Left A Bright Legacy For Workers, Science

[mahatmakanejeeves]

From 2017. I'm clearing out old email.

Dark Lives Of 'The Radium Girls' Left A Bright Legacy For Workers, Science
By MARY LOUISE KELLY • NOV 27, 2017



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In the early days of the 20th century, the United States Radium Corporation had factories in New Jersey and Illinois, where they employed mostly women to paint watch and clock faces with their luminous radium paint. The paint got everywhere — hair, hands, clothes, and mouths.

They were called the shining girls, because they quite literally glowed in the dark. And they were dying.

Kate Moore's new book The Radium Girls is about the young women who were poisoned by the radium paint — and the five who sued United States Radium in a case that led to labor safety standards and workers' rights advances.

Radioactivity wasn't well understood back then — in fact, radium was considered a wonder substance, and it turned up everywhere. "Radium truly was an international craze," Moore says. "It was in everything from cosmetics to food, and it very much had an allure to it."

Interview Highlights

On the boost to the radium industry during World War I

Soldiers needed watches, and people needed it for the planes and the trucks and so on, and so the dial painters, who were the Radium Girls, they were employed to paint all these dials with luminous radium paint, and they were taught to lip-point — so, to put their brushes between their lips to make a fine point for the detailed handiwork ... Mae Cubberley, who's one of the Radium Girls that I write about in the book, she said "The first thing we said was, 'Does this stuff hurt you?'" And their managers said no.
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[solara]

1. Were the Radium Girls only on the east Coast?

My mom told me about a job she had in L.A during WW II, painting clock dials in planes, watch dials and lip-pointing. She died of breast cancer but lived until she was 83..

Just curious

[Newest Reality]

2. My Grandmother...

My Grandmother did it in Chicago back then. Same thing with the watch dials and lip-pointing.

She was in a bus and there was an accident with a trauma to her breast. That rapidly turned into cancer and she spent ten-years dying a slow, gruesome death, literally dissolving away in agony. That even cleaned my family out financially before I was born.

The workers did not know about the dangers of exposure.

[solara]

3. So sorry about your Grandmother

We, as a supposedly intelligent people, have been pretty stupid about radiation and such and thousands have suffered because of it..

[mitch96]

4. I remember hearing about his in my Radiology training

Many of the radium dial painters died of oral-maxillofacial cancer. They would put points on the paint brush by wetting the tip with saliva. Radium go on the tongue and the rest is ......
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