5/2/2023 0 Comments Radium girls pictures![]() It was even used in jock straps, lingerie, suppositories, and in the treatment of impotence. It was soon being used in everything from toothpaste to eyeshadow, chocolate and toys. It was seen as lifesaving, thought to be able to restore vitality to the elderly and cure all manner of health problems, including, ironically, cancer. The substance, the progenitor of all things “glow in the dark,” literally gleamed with possibility. Along with another scientist, André-Louis Debierne, Marie isolated it as a pure metal in 1910. Radium was discovered by the Polish-French chemist and physicist Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie in 1898. In her new book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Kate Moore tells the story of young women who were drawn to glamorous work with radium in the 1910s and 20s, only to have their lives taken - painfully, horrendously, and very early - by the lethal substance. But in the early 20th century, the newly discovered chemical element radium seemed to hold the promise of modernity, and America went wild for it. Radioactivity is now known to be practically synonymous with death. What they didn’t know is that the work they were doing was killing them. The girls were called dial painters, and they were told to hold the brushes in the mouths for increased precision. The combination made a luminescent green paste called Undark, which they used to painstakingly paint the numbers on the faces of watches. Beside each girl sat a small dish of radium powder, which she mixed with a few drops of water and adhesive. (Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images)Īt factories like the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation on Third Street in Newark, young women like 14-year-old Katherine Schaub passed their days with tiny paintbrushes in their mouths. ![]() Workers would often lick the paintbrush to achieve a finer point - directly ingesting the radium. Women painting alarm clock faces with radium in 1932, Ingersoll factory, January 1932.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |