5/27/2023 0 Comments Radium jaw photos![]() ![]() “I think I pointed mine with my lips about six times to every watch dial. “Our instructors told us to point them with our lips,” she said. After a few strokes, the brushes would lose their shape, and the women couldn’t paint accurately. They mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish-white paint, and carefully applied it with a camel hair brush to the dial numbers. Racks of dials waiting to be painted sat next to each woman’s chair. Grace started working in the spring of 1917 with 70 other women in a large, dusty room filled with long tables. They all had a good laugh, then got back to work, painting a glow-in-the-dark radium compound on the dials of watches, clocks, altimeters and other instruments. The women even painted their nails and their teeth to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. But everyone knew the stuff was harmless. It was a little strange, Fryer said, that when she blew her nose, her handkerchief glowed in the dark. Grace Fryer and the other women at the radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, had no idea that they were being poisoned. Even though several previous workers died and health risks associated with radium were allegedly known, this company continued dial painting operations until 1940, when the operation was moved to New York City.The Doors of Justice are barred to the “Doomed Radium Victims,” and notes explain that it is due to “statute of limitations, summer vacation, postponement,” in this New York World editorial cartoon.īy Bill Kovarik and Mark Neuzil, from Mass Media and Environmental Conflict (Sage, 1996), p. The unfavorable publicity generated by reports of illness and death amongst previous dial painters resulted in a drop in potential employees.Īround 1920, a similar dial painting business, a division of the Standard Chemical Company based in Chicago, known as the Radium Dial Company opened in Chicago, but soon moved its dial painting operation to Peru, Illinois to be closer to its major customer, the Westclox Clock Company. This was the reason for litigation against US Radium by the so-called Radium girls. Radium jaw (Radium necrosis), was allegedly known and initially denied by US Radium's management and scientists working for the company. The ingestion of the paint by the women, brought about while licking the brushes, resulted in a condition called radium jaw, a painful swelling and porosity of the upper and lower jaws, and ultimately led to the deaths of many of these women. Unbeknownst to the women, the product was highly radioactive and therefore, carcinogenic. Workers had been instructed to "point" the brushes by licking them with their mouths. The luminescent paint used by the women, a product called Undark, had radium as its main ingredient. A successor company, Isolite, still produces luminous signs using tritium. After the 1970s, the company called itself the Safety Light Corporation, a reference to glow-in-the-dark safety signs, dials and other luminous paint products the company produced. The company then moved to Orange in 1917 and four years later opened its doors as United States Radium Corporation in 1921. The company produced uranium from carnotite ore and eventually moved into the business of producing radioluminescent paint. Willis, and was originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation. The company was founded in 1914 in Newark, New Jersey by Dr. ![]()
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