Even after the end of World War II, the dial painters’ legacies continued. Having seen the damage a tiny amount of radiation can do to a human body, new safety measures were used to great success in the Manhattan Project, to protect people working with radiation. New safety standards were introduced as a result of the dial painters’ plight. However, amongst all the death and disappointment, there was a silver lining. The bulk of Radium Girls is very grim the companies that sickened and killed these women were never really held to account, and we still struggle with workplace safety today. But what justice they achieved was often too little too late, but what almost immediately the dial painters got publicity and the sympathy of the world. With the help of their families, social workers, medical professionals, scientists, lawyers, and years of work, some of the dial painters were able to get a semblance of justice. Some of them were originally diagnosed with syphilis or just a mysterious list of symptoms: anemia, tooth decay, bone cancer, etc. It took years for doctors to figure out the cause. Kate Moore writes in detail how more and more women got sick and died mysteriously. It wasn’t until 1921 that one of the first dial painters started exhibiting symptoms. Radium is a patient poison though, and most of the women had left the factory years before they started getting sick. While the chemists in the lab used lead lined aprons and gloves, the dial painters were lip pointing daily, ingesting microscopic amounts of radium every time. But at the time, the workers were not told of the danger. We now know that when ingested in the body, radium is treated as calcium and deposited in the bones, left basically forever (certainly longer than a human lifespan) to do its damage. Since dial painters were paid per dial, the faster the painting, the more lip pointing occurred, and the more radium was ingested by the dial painters. The workers regularly put the tip of the brush in their mouth many times per day. In order to speed up their work, dial painters were encouraged to use the technique of “lip pointing” to create an even finer tip. In 1917, painting watch dials was meticulous work, and the brushes required to paint the small numbers were extremely fine. Radium Girls is the story of the women who worked at this factory in New Jersey, and a similar one called Radium Dial Company in Illinois. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky, who later went on to co-found the United States Radium Corporation, both a producer of this new paint, sold as “Undark”, and the watch dials that were painted with it. During WWI there was a great need for watch dials that could be seen at night, since soldiers can’t all coordinate to go “over the top” at 5am if they can’t see their watch in the dark. It was used as a toothpaste, health tonic (think patent medicine, not cutting edge science) and skin cream I mean, who doesn’t want their skin to glow? There were lots of ways people marketed and sold their piece of this new discovery but people were especially excited about its ability to glow in the dark. After the discovery of radium in 1898, the world had a bit of a radium obsession.
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