"Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. "
How awful is this ? I had never realized radiation had been so misunderstood back then...
The Radium Craze up to the nuclear bomb watching tourism of the Atomic Age are indeed quite bizarre to modern sensibilities. Or you could say they reflect an optimistic and romantic hope of what the future could bring, which we no longer have.
> Prescribed Radithor by his doctor in 1928, Byers was dead by 1932 (aged 51), with his autopsy revealing that he had consumed approximately 1,400 bottles in afew short years — at least one every day. Radithor was a radium drinking solution promoted by one Dr. William Bailey (a fake name) whose products did in fact contain significant amounts of the element. The recognition that rich patients — and not just female industrial dial painters — were dying because of these products led “the federal government to act with far greater alacrity to help consumers than to assist workers.”
The comment about the jaw coming off reminds me of a story about phosphorus as a tonic:
> [I]n 1931 a Dr. G. Coltart wrote to the Lancet about an interesting case. A patient of his had come to him in 1904 complaining of feeling run down and so the doctor had prescribed a popular brand of tonic pills that contained both elemental phosphorous and strychnine but told the patient to stop taking them if the strychnine made him twitch. The patient had returned twenty-seven years later with an advanced case of phossy jw, the industrial disease that afflicted those in the match-making industrys, having taken the pills regularly during the intervening years. Asked why he had taken the pills for so long, he replied that he continued with them because they had never caused him to twitch! ("The Shocking History of Phosphorous", John Emsley, p. 58.)
The comment about the FDA reminds me of the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy. As the WSJ article points out, the FDA only had the power to regulate adulterants or false advertising. They only had the authority to track down the toxic Elixir Sulfanilamide because it, technically speaking, was not an elixir. Hence why they couldn't control the sales of radium water which truly did contain radium.
(With free market beliefs, the idea was that the customer should decide, not the government.)
> Minute particles of the radioactive substances ... produce, for a period of time, seemingly curative or stimulative reactions, to be followed later by exhaustion and destruction of the blood producing centers.
I was in a store recently in CA and I was all set to buy this beautiful silver tea platter for my partner, that is until the shop owner had told me it was made with radium. I had decided not to get it as I wasn't sure if could be potentially dangerous. I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of radiation in general(having studied physics and being aware that we're exposed to it constantly by light), but was I paranoid and overreacting?
Thanks, this definitely makes me feel better. Now that you mention it, how would you go about measuring it, anyway? Would a Geiger counter do the trick(by measuring the sievert readings) or would you have to examine it more closely with other instruments?
For just determining if it's safe to take home - a Geiger counter will do. It needs to be able to count alpha & beta radiation, which they all pretty much do.
One would also help in checking for radioactive glaze used on Fiestaware plates.
It makes you wonder what we don't know about today. What are some of the things that we see with wonderment that in 50-100 years people will have the same reaction that you do with radiation today?
How awful is this ? I had never realized radiation had been so misunderstood back then...