The 54-year-old Park Ridge, Illinois resident had worked in the 1920s at the Ottawa, Illinois Radium Dial Company, which hired women to paint watch and clock dials with radium-laced, glow-in-the-dark paint. The lasting legacy of the women's fight led to the introduction of new safety standards to protect a whole new generation of dial painters, as well as those working with plutonium in making atomic bombs. On August 25, 1959, Beatrice Workman died of radium poisoning. It took eight appeals before the former radium girls finally had a victory, in October 1939. An autopsy soon proved that "each and every portion of tissue and bone tested gave evidence of radioactivity". During the case, the body of Molly Maggia was exhumed and taken away for an autopsy.Īccording to Moore, Maggia's body was in "a good state of preservation" five years after her death. In 1927, five former dial painters, led by Catherine Donohue and represented by lawyer Leonard Grossman, (working pro bono), filed a legal case against the US Radium Corporation. vmzIvyoOPC- Pulp Librarian JanuA VICTORY AT LAST After a long trial and painful testimony they won their case. It took the death of a male employee of the radium firm for experts to finally take the issue seriously.įinally in 1938 five women - dubbed the Radium Girls - sued the Radiant Dial Company they worked for after Radium exposure left them close to death. But 800 miles away in Ottawa, Illinois, where a new studio had opened, the painters were unaware of the problems - and their employers did not inform them of the now-established danger." Moore writes: "In New Jersey, the women's illnesses had an understandable effect on the profession's popularity: dial painting declined. The only study into the safety of radium was conducted in the same factory.Īccording to Moore, instead of radium firms suspending dial-painting, the managers refused to accept any responsibility and vowed to find the "real cause" of the women's illness. Radium was not suspected at first because the official line was that it was safe in small doses. sbR334rpAE- Pulp Librarian JanuON THE BRINK OF DEATH In the 1920s it was marketed as a 'scientific' panacea of wellness. Tritium, however, is significantly less radioactive than radium, meaning it was safe enough to be painted onto watch dials for decades, until the early 1990s when a couple of even safer alternatives - still used today - took its place.Radium and radioactivity was soon a main ingredient in quack medicine: with extravagent claims made for its health-restoring and energetic properties. Tritium operates under the same chemical principles as radium - the material undergoes decay, releasing electrons that trigger zinc sulfide to glow. By the 1960s the amount of radium used in watch dials was approximately one-hundredth the amount used in the early 1900s in 1968 it was banned altogether.Īnother radioactive material, tritium, arose as a successor. The incidents occurred at three factories in the United States: one in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917 one in Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s and one in. The usage of the material was then greatly scaled back. The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. and further tightening of industrial safety regulations. The silver lining to all this was that litigation paved the way for increased legal protection of workers in the U.S. But when workers began suffering from anemia, bone fractures, necrosis of the jaw, and eventually death, it became clear these women were misled.īy 1927, dial painter Grace Fryer and a handful of other women - known as the “ Radium Girls” - sought compensation from the United States Radium Corporation, a major employer of dial painters in the U.S. Employers told the women there would be no ill effects from ingestion and exposure to the material, despite the fact that factory owners and scientists did take precautions when handling larger quantities of radium.
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