PICRYL is an AI-driven search & similarity engine. PICRYL is the largest media source for public domain images, scans, and documents. The World's Largest Public Domain Media Search Engine Radium site.īuilding/structure dates: 1917 Initial Construction The paint application building is a contributory element to the historical significance of the U.S. Even before official standards of workplace radiation exposure were established after World War II, data from dial painters' cases were a major source in the health and safety codes developed for the wartime Manhattan Project. These investigations had military as well as civilian implications. Equally important, scientific investigation of these dial painters, and of other victims of radium poisoning, led to the establishment of health standards used to protect workers in radioactive environments and to the emergence of human radiobiology as a field of study. The survivors subsequent efforts to seek redress, in alliance with the Consumer's League, played a major role in the establishment of legislative protection for workers against industrial diseases. The dead woman, and others who survived, became known as the first known victims of industrial radium poisoning. There were no publicly recognized health or safety problems identified or standards established for handling radioactive materials at this time. Beginning in 1920j, radium dial painters at the plant began reporting health problems later associated with radium exposure and many died over the next decade. Radium Corporation site, including the surviving structural components dating to the period 1917-1926, were associated with nationally significant developments in health and safety standards, the ability of women reformers to secure protection for workers handling radioactive materials, and tools used to detect and measure radio-isotopes. Hughes testified that all five women had ingested so much radium that their breath was toxic.Significance: The U.S. Their attorney, Raymond Berry, hired 30-year-old physicist Elizabeth Hughes who used an electroscope to measure radioactivity in the breath of the five dial painters. Newspaper headlines dubbed them the Living Dead and the Radium Girls. It took Fryer two years to find an attorney to take the case, but once she did, four other women - Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice - joined.
"Studies by officials in New Jersey proved that the women were suffering from radiation poisoning, and that it had come from the radium they were exposed to in their workplace."īy the late 1920s, five women sued USRC in Orange, New Jersey, starting with Grace Fryer. "When one of USRC's senior chemists died of aplastic anemia in 1925, it became obvious that there was a connection," Stemm says. submitted a falsified version of the report to New Jersey officials and suppressed its findings, continuing to refute the idea that its radium dial paint was making anyone sick. "Radium poisoning caused the victims' jaws to disintegrate over time, eventually killing them."īy the time the first dial painter died in 1923, the medical community had begun to suspect that radium exposure was the cause. "This extremely painful and disfiguring condition was the most common of the diseases suffered by the ," Stemm says. The women's employers at Radium Corporation assured them the paint was harmless, but many of the women soon fell ill, some severely with necrosis of the jaw. "To ensure a sufficiently sharp point, the women were told to use their lips and tongue to shape the brush." They had to do this repeatedly throughout the day to keep that fine point, which meant the women ingested radioactive paint constantly. "Once the paint was mixed, the extremely fine detail painting required very sharply pointed paint brushes," says Stemm. Some of the women even used radium paint on their teeth to brighten their smiles. They were soon known as " ghost girls," because the radium dust made their skin, hair and clothes glow. The women would mix their own paint from radium dust and other ingredients. "Estimates of the total number of women employed in the industry between 19 vary, but a number approaching 10,000 is not unreasonable." "At the height of the industry in the early 1920s, about 2,000 women were employed," says Stemm. Their small hands were suited to the detailed work, and the jobs paid well. USRC hired young women to paint these instruments with radium paint.
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