Radium Girls

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As Radium Girls factory workers were called in the United States, the one at work radium poisoning had drawn. Their job had consisted of applying radioactive luminous paint to the dials of clocks .

The women ingested dangerous doses of radium because they licked the brushes in order to be able to draw fine lines. In addition, some painted their fingernails with the paint. Many became seriously ill as a result, and a number of them died. The harmfulness of radium was not originally known, but the conspicuous accumulation of diseases was ignored and even covered up for years.

In 1920 alone, three large American manufacturers produced 4 million clocks with luminous numbers containing radium. The best known of the factories was in Orange , New Jersey and owned by the United States Radium Corporation . There were other similar factories of various companies in the state of Connecticut in Waterbury , Bristol , Thomaston and New Haven and in Ottawa , Illinois . Thirty of the contaminated workers died in Connecticut, 35 in Illinois and 41 in New Jersey. According to other sources, there were 40 fatalities in Ottawa alone.

Five of the New Jersey women sued their employer. The process sets precedent for workers who get sick from their work and sue their employer.

US Radium Corporation

From 1917 to 1926 the company operated a plant for the extraction and concentration of radium from carnotite . This was used to produce luminous paint, which was sold under the name Undark . The company was also an important manufacturer of watches with luminous numbers for the military. The Orange , New Jersey factory employed over a hundred workers, mostly women, painting clocks and instruments.

Radiation exposure

Women painting clocks

The history of the Radium Girls is an important point in the development of radiology  - especially radiation protection (health physics) - and workers' rights. The US Radium Corporation initially hired about 70 women to do various jobs that meant contact with the radium. Meanwhile, the owners and the responsible scientists - aware of the danger - avoided any contact with the substances. The chemists used lead shields and masks for protection. It is estimated that about 4,000 workers in companies in the United States and Canada painted clocks with fluorescent paint.

The paint was a mixture of glue, water, radium, and zinc sulfide. Fine camel hair brushes were then used to paint the numerals on the clocks. The wages were around 1.5 pence a clock, and one worker managed around 250 clocks a day. The brushes lost their shape after a few strokes, so the foremen recommended the workers to sharpen the brushes with their tongues again. In addition, the workers played with the paint and painted their fingernails, teeth and faces. This made them glow at night to the surprise of their significant other.

Radiation sickness

Many of the women developed anemia , broken bones, and necrosis of the jaw, later known as the radium jaw . It is believed that the examining doctors' X-ray machines contributed to the further aggravation. It also found that at least one of the investigations was fraudulent, as part of a cover-up campaign launched by the company's defenders. US Radium and other companies denied any connection between the workers' disease and radium. For a while, the dentists, doctors and other scientists involved withheld their data under pressure from the companies. Pathologists were pressured to attribute the deaths of workers to other causes; Syphilis was a popular attempt to undermine the reputation of women.

After Harrison Stanford Martland , chief medical examiner in Essex County, New Jersey , found the radioactive noble gas radon (a decay product of radium) in the air the Radium Girls breathed , he turned to Charles Norris , his colleague from New York City , and his Chief chemist Alexander O. Gettler . In 1928, Gettler succeeded in detecting a high concentration of radium in the bones of Amelia Maggia, one of the young women, even five years after her death.

Legal proceedings

The story differs from other such incidents in that it was closely monitored by the media, which also resulted in the condemnation of those responsible.

Grace Fryer was the first worker to decide to sue. However, it took her two years to find a lawyer willing to take on the case. Ultimately, five workers were ready to sue. The allegations and the media hype around this event led to the precedent and regulations on workplace safety, including the term Proven Leiden ( English provable suffering ).

The trial ended in the spring of 1928 with a settlement. Each of the Radium Girls received US $ 10,000 (taking inflation into account , this corresponds to US $ 148,990 today, which corresponds to € 125,044 at the current exchange rate), plus a lifelong annual pension of US $ 600 and all expenses for doctors and lawyers.

Implications for workers

This case established the right of the individual worker to sue the company if he became ill from work.

As a result of the process, the safety standards in the industry were significantly improved. The situation of the workers improved drastically through the introduction of occupational safety measures (rubber gloves, hair nets, air extraction hoods, a ban on sharpening brushes with the lips). Officially, no person recruited after 1927 suffered radiation damage. However, some researchers suspect that cancer cases also occurred later, which, however, could no longer be clearly attributed to the now significantly lower radiation exposure.

Consequences for science

In 1933 Robley D. Evans made the first measurements of radon and radium in workers' excretions. At MIT, he collected data from 27 workers. This information was the basis for the National Bureau of Standards in 1941 to set the limit values ​​for radium at 0.1  microcurie (approximately: 3.7  kilobecquerel ).

In 1968 the Center for Human Radiobiology was established at the Argonne National Laboratory . Its primary task was to further medical examinations of the workers who were still alive. The project gathered all available information and, in some cases, tissue samples from the workers. When the project ended in 1993, detailed information had been gathered from 2403 people. The samples are stored in the National Human Radiobiological Tissue Repository .

One result was that no symptoms were found in workers who had up to 1000 times the concentration of radium compared to non-exposed workers. This indicates a limit for radium poisoning.

Media reception

The story of the workers was processed in the poem Radium Girls by Eleanor Swanson . It's also included in her 2003 collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium .

Writer DW Gregory told the story of the Radium Girls in his award-winning play Radium Girls . It premiered at the Playwrights Theater of New Jersey in Madison , New Jersey in 2000 .

There is a full description of Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Jailbird .

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw worked on the subject in her poem The Innocence of Radium (Night Photograph, 1994).

In Ross Mullner's book Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy , many events around the Radium Girls are dealt with.

Kate Moore's The Radium Girls was released in 2016 and tells the story based on original documents.

In the documentary series 1000 Ways to Bite the Grass , the fate of the Radium Girls is depicted in the story # 196 Deadly Shine.

Henning Mankell describes the suffering of women in his book Quicksand .

literature

• University Libraries Special Collections: US Radium Corporation, East Orange, NJ 1917–1940 (Revised, June 2003)
• Eleanor Swanson: Radium Girls ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Poison paintbrush. In: Time June 4, 1928
• Radium Women. In: Time August 11, 1930
• Radium dial painters, 1920-1926. Radiological Accidents and Events Database, Johnston's Archives
• Arne Molfenter: Women who glow in the dark. "Radium Girls". In: spiegel-online.de. August 9, 2018, accessed August 9, 2018 . 

swell

1. ↑ Ann Quigley: After Glow - 90 Years Ago Workers At The Waterbury Clock Company Began Dying After Painting Radium On Clock Dials ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Waterbury Observer, first published September 2002 
2. ↑ ^{a b} A. Bellows: Undark and the Radium Girls. In: damninteresting.com . November 26, 2007 (English).
3. ^ William G. Eckert: Dr. Harrison Stanford Martland (1883-1954). The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, Vol. 2 No. March 1, 1981
4. ↑ Deborah Blum: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York , Penguin Press, 2010
5. ↑ This figure was based on the template: Inflation determined and refers to the previous calendar year at most
6. ↑ Bill Kovarik: The Radium Girls (Originally Chapter 8 in Mass Media and Environmental Conflict ) Digitized version ( memento of the original from July 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
8. ↑ Ann Quigley: After Glow - 90 Years Ago Workers At The Waterbury Clock Company Began Dying After Painting Radium On Clock Dials ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Waterbury Observer . First published September 2002. 
9. ↑ National Human Radiobiological Tissue Repository ( Memento of August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
10. ↑ For a detailed description of the dangerousness of radium for humans cf. the presentation by RE Rowland: Radium in Humans - A Review of US Studies, Argonne (Illinois): Argonne National Laboratory, September 1994, p. 23 f. ( Memento of the original from June 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 5.5 MB) 
11. ↑ Amazon Online Reader
12. ↑ Simon & Schuster, The Radium Girls , Archived Copy ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.