![]() She was the oldest sister in a family of 10. Looney started working at Radium Dial when she was 17. The radium became a toy.ĭarlene Halm's aunt, Margaret "Peg" Looney, was one of the first Ottawa painters to die from radium poisoning. They told the girls it would make them beautiful. ![]() Their bosses said the paint wouldn't hurt them. Precision was key, so the girls were taught to create a fine point of the paintbrush bristles with their lips. Radium Dial hired women, girls mostly - some as young as 11 years old, according to Moore's book - to paint the watch dials. They became top sellers, and production ramped up. In the 1920s, watch advertisements touted the wonderful radium dials that let owners tell the time in the dark. Although dial painters in other states sought retribution for their fatal illnesses, those in Ottawa were the only ones to win state-sanctioned compensation for radium poisoning. Illinois' law led to the creation of the Illinois Industrial Commission in 1917, and it was this body that sided with one of Ottawa's most well-known dial painters in 1938. ![]() The final state to adopt it was Mississippi in 1948. Illinois was one of the earliest workers' compensation law adopters in 1911. Because of Illinois' progressive workers' compensation laws, some of the Radium Dial workers received financial awards. Some of the Ottawa painters, despite their long, agonizing illnesses with crippling sarcomas (cancer that grows in connective tissue that connects other kinds of tissue in your body), crumbling jawbones, crushed spines, amputated limbs, and other infections, were among the luckier ones. Radium would also receive government contracts during World War I to produce watches and airplane instruments for American soldiers. Dozens of these women later died of radium poisoning.Īdvertisements for the product, which they called "Undark," boasted of how it was all "made possible by the magic of radium!" U.S. paint numbers on the faces of wristwatches using dangerous radioactive paint. Radium Corporation to manufacture wristwatches with radium-painted dials.Įmployees of the U.S. His discovery would soon be used by the U.S. Hammer discovered that by mixing the radium with glue and zinc sulfide, he could make glow-in-the-dark paint. Hammer went to Paris and obtained a sample of radium salt crystals from the Curies. Marie is operating the apparatus.Īround this time, American inventor William J. Pierre and Marie Curie in the laboratory, demonstrating the experimental apparatus used to detect the ionization of air, and hence the radioactivity, of samples of purified ore which enabled their discovery of radium. After it was observed that radium could treat cancer, many people mistakenly thought it could also be used to treat other diseases as well. Radium was particularly intriguing because it glowed in the dark, and as Marie noted, “These gleamings seemed suspended in the darkness and stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.” Soon enough, the radium craze was on. In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie, two of the most prominent pioneers in researching radioactivity, discovered the element radium.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |