![]() That they got to work with a famously amazing health substance and aided with the war effort didn’t hurt, either. The Radium Corporation was an excellent workplace for a lady, or so it seemed: The job paid well and was comparatively easy, and the company liked to employ young women because their delicate, dextrous hands made the work easier. The 100+ workers of the company’s plant extracted and purified radium from carnonite ore, mixed the special radium paint the company called Undark, and hand-painted the watches. ![]() Radium Corporation in 1917, to join other similar companies that had been operating since 1916. To capitalize on this demand, von Sochocky and Willis founded the U.S. The radium girls emergeĪ paint that glows in the dark proved to be excellent for manufacturing things like glow-in-the-dark watches for military use, and military need was urgent because the WWI was raging. Remember this nasty factoid, it will be important in a minute. In hindsight, this was particularly dangerous because ingested radium behaves much like calcium and goes right in your bones. Radium was viewed as a cure for arthritis and other ailments, and it featured in all sorts of products from cosmetics and toothpaste to jockstraps and lingerie, and even food and drink. The media praised radium as a miracle substance with no negative side effects, and people were ingesting elixirs containing trace amounts of it daily, much like you’d take vitamin pills. Because it had been successfully used to treat cancer in the early days, people had started to think of it as an all-healing superdrug. Unfortunately for the radium girls, the information about the material’s dangers was largely unavailable to anyone outside the scientific community. ![]() Von Sochocky and Willis were extremely familiar with radium’s dangers - in fact, von Sochocky once hacked off one of his fingers when it had become tainted with the radioactive element. This paint would go on to destroy hundreds, possibly even thousands of lives. In 1913, von Sochocky and another physician called George Willis experimented with radium and created a luminous, radium-based “paint” that made things glow in the dark. Radium girls skin#In fact, the Curies’ apprentice Sabin von Sochocky once heard Pierre say that he “ would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him.” ![]() At first, the highly radioactive material was very difficult to extract and there were only minuscule amounts available, and the Curies became extremely wary about the stuff after suffering multiple radiation burns from handling it. Chemistry and physics legends Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898. ![]()
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