#Cancer from radium dial watch skin#

Her dentist extracted several teeth, but the wounds from those extractions never healed and Mollie’s pain worsened. Mollie Maggia, who had worked at the Orange, New Jersey, plant for four years, began complaining of severe mouth pain. Some had aplastic anemia, others had collapsed hips and backbones so damaged that they needed braces from the neck to the waist in order to stand up straight. The alpha radiation in the paint they had ingested had eaten away their bones from the inside out.

#Cancer from radium dial watch skin#

Salesmen hawked radium face creams that would literally set the skin aglow and, they promised, extend the lives of those who used it.īut by the late 1920s, many of the women involved in this work had fallen dangerously ill, and several had died of suspected radiation poisoning. Doctors used it to treat colds and cancers. The stuff fizzed and gave off a mysterious blue-green light. The women had little reason to doubt those assurances: Radium had been hailed as a miracle substance ever since Marie and Pierre Curie had discovered it in 1898. When some of the women inquired whether lip pointing, as the technique was known, was really safe, the supervisors assured them it was. The numerals glowed because the paint contained radium.īecause the work required fine detail to paint the tiny numbers, the factory supervisors instructed the women to lick their camel-hair brushes to a point before and after dipping the brushes in the radium paint.

Below is a condensed version of the full story that you can read here.īeginning in the 1910s and continuing through the 1920s, more than 3,000 girls and young women seized upon a new and unusual work opportunity: painting glow-in-the-dark numerals on the dials of watches, clocks and military equipment. He recently reviewed NIST’s connection with the radium dial workers - notably the role of one heroic woman - in the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Radiation expert and historian Bert Coursey, who has worked at NIST for 50 years, writes extensively on the history of radium and radiation standards.