Radium Girls ( Radium Girls ) - the name by which women became known who worked at the enterprise of the American corporation United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, in 1917-1926, and who received radiation poisoning , painting the hands and dials hours radioluminescent paint.
Misled by the leadership of the company, whose representatives told them that radium was harmless, the workers received a lethal dose of radiation, licking the tips of their brushes with radium paint to restore their shape and, for fun, painting their nails and teeth with a luminous substance.
Five women affected by radiation filed a lawsuit against the company, which set a precedent for the right of individual workers who have acquired occupational disease to sue their employer.
Content
US Radium Corporation
Between 1917 and 1926, the United States Radium Corporation , originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation , mined and processed radium from carnotite ores to produce luminous paint sold under the Undark trademark (literally “diffusing darkness”). As a contractor in the military industry, the company was a leading supplier of radium-based radium watches for the army. Her factory in Illinois employed over a hundred workers, mostly women, who painted dials and watch hands with radium-based paint, which misled the company's management that this material is safe.
Exposure to radiation
The US Radium Corporation had a total of 70 women on staff to carry out various tasks related to radium, including its processing, although the owners of the company and scientists working in it knew about the effects of radium on humans and carefully avoided any contact with it. material. As evidence of this, the fact is given that the chemists of the factory used special lead shields, face masks and forceps when handling radium [1] . Moreover, US Radium has even published articles for the medical community describing the harmful effects of radium on the human body.
About 4,000 employees employed by the company in the United States and Canada were involved in the coloring of the dials with radium paint. They mixed glue, water and radium powder, and then using the camel hair brushes manually applied the resulting luminous paint to the watch parts. The level of payment for such work - taking into account the coloring of an average of 250 dials per day - was about one and a half cents for one dial (equivalent to 28 cents in 2014 prices). Since the tips of the brushes lost their shape after just a few strokes of paint, the US Radium management encouraged its workers to restore the shape of the brushes with their lips or tongues. For the sake of fun, many workers painted themselves with deadly paint produced at the factory, nails, teeth and faces [2] . It is still unknown how many of them died from radiation exposure.
Radiation Poisoning
Many factory workers later began to suffer from anemia, frequent fractures, and necrosis of the jaw — a condition now known as the radium jaw. According to some assumptions, the use of x-ray machines by the doctors who examined the workers during the illness contributed to the deterioration of the condition, as it gave additional radiation. As it turned out, at least one of these inspections was actually a trick - part of a public disinformation campaign that was launched by a contractor in the military-industrial sector [1] . US Radium Corporation and other companies involved in the production of radio-luminescent watches rejected claims that sick workers were affected by exposure to radium. For some time, doctors, dentists, and scientists complied with companies' demands not to publicize the true information at their disposal. Under pressure from companies, doctors attributed the death of female workers to other causes; in order to harm the reputation of women, it was often claimed that they allegedly suffered from syphilis, common in those days [3] .
Significance of the incident
Litigation
This case of abuse of workers differed from most similar cases in that the trial in the case ultimately received widespread media coverage. Grace Fryer, one of the factory workers, decided to file a lawsuit, but only after two years of searching she managed to find a lawyer who was ready to confront the court of Radium Corporation . A total of five factory workers - Grace Fryer, Edna Hassman, Catherine Schaub and sisters Quinta MacDonald and Albina Laris - took part in the lawsuit and became known in media publications under the name "Radium Girls".
In the fall of 1928, the parties reached an agreement, not bringing the case to a full trial by jury. The settlement agreement provided for the lump-sum payment of each of the “radium girls” $ 10,000 ($ 137,000 in 2014 prices) and the establishment of an annual pension of $ 600 ($ 8,200 in 2014 prices) for the rest of their lives, as well as payment of all legal and medical expenses associated with the disease [4] [5] .
Influence on History
As a result of the lawsuit and its wide media coverage, a legal precedent was created that led to the adoption in the United States of the rules governing labor protection standards in the field of hazardous production.
The history of “radium girls” also occupied an important place in history in connection with its influence on the development of science - in relation to the identification, assessment and control of health risks from ionizing radiation and the definition of rules for the safe use of equipment emitting radiation, as well as in the field of movement development for the empowerment of workers. The process of “radium girls” created a precedent regarding the right of an individual worker to sue for damages in connection with harm to his health received through the fault of the employing company. The industrial safety standards adopted after the incident were significantly improved in the following decades.
The lawsuit and its accompanying publicity in the media became one of the factors in the adoption of a special law on occupational diseases in the United States [6] . Workers involved in the coloring of watch dials began to be instructed, trained in precautionary measures and equipped with protective clothing; in particular, they began to be informed that the shape of the tip of the brush with paint cannot be restored with the lips, and that swallowing or inhaling the paint should be avoided. The use of radium paint for coloring the dials and hands of the watch continued until the end of the 60s of the XX century [7] .
The story of the “radium girls” was mentioned in one way or another in many books and films, including Kurt Vonnegut ’s JailBird .
Impact on Science
In 1933, Robley Evans took the first measurements of the exhalation of radon and the content of radium in the discharge of a former employee of the company. While working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he collected reliable data on the content of substances in the body of 27 former employees. The data obtained were used in 1941 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish an acceptable level of passive radiation of radium at 0.1 microns Ci (3.7 k Bq ).
In 1968, a center for the study of human radiobiology was established at the Argonne National Laboratory . The main goal of the center was medical observations of former dyers of radium factories who were still alive. The project was also focused on collecting information, and in some cases was collecting and studying tissue samples from former dyers. By the time the project was completed in 1993, detailed information was collected on 2,403 cases. Symptoms of radiation poisoning were not diagnosed in those dyes whose radiation dose was less than a thousand times higher than the normal level of the radium-226 isotope, measured in people who were not exposed to radiation, which laid the foundation for determining the risk threshold for malignant tumors due to radiation [8] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Undark and the Radium Girls • Damn Interesting
- ↑ Grady, Denise . A Glow in the Dark, and a Lesson in Scientific Peril , The New York Times (October 6, 1998). Date of treatment November 25, 2009.
- ↑ Mullner, R. Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy. - American Public Health Association , 1999. - ISBN 9780875532455 .
- ↑ Kovarik, Bill The Radium Girls (link not available) . (originally published as chapter eight of Mass Media and Environmental Conflict ) . RUNet.edu (2002). Date of treatment January 27, 2007. Archived July 21, 2009.
- ↑ CPI Inflation Calculator
- ↑ Mass Media & Environmental Conflict - Radium Girls (link not available) . Date of treatment August 1, 2009. Archived July 21, 2009.
- ↑ Oliveira, Pedro. The Elements: Periodic Table Reference . - pediapress.com, 2012 .-- P. 1192.
- ↑ Rowland, RE Radium in Humans: A Review of US Studies . - Argonne, Illinois: Argonne National Laboratory, 1994.