Radium: Miracle. Medicine. Poison.Episode 52:10
The Government Weighed the Miracle
While workers ingested invisible traces, laboratories measured an industry producing radium by the gram.
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Transcript
Dial painters used their lips to give brushes a fine point.
After radium was discovered, the market became infatuated with it.
In 1903, Tanakadate brought radium from Europe to Japan: only 10 milligrams.
By 1913, fluorescent paint mixed radium-226, zinc sulfide, additives.
In 1914, von Sochocky and George Willis founded a luminous-materials corporation.
The dangers of radiation exposure were not fully understood.
A laboratory chemist instructed the painters beside their tiny dials: The point has to stay sharp.
In World War I, luminous paint supplied dials and signs for ships and aircraft.
In one fiscal year, a government bureau completed more than 1,400 calibrations totaling 25.5 grams.
In 1920, U.S. output was 32.5 grams. Standard Chemical accounted for 18.5 grams.
Elizabeth Hughes was a lab assistant in the National Bureau’s Radium Section.
Hughes moved a sealed source toward the electroscope for measurement.
Hughes recorded the measurement as the electroscope needle settled.
By 1921, von Sochocky oversaw refining about 30 grams of radium.
Across Japan, hot springs, pills, cosmetics, groceries joined the radioactive market.
In 1916, Kosakai called it an era of radium or radiation.
Victor Hess listed Elizabeth Hughes as coauthor on a 1922 Physical Review paper.
January 1923: written suspicion tied radium to an occupational disease.
That year, a public report described jaw osteomyelitis in a young dial painter.
By 1925, Harvard researchers tied exposure to blood changes and jaw necrosis.
The measured miracle had a human cost. What could that tiny beginning become?
Where it leaves off
While American laboratories measured radium by the gram, Japan was turning ten milligrams into a national dream.
Sources
- Radium dial workers: back to the future - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
- Introduction - Radium: Topics in Chronicling America - Research Guides at Library of Congressguides.loc.govsecondary
- Radium traffic: radiation, science and spiritualism in early twentieth-century Japan - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
- The National Bureau of Standards and the Radium Dial Painters - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
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