Radium: Miracle. Medicine. Poison.Episode 92:18
The Nobel Scientist Inside the Factory
As radium accumulated inside workers, the renamed U.S. Radium Corporation expanded its scientific authority.
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Transcript
Von Sochocky produced fluorescent paint for commercial use in 1913.
In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium, captivating the market.
By 1904, glowing radium appeared in paint, cocktails, and consumer goods.
By 1913, reports even described it reducing malignant growths.
After studying radioactivity with the Curies, von Sochocky mixed radium-226 with zinc sulfide.
Alpha particles excited the zinc sulfide, creating a continuous light source.
In 1914, von Sochocky and George Willis founded Radium Luminous Materials Corporation.
By 1917, its Orange, New Jersey complex had several buildings.
By 1921, von Sochocky supervised extracting and refining about 30 grams of radium.
Earlier, National Bureau of Standards logged over 1,400 calibrations in fiscal year ending June 30th, 1920.
Together, those calibrations totaled 25.5 grams.
In August 1920, Elizabeth Hughes joined its electroscope lab.
She had previously worked at the Bureau of Standards under Noah Dorsey.
After World War I, military signage demand fell, and the company reorganized.
The new name was the U.S. Radium Corporation.
In 1921, Victor Hess joined U.S. Radium Corporation after discovering cosmic rays in 1912.
Hess would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Radium dial painters were mainly women in the commercial luminous-dial market.
Before the mid-to-late 1920s, painters used their lips to shape brushes.
In 1928, Hughes told a New Jersey Chancery Court about injured dial painters' measurements.
Earlier, a January 1923 written suspicion linked radium to an occupational disease.
That year, a young dial painter's jaw was publicly reported as failing.
Where it leaves off
Inside the U.S. Radium Corporation's scientific world, expertise was growing; outside it, a former painter's jaw was beginning to fail.
Sources
- The National Bureau of Standards and the Radium Dial Painters - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
- Introduction - Radium: Topics in Chronicling America - Research Guides at Library of Congressguides.loc.govsecondary
- Radium dial workers: back to the future - PMCpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govsecondary
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