She was most likely recruited because of her experience at NBS and perhaps recommended by Dorsey. Shortly after Dorsey took a leave of absence from NBS in June 1920, Hughes left to take a position as a physicist at the USRC, then known as the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation. He had firsthand knowledge about the dangers: Handling radium samples had burned Dorsey’s hands. From Hughes' first days on the job, Dorsey had alerted her to the hazards of radium - information not known to the public. The faster the leaf moved - observed through a small window in the electroscope - the more radioactive the sample. When Hughes placed a small amount of radium at a fixed distance from the electroscope, gamma radiation emitted by the radioactive sample entered the chamber and ionized the air, causing the electroscope to discharge and the leaf to move back to its original position. When Hughes applied a voltage to the electroscope, the suspended gold leaf accumulated charge and tilted relative to its original position. That device consisted of a small lead-lined chamber with a thin gold leaf suspended from a metal rod.
This 1928 photo from NIST's archives shows a gold-leaf electroscope used for radioactivity measurements. Hired in 1919, she had been tasked with calibrating sealed radium sources using a gold-leaf electroscope that her supervisor, physicist Noah Dorsey, had helped develop. As a former laboratory assistant in the radium section of NIST, then called the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), Hughes had just the right credentials. Raymond Berry, the lawyer representing the women, needed an expert who could measure the radiation and present the data in a convincing manner to the court.Įnter 30-year-old physicist Elizabeth Hughes. The judge rejected their claims, and a hearing finally took place in 1928. They argued that because the women had left the job several years before they fell ill, the radium paint could not have caused their ailments.
RADIUM POISONING MEANING TRIAL
Apparently hoping that the plaintiffs would die by the time the trial began, the company lawyers tried various delay tactics. Radium Corporation (USRC), based in Orange, New Jersey. In 1925, five of the women filed a lawsuit against the U.S. The radium girls, as the newspapers called them, were still in their 20s many were newlyweds with young children. Her teeth began falling out on their own, and during one examination her jawbone shattered against the light touch of her dentist’s hand. 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.
RADIUM POISONING MEANING 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.
RADIUM POISONING MEANING FULL
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. Women working at a factory of the United States Radium Corporation, 1922
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