Adding to the allure of the job, the girls were listed as ‘artists’ in their town directories. The Radium Girls actually believed they were getting healthier by working with the new wonder drug – the most expensive substance in the world at the time, costing the equivalent of $2.2 million per gram in today’s money. By putting the brushes in their mouths, the Radium Girls were especially at risk – so why did they do it? “Because it was the easiest way to get a fine point on the brush, to paint on numbers as small as a single millimeter in width,” said Moore.Ī 1924 ad for a radium hair treatment. The luminous paint, which worked by converting the radiation into light through a fluorescent chemical, was one of the most successful radium-based products. How soon they develop depends upon the dose, but at the very high doses that the Radium Girls were exposed to, just a few years.” So the major health risk of ingesting radium is radiation-induced bone necrosis and bone cancers. “Since the body uses calcium to make bone, ingested radium is mistaken for calcium and gets incorporated into bone. When ingested, radium is particularly dangerous: “Chemically, it behaves very much like calcium,” said Jorgensen. The headline of a Wall Street Journal story about his death reads, “The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off.” One user, American socialite and athlete Eben Byers, became notorious for drinking a bottle of Radithor every day for years – and then dying from it in 1932. “Radium products were used for any ailment where lack of energy was seen to be the root cause – from common fatigue to impotence,” Jorgensen said in an email.įar from being a panacea, radium was deadly. And they didn’t see how adding some energy to their bodies could possibly be harmful, said Timothy Jorgensen, a radiation expert at Georgetown University and author of “ Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation.” “People knew that radioactivity released energy.
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