Radium Girls was also one of Science Friday’s 2019 summer reading picks! Among other uses, entrepreneurs used radium to create “glow-in-the-dark” paint. That's right, they all glow! Photo from "Deadly Glow." Radium 223 is a mildly radioactive form of the metal radium.It's brand name is Xofigo (pronounced zoh-fee-go). Although ingesting radium is definitely harmful, it is less harmful to ingest it rather than inhale radium dust—according to the CDC, a large percentage (about 80%) of consumed radium should be quickly filtered out by the body. While lying on their sickbeds, the radium still shone from them, now beaming from their bones with its unearthly light. There was no way to remove the radium from the bones. The substance, the progenitor of all things “glow … Contact with radium can cause different bone diseases and cancers, as well as a host of other problems. Many old vintage watches—especially military watches—have gold or white-ish colored paint on their hands or the numbers on their dials. Join us on a deep dive that will cement your distaste for capitalism and make you really glad you live in a time where it's not common to have highly radioactive materials in … Kate Moore: They were just entranced by it! Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927, in the hopes that her bones would give still-living Radium Girls the evidence they needed to win in court. What made it all even worse is the fact that the radium inside their bones and bodies never stopped glowing, and emitted a bright, deadly light from under their skin. The radium bound to their bones like its chemical cousin, calcium, injuring, disfiguring and killing many of the 2,000 workers estimated to have been employed at peak. The following is an excerpt from The Radium Girls by Kate Moore.. Recommended The bones of the radium girls are believed to glow in their graves. When ingested, radium is particularly dangerous: "Chemically, it behaves very much like calcium," said Jorgensen. The first such studios were open in New Jersey, Newark, Illinois, and in Ottawa, Canada. ... covered in radium and glowing in the dark. For radium has a half-life of 1,600 years...and it is still embedded in their bones. According to NPR, US Radium hired scores of girls and young women — as young as just 11-years-old — to paint watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. A couple of new things related to my Radium Girls post have crossed my path this week, so I thought I’d drop them here for anyone who’s interested. When the girls looked at them in the mirror in the middle of the night, they understood that they were experiencing radium poisoning by seeing that they were glowing. Its most characteristic property is its intense radioactivity, which causes compounds of the element to display a faint bluish glow in the dark. ... Radium Dial, flat out denied responsibility, with Radium Dial going as far as to steal the radium-riddled bones in an attempt to cover up the situation. Radium is a silvery white metal that does not occur free in nature. But one of the biggest discoveries regarding radium was the fact that when it was mixed with zinc sulfide and a glue agent, it glowed in the dark. Even as I write, the radium girls will be glowing in their graves. But when workers began suffering from anemia, bone fractures, necrosis of the jaw, and eventually death, it became clear these women were misled. His upper and lower jaw had decayed – a condition called “radium jaw.” The deteriorating tissue was surgically removed, leaving him with a gaping hole where his mouth used to be. The story I find most haunting is that of the Radium Girls, the young painters of luminous watch dials in the 1920s. In the last scene of my daughter’s show, a character struts around puffing on a cigarette — yesterday’s radium. Coffin – Shutterstock – The Radium Girls weren’t just sick, they were very literally radioactive. Radium laced products were popular as tonics, even items that didn’t contain the material would use the name for a sheen of quality. This paint could potentially be made of a phosphorescent compound mixed with radium. Makes you wonder what ours is today. The ghost girls will be glowing in their graves for a good while yet. Girl using radium to paint clock face, Jan 1932. Radium jockstraps, face cream, cigarettes. Over time, workers began suffering from a host of health problems, including anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw — also known as “radium jaw.” You may know that radium has a half-life of 1,600 years. It was luminous. The Radium Girls had to be buried in lead-lined coffins. Byers had consumed more than three times the lethal dose of radium by the time he stopped taking Radithor in 1930. Luminous radium found a place in a dial-painting “studios” where glowing paint was applied to instrument gauges, clocks, and wristwatches for the USRC — United States Radium Company. The radium-based glow was from radioluminescence, or excitation of a dye compound by ionizing radioactive emission – the rate limiter in photon generation is the rate of radioactive emission. Martland understood that poisoning was fatal. Radium Brand Butter, anyone? When radium was discovered in 1898, it was thought only to give positive health benefits, and was used in everything from medical treatments to candy for children. The Radium Girls, women working for the US Radium factory around 1917, suffered bone fractures, radium jaw and other medical conditions caused by radiation poisoning from their work painting watch dials with radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint they were told was harmless. Frighteningly, the damaged bones began to shine due to radium. The former glowing goddesses had become ghost girls — scores of radioactive walking dead, full of radiant death that couldn’t be removed from their bodies. In the late 1920a and early 1930s, it was found that workers exposed to radium when handling radio-luminescent paints such as Undark, suffered serious health problems, including sores, anemia, and bone cancer.Many of these workers, included the watch dial painters referred to as ‘the radium girls,’ died from diseases cause by radiation.## As if just working with the paint wasn't bad enough, they were also encouraged to put the brush between their lips and twirl it … This paint contained radium, a radioactive element that gave the watches a subtle glow. Lip, dip, paint. What do lightbulbs, fireflies, and the long-buried bones of the Radium Girls all have in common? Along with another scientist, André-Louis Debierne, Marie isolated it as a pure metal in 1910. Radium, radioactive chemical element, the heaviest of the alkaline-earth metals of the periodic table. During WWI, watch factories employed thousands of women to paint glowing numbers on dial faces. However, once inside the body, these tiny glowing radium isotopes that emit alpha particles can wreak havoc. The symptoms that would afflict them later were unimaginable to the early dial painters. The girls were told that this was the best way to get the glowing paint perfectly onto the numbers of the watch faces. Reader, Robert Merkin brought the above poem to my attention. The watch faces only required less than a millionth of a gram of radium to glow. Cancer was eating away at his bones.