Workers were often encouraged to lick the tips of their paintbrushes in order to keep the tips pointed for more accurate painting, which resulted in many workers continually ingesting small amounts of radioactive material each workday. Radium was touted as a new miracle compound with fantastic medical potential-it was even believed to be a stomach cancer cure.īecause of all this, workers were unsurprisingly given little-to-no warning of the health dangers of handling such radioactive materials. Radium Corporation were well aware of the potential harm of interacting with radium, much of the rest of the population was lead to believe the opposite. While scientists and the owners of the U.S. Radium was used in watch paint beginning around 1910 well before the danger of radioactivity began to be understood.Īfter World War I and through the 1920s, radium-painted dials became very popular for both watches and clocks.Ĭompanies that produced radium-painted watch and clock dials, and other instruments typically hired young women to do the painting, and generally failed to disclose to them the potential hazards of working with the radioactive material. You can also make an educated guess concerning the age of the watch the older the watch, the more likely it is to contain radioactive material. These instruments will be able to pick up the radiation of a vintage radium-painted watch, but will not be able to detect other, non-radioactive glow-in-the-dark compounds, or tritium-painted compounds. The use of a Geiger counter or dosimeter to measure any present radiation levels.
The “<25” label signified that the watch included less than 25 millicuries of radioactive tritium. Similarly, a watch featuring tritium in its paint during this time would also be marked with two small Ts, or T<25 labels near the same six o’clock marker. Beginning around the 1950s or ’60s, watches dials began to be labeled this way in order to distinguish the element used in its markers. One is to look for an “R” or “Ra” located on the dial below the six o’clock marker. In the first of its kind study, this new data indicates a previously unconsidered risk to owning, collecting, and storing radium dial watches or other items that were typically coated in radium-infused paint.There are a couple ways to identify a radium-painted watch: Upon retesting it was discovered that the room’s radon level rose to 134 times the EPA recommended action level. The study was performed in a small bedroom and consisted of measuring the radon gas level for a baseline, then adding 30 radium dial watches to the room to see how much the radon level would change, if at all.
This lead most people to believe that radium was not an issue, unless of course you consumed it.įast forward 60 years – researchers from the University of Northampton understand that radium decays into radon gas, so could “vintage” clocks, watches, phones, etc., previously coated in radium paint influence radon gas levels as the radium naturally decays? As a result, by 1930 ‘pointing’ brushes was no longer done by mouth and incidences of malignancy due to radium was down to zero by 1950. Simply put they would lick the ends of the brushes to refine the bristles into a point, subsequently ingesting radium remnants from the brush. However the new found idea was not without its issues, and by 1925 a group of radium painters, later referred to as the Radium Girls, sued their employer over health issues believed to be stemming from the ingestion of radium through a practice called ‘pointing’ their brushes. Everyone was fascinated by this discovery leading to the application of the paint to clocks, telephones, and even airplane instrumentation panels, enabling the devices to be seen in the dark. In the first decade of the 20th century, scientists developed a way to mix radium 226 with paint to created ‘radioluminescent paint’.
0 kommentar(er)
