In 1917 a young female right out of high school started working at a radium factory in Orange, New Jersey. The job was mixing water, glue and radium powder for the task of painting watch dials, aircraft switches, and instrument dials. The paint is newly inventive and cool so without hesitation she paints her nails and lips with her friends all the while not knowing that this paint that is making them radiant, is slowly killing them. This was the life of Grace Fryer. Today there are trepidations on the topic of radiation from fears of nuclear fallout, meltdowns, or acts of terrorism. This uneasiness is a result of events over the past one hundred years showing the dangers of radiation. Although most accidents today leading to death from radiation poisoning occur from human error or faults in equipment, the incident involving the now named "radium girls" transpired from lack of public awareness and safety laws. (introduce topics of the paper)
The Radium Luminous Material Corporation was founded in 1914 (renamed in 1921 to the United States Radium Corporation) by Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis becoming the first U.S. company to produce radioluminescent paint. The paint used by this particular company was the trademarked "Undark", invented by William J. Hammer through mixing radium, zinc sulfide and glue with the help from Marie and Pierre Currie and Henri Becquerel. The corporation hired hundreds of women having no trouble finding employees, being one of the few companies at the time to hire women. Business was surging with the defense contract obtained by filling the demand during World War I by making equipment for soldiers luminescent, enabling reading at night. The company even marketed other i...
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...to establish the tolerance level for radium. The center for Human Radiobiology was established in 1968 with the primary purpose of examining living dial painters.
The events involving the radium girls is significant today because of the awareness brought to the public about the dangers of radium, ending the consumer craze. Public awareness was and still is the most powerful tool of prevention. The corrupted corporations of the early 1900s have been forced to conform to a standard in protecting their employees from occupational exposure thanks to the dial painters who stood up for a better future. Events involving the dial painters have lead to the gathering of scientific information without such events would not be possible. The individual in the United States now has rights as a worker because of sparks set off from the mortars dropped by the radium girls.
In chapter 8 titled "Radium (Ra)" of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, the most interesting story developed within this chapter was the death of dial workers at Orange, New Jersey after been exposed to radium every day. It was interesting due to the fact that radium was used everywhere in the community and was never thought it could harm anyone. Radium was a super element that was used everywhere, but its continuous use unmasked its fatal habits. As it was stated in the text, "Radiant health, the ads proclaimed-beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight." (Blum 179). People were accepting radium as a natural gold element but they haven't realized constant contact
Brown took her time to interview people and look through archives to get the raw scenery of what happened behind closed doors. The third part was “The Plutonium Disasters.” She brought light to how dangerous it was to work and live there, and most of the people in the camp did not know how it can affect their body. Dr. Herbert Parker, the head of the Health Physics Division, “estimated there were eight hundred million flakes of [plutonium], which, if sucked into workers’ lungs or [ingested], could lodge in soft organs and remain in the body of years, a tiny time bomb that Parker feared would produce cancer” (Brown 166). This radioactive element that workers are producing is not just affecting the environment, but is also affecting the workers and their families. Brown has given an immense amount of evidence to explain to the readers how it affected so many of the workers’ health; she gives a vivid picture of how the radioactivity and particles of plutonium lingers in the air. The affects to the workers and their family ranges from cancerous cells to organ deterioration, when a pregnant woman is exposed to it, the health of her baby is also at risk. The fourth and last part of the book is “Dismantling the Plutonium Curtain,” this curtain is the curtain of secrecy. Brown interviewed people who lived in the camps as children and also people who worked there. Many of the people she
In 1920, Marie Curie and some of her colleagues created the Curie Foundation, whose mission was to provide both the scientific and medical divisions of the Radium Institute with adequate resources. Over the next two decades, the Curie Foundation became a major international force in the treatment of cancer.
...d them to end the war with Japan. But not only did they create bombs, but they also found a new way to power the spreading cities of America. Also, even though many knew the power of a nuclear bomb, they couldn’t have predicted the lasting effects on the land and the people. So within this scientific experiment we have learned that nuclear radiation can cause genetic mutations, the formation of cataracts, leukemia, and a shortened life (Document I).
The experiment accidents killed thousands of people and damaged the town they were living in. Some people doesn’t was to move from that place because they stated that their parents raised them here and it is a priority to live here. The explosions were really big and they destroyed the whole area. The people who were involved in this test didn’t know what they were doing until, it slowly killed them. Many scientists have died because of cancer and other diseases of the cause of radioactive surroundings that they are involved in during experiments.
“I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation” (Williams 275). This author uses real life situations from her life to create this short story. Her story reflects on what she thought had been a flash in the night her whole life until talking with her father. Indeed, it had not been a flash in the night and was instead a bomb during the Nuclear War testing. “On August 30, 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a suit was filed entitled “Irene Allen vs. the United States of America.” Mrs. Allen was the first to be alphabetically listed with twenty-four test cases, representative of nearly 1200 plaintiffs seeking compensation from the United States government for cancers caused from nuclear testing in Nevada” (Williams 277). With cancer being so common in the Utah area where the Nuclear testing was done many people wondered if there was a connection. “It was the first time a federal court had determined that nuclear tests had been the cause of cancers” (Williams 278). Some plaintiffs had been awarded and the other cases of this matter were not proved that nuclear testing had resulted in cancer. This was a strong topic amongst the Utah community and the United States that is still up in the air to this very day. Terry cannot prove or disprove that all these people had developed cancer from the nuclear fallout, but it is
Discovered that certain chemicals glowed when exposed to cathode rays. These chemicals were special because they weren’t deflected by the magnetic field produced in the cathode ray tube (which was built by Sir William Crookes in 1870).
This text provides a historical account of the development of the atomic bomb and nuclear fission. It provides insight into the function and effectiveness of the Manhattan Project, as well as the destruction of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book illustrates human determination, the ability to perform during times of crisis, and again brings up the question of morality and human
The Radium Girls was the nickname given to hundreds of young women who worked in clock factories in the early 1900s in the U.S. and in Canada. The women painted and sold over 1,000,000 watch dials with a luminous radium paint to make them glow in the dark. The girls were referred to as the Ghost Girls in their time because they would physically shine at nighttime due to the radium on their skin from the factories. They also licked their paint brushes every time they picked them up after making a mark on the watch dials to make a finer tip on the brush. The ingestion of radium caused devastating side effects for the girls because of the gamma radiation that radium emits (Moore, 2017). Gamma radiation refers to gamma rays which can cause stochastic (random) health risks such as cancer.
Discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth uranium has been around for a while. But merely in the last few decades have we begun to understand how important and life changing it is. It first began with Henri Antoine Becqurel’s discovery in 1896 that uranium was radioactive which led to Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmans discovery of uranium fissionability in 1938. From then on the ideas of harnessing the power began to flow resulting in the first nuclear powerplant the “Chicago Pile-1” built December the 2nd 1942
...of “setting some dose limits for the workers and civilians, monitoring and labeling radioactive materials, setting up signs around radioactive areas to alert others of what is going on, reporting any loss of the radioactive wastes, and setting up punishments for anybody who does not abide by these rules” (“Radioactive Waste Production”).
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
...S make amends for human radiation experiments." JAMA. v274, n12. September 27, 1995. pp. 933.
The impact of nuclear power on the modern world has improved Various sectors of the economy and society .i.e. Food and Agriculture, Insect control, Food Preservation, Water Resources, Military, Medicine, Research and Industry. “In 1911 George de Hevesy conducted the first application of a radioisotope. At the time de Hevesy was a young Hungarian student working in Manchester with naturally radioactive materials. Not having much money he lived in modest accommodation and took his meals with his landlady. He began to suspect that some of the meals that appeared regularly might be made from leftovers from the preceding days or even weeks, but he could never be sure. To try and confirm his suspicions de Hevesy put a small amount of radioactive material into the remains of a meal. Several days later when the same dish was served again he used a simple radiation detection instrument - a gold leaf electroscope - to check if the food was radioactive. It was, and de Hevesy's suspicions were confirmed.
One of the greatest events of twentieth century was the use of radioisotope as a source of energy and as medical and industrial tools. Using radioactivity has been a global issue owing to its very nature. When it is used for peaceful purposes, it is a triumph of science because it can solve energy problems in the form of nuclear energy but the side effects in the form of harmful radiation and harmful radioactive waste is the real limitations of science. This essay will attempt to analyze the application of science in the use of radioactivity and radioactive isotopes and how science is not so effective in dealing with the side effects.