Since the rays could not be felt by the senses, and there seemed to be no immediate effect on exposed skin, the general consensus was that X-rays were harmless. German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays, and their initial diagnostic value, in 1895. Radioactivity was a relatively new and poorly understood phenomenon in the early 20th century. Radium dial painters who contributed significantly to expanding the legal protections afforded American workers and increasing public awareness of the dangers of radioactivity. One striking example of this is the case of the “Radium Girls”-five U.S. It was comfortable and pleasant compared to most factory work of the time, and the dial painters had no reason to believe this amazing new substance called radium wasn’t perfectly safe to work with.Īs has often been repeated in the past century and a half of quantum leaps in science, industry and medicine, overexuberance to adopt the latest discoveries has sometimes surpassed our ability to completely understand their potential negative effects. Radium needed hundreds of new workers to fulfill its lucrative contracts and found young women to be ideally suited for the intense concentration and nimble handwork that dial painting required. Upon the United States entry into World War I in April, there developed a demand for a wide variety of devices to be coated with the glowing radium-treated paint, trade named Undark. Along with 70 other young women hired at the plant that spring, Fryer would be earning more than triple the average factory-floor wage to apply a newly formulated luminescent paint to watches, clocks, compasses and an assortment of military instruments. When Grace Fryer landed a job at the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, New Jersey, in 1917, she must have felt special and very lucky. How the 'Radium Girls' Helped Shape American Labor Laws | HistoryNet Close
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