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The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting radium dials – watch dials and hands with self-luminous paint. The incidents occurred at three factories in the United States: one in Orange, New Jersey , beginning around 1917; one in Ottawa, Illinois , beginning in the early 1920s; and one in ...
November 1917 ad for an Ingersoll "Radiolite" watch, one of the first watches mass marketed in the USA featuring a radium-illuminated dial. Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 [1] and was soon combined with paint to make luminescent paint, which was applied to clocks, airplane instruments, and the like, to be able to read them in the dark.
It was used primarily in radium dials for watches and clocks. The people working in the industry who applied the radioactive paint became known as the Radium Girls because many of them became ill and some died from exposure to the radiation emitted by the radium contained within the product.
During World War I and World War II, the company produced luminous watches and gauges for the United States Army for use by soldiers. [2] U.S. Radium workers, especially women who painted the dials of watches and other instruments with luminous paint, suffered serious radioactive contamination. Lawyer Edward Markley was in charge of defending ...
The resulting dials are now collectively known as radium dials. The luminous paint used on the dials contained a mixture of zinc sulfide activated with silver, and powdered radium, a product that the Radium Dial Company named Luma. However, unlike the US Radium Corporation, Radium Dial Company was specifically set up to only paint dials, and no ...
MIL-W-46374 is a specification first published on October 30, 1964, [1] for US military watches. [2] The 46374 was specified as an accurate, disposable watch. In its span, it encompassed metal and plastic cased watches with both mechanical and quartz movements. [2] The 46374 replaced the MIL-W-3818, reducing cost and inheriting the dial from ...
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In addition to alpha and beta particles, radium emits penetrating gamma rays, which can pass through the metal and glass of a watch dial, and skin. A typical older radium wristwatch dial has a radioactivity of 3–10 kBq and could expose its wearer to an annual dose of 24 millisieverts if worn continuously. [ 2 ]