Radium employee stricken with radium poisoning. Radium on behalf of Grace Fryer, a former U.S. In 1927 Raymond Berry, a New Jersey attorney, filed a lawsuit against U.S. When the dangers of radioactive paint began to receive media attention in the 1920s after numerous workers began to fall ill from unknown causes, investigations into the working environments of these companies showed just how lax their regard for the safety of their workers was. 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. There are a couple ways to identify a radium-painted watch:

Radium poisoning from their watches