What happened when the first time the radium was found?
I won’t detail all about how radium is made up of. I will tell you about the
incidents that happened because of radium.
To start with, radium was discovered by the woman inventor called Marie Curie,
the first female noble prize winner. In 1898, Marie and her husband Pierre Curie
found two new elements from an ore called Pitchblende: radium (named after the
Latin word ray), polonium (named after Marie’s home country). Silvery and
lustrous radium seemed a lot like a miracle. Even Maria often referred to the
substance as beautiful radium. Not long after her discovery, radium had been
proven as an effective treatment for cancer, and many people mistakenly
believed that radium could even expand our lives, and they purported radium as
magic. Radium was marketed widely in many fields as the wonderful element that
provides health benefit and make women prettier. Manufacturers added radium
to almost every usable item. People drank radium water as a tonic, wore radium
cosmetics, and used products like butter, milk, toothpaste, and many other things
that contained radium.
The glowing wrist-watches painted with Phosphorescent paint that contained
radium widely became popular. The paint was also used in airplane instruments,
especially for soldiers in World War 1. As the luminescent watches were more
popular, the dial painter job became the common job for hundreds of women and
teenage girls at that time. The employers told that the radium paint was safe and
there was no harmful effect for them. So workers slipped the radium-painted
small brush between their lips to paint exactly the number on the small watch
dial. They averagely painted almost 200 watches per day, and that small amount
of radium for each number they painted was steadily poisoning them. They also
painted their nail, teeth, cheek, and dresses with radium as their attraction.
Not very long, the women working in factory began showing the sign of illness.
The radium was slowly poisoning and eating their bones. The workers were
experiencing many horrible symptoms like bones breaking, teeth coming out even
with the slightest touch, and spines collapsing. Some even had removed their jaw,
which was becoming rotting, and even Marie Curie herself died due to exposure
to large amounts of radiation. Although radium is a utility to treat cancer, that can
cause terrible effects on the blood (anemia), eyes (cataracts), teeth (broken
teeth), and bones (reduced bone growth). So please read carefully your beauty
cosmetic ingredients.