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Maddy Padmanabhan
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There have been countless horror stories about various phenomena discovered throughout the course of scientific history. You’ve probably heard it all: toxic fumes and substances, chemical weapons, and failed experiments. It turns out that there is one single phenomenon that checks all of those boxes: radioactivity. However, despite all the cautions taken nowadays when dealing with radioactive chemicals, there used to be an age in which it was championed as the ultimate cure to practically everything. Of course, during this time period there were many breakthroughs in the areas of chemistry, the discovery of radioactive elements included, which meant there was more mystery surrounding them at the time. Nevertheless, the dangers of radioactivity always seemed to lie in what we didn’t know then, and what continues to be unknown today.
On March 1, 1896, Henry Becquerel discovered the concept of radioactivity, a term later coined by Marie Curie when she identified certain radioactive elements. He held potassium uranyl sulfate up to the sunlight and placed it on some photographic plates, believing that the substance would absorb the sun’s rays and emit it as x-rays. Instead, he discovered that the substance emitted radiation without the external source of energy from the sun. The main difference he observed was that x-rays are neutral and cannot be bent in a magnetic field, but this new emission could be bent, so it must have had a different charge and properties. This discovery led Becquerel to develop classes of radioactivity based on the direction they deflected in when put in a magnetic field: positive, negative, and electrically neutral.
Credit: Stanford.edu
Discoveries regarding radioactive substances did not stop at Becquerel’s. Marie Curie, the famed chemist whose observations and experimentation eventually cost her life, managed to come across individual elements exhibiting radioactive characteristics. She extracted uranium from a pitchblende ore and found that the leftover ore showed the presence of other radioactive elements. From this, she discovered radium and polonium, the former of which was produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Ernest Rutherford, a physicist credited with the discovery of the nucleus, built on the types of radioactive particles known at the time. By studying properties of radioactive decay, he developed three categories of particles based on their ability to penetrate matter: alpha, beta, and gamma rays.
The breakthroughs with radioactivity ushered in an era in which radium was hailed as the cure-all element. Being advertised across the globe, it became a staple in several consumer products, such as toothpaste and makeup. It was highly regarded as the most expensive material in the world, more valuable than diamonds by weight, valued at about $100,000 per gram, which is about $1.3 million today. The craze surrounding radium saw the emergence of an extremely lucrative business: watch face painting. The United States Radium Corporation (USRC) developed a paint called “Undark,” consisting of radium-226 and zinc sulfide, which would glow in the dark. Young girls and women were hired to paint hundreds of watch faces for soldiers fighting in World War I. These dial painters earned generous salaries, and in conjunction with the fact that they were in close contact with a miracle substance like radium every day, watch painting became a very sought-after job.
Credit: The Washington Post
Credit: Today In History
Despite the fact that both Curie and the higher-ups at USRC were aware of the dangers, of course, they wouldn’t stop this business right at the turn of the century, when they were enjoying great profits. They chose to employ a painting technique that nowadays would be seen as horrifyingly unsanitary and dangerous; the dial painters had to point the brushes in their mouths to give them a precise tip. The girls ended up consuming dangerous potent quantities of radium, about 2 grams of paint per day, and began to feel the deadly effects over time. Radioactive poisoning, which caused jaw necrosis, tooth loss, bone fractures, and cancer slowly but surely took hold of the workers. There were cases in which their bodies mistook radium for calcium and fortified their bones with it, allowing the chemical to rot the jawbones from the inside out before spreading to the rest of their bodies. Almost all of the dial painters suffered violent, agonizing deaths that almost went completely under USRC’s radar. However, the surviving girls filed a lawsuit against the company for wrongful death, and laid the foundation for modern-day sanitation laws, labor condition standards, and the organization of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The lesson with radium was learned by the world quite quickly through the Radium Girls’ stories, which led to lots more being uncovered about radioactive substances. Nowadays we regard it with high care and caution, but still utilize it in different cancer treatments. There is still so much left unanswered about radioactivity, for example, the long-term effects of prolonged low-level exposure and how exactly various substances decay. It is nonetheless very clear that this scientific breakthrough has left its indelible mark on the development of safety standards, which serves to highlight just how uncertain the future of science is when it comes to handling these deadly chemicals; how much do we really know about what this phenomenon can do?
Maddy Padmanabhan
Maddy Padmanabhan
Class of 2027
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