Radium Quotes

But chiefly, no lies! No lies about there being a Santa Claus or about the world being full of noble and honorable people all eager to help each other and do good to each other. I'll tell her there are honor and goodness in the world, the same as there are diamonds and radium.

The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

Certein bodies... become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for mankind.

We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs.

I would argue that masturbation is the human animal's most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it's doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn't first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or "knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom"). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe.

Little Willie, full of glee, Put radium in grandma's tea. Now he thinks it quite a lark To see her shining in the dark.

Radium is not to enrich any one. It is an element; it is for all people.

You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.

I carry a secret sense of accomplishment around with me, like a radium pack implanted near my heart that now leaches a quiet sense of relief through my system.

Radium, he determined, was dangerous. It was just that nobody told the girls…

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story. Grace Fryer: the girl who fought on when all hope seemed gone; the woman who stood up for what was right, even as her world fell apart. Grace Fryer, who inspired so many to stand up for themselves.

For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction.

We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.

Lip… Dip… Paint.

My body means nothing but pain to me,” Grace revealed, “and it might mean longer life or relief to the others, if science had it. It’s all I have to give.

Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.

Tonight, history was going to be made. And it wasn't the discovery-of-radium, first-man-on-the-moon happy kind of history. It was the Spanish-Inquisition, here-comes-the-Hindenburg bad kind of history.

Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.” Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger… Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.

Radium eats the bone,” an interview with Grace later said, “as steadily and surely as fire burns wood.

It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.

Her love for him is not something that can be changed— it’s physics, not emotion: It’s the exact weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.

The radium girls,” the governor announced, “deserve the utmost respect and admiration…because they battled a dishonest company, an indifferent industry, dismissive courts and the medical community in the face of certain death. I hereby proclaim September 2, 2011, as Radium Girls Day in Illinois, in recognition of the tremendous perseverance, dedication, and sense of justice the radium girls exhibited in their fight.

With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.

What was the first case that you heard of?” asked Berry. “I don’t remember the name,” replied Roeder coldly. The dial-painters weren’t important enough for him to recall such insignificant details.

Never has the promise of glowing skin been more dangerously apt than in the early years of the twentieth century when radium was commonly used as a featured ingredient in beauty products. (credit 7.11) Thanks

Sarah wasn’t even in her grave before her former company was denying it was to blame.

Why should I be so afflicted?” she would later ask. “I have never harmed a living thing. What have I done to be so punished?

If Newton had not, as Wordsworth put it, voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have. If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J. K. Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter. That is why Master Potter means so much to me. Science may be special but Harry, as a work of art, is more so. Harry Potter is unique.

What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment.

The girls,” remembered a local resident of the time, “were ‘good Catholic girls’ who were raised not to challenge authority.

Wars are hungry machines—and the more you feed them, the more they consume.

The element was dubbed “liquid sunshine,

The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was expanding massively, and the new site comprised several buildings, all located in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

The executives of the Radium Dial Company had confirmed knowledge of radium poisoning since at least 1925, less than three years after their studio first opened in Ottawa.

Oh no, the local doctor said, it was definitely not radium poisoning

girls had no choice but to lip-point, as there was no other way to clean off the radium

Von Sochocky’s breath, as it turned out, contained more radiation than anyone they had tested so far.

Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary.

The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died. “The first case that was called to my attention,” Martland later remarked, “was a Dr.

Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: “When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.

Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors,

as for swearing that nobody told the girls radium wouldn’t hurt them—unfortunately for the company, a full-page ad signed by its president and printed in several editions of the local newspaper asserted exactly that.

Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers... And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day's work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square. Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital 'G', there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by. Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.

That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and Martland devised his tests. The executives had read Kjaer’s studies, attended the radium conference and seen the Eben Byers story: they knew radium was dangerous.

the industry got away with murder.

The decay in Irene’s jaw was eating her alive, bit by bit.

the hospitals where she’d been treated refused to release her records.

The moment, is the diamond of life

Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

Yet she was brave about it. “It had to be done,” she went on, “had to be told, or else how would we be able to fight for the justice that was due us?”13

Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears.

The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.

Watch and clock faces, fingernails, military instrument panels, gun sights and even children’s toys glowed with radium, hand-painted in factories by young women working for the United States Radium Corporation. The unsuspecting artisans would lick their brushes - ingesting radium particles each time - to keep the tips pointed during the precision work, but years later their teeth and skulls began to disintegrate.

In 1978, researchers exhumed Peg’s body from St. Columba Cemetery, where she had been resting alongside her parents. They discovered she had 19,500 microcuries of radium in her bones—one of the highest quantities found. It was more than 1,000 times the amount scientists then considered safe.

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by. Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche - even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.

Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing—the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving. But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolizing extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.

Why didn’t their basic humanity compel them to end the practice of lip-pointing?

had eaten away at her skull until her jawbones had holes riddled right through them.

Almost a year on, the company had not lifted a finger to help her.

To offend such a prestigious institution as USRC would not be wise.

Her whole head was rotting, but she was still alive.

if we were to give the medical reports to you girls there would be a riot

the delicate work of dial-painting; records show that some were as young as eleven.

Catherine Wolfe, fired for being sick,

wealthy consumers were much more worthy of protection than working-class girls;

in 2015, the cleanup was still going on.

There was nothing hazardous in the paint, the doctors promised:

the tests happened often, the girls never learned the results.

No one was willing to do anything about it,

the war in Europe had left America mostly untouched, except for the economic boom it brought.

As the firm had actively conducted a campaign to mislead the girls, it should not be allowed to rely upon the delay, which it had caused, as a defense.

Safety standards only keep you safe if the companies you work for use them.

Tom would later confide that she “cries but rarely smiles; she has forgotten how to laugh.”11

It should have been done a long time ago,

Mrs. Donohue, this remnant of a woman, took on her role as president of this strange society,” he later wrote. “She lay motionless, but she was business-like.

painters who were still working for USRC participated anonymously, for fear of jeopardizing their jobs.

It is an effort to do things in the ordinary way, to act normally,” confessed Pearl. “I don’t show it, but at present I am nervous and shaking. What I have lost I can never recover.

Within sixty hours, Sarah’s bones caused exposure on the film: white fog-like patches against the ebony black. Just as the girls’ glow had once done, as they walked home through the streets of Orange after work, her bones had made a picture: an eerie, shining light against the dark.

despite her dislike of the work, she was drawn back to the studio the following day. “She stayed because of the money,”15 a relative remarked somberly. Those high wages were so hard to say no to.

The dial-painters’ case ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now works nationally in the United States to ensure safe working conditions.

If Mrs. Donohue dies before a final ruling,” he said solemnly, “her estate under the law would receive nothing.”20 Perhaps that was why Magid immediately requested a postponement; but it was not granted.

It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it. The example of the discoveries of Nobel is characteristic, as powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who lead the peoples towards war. I am one of those who believe with Nobel that mankind will derive more good than harm from the new discoveries.

The girls shone “like the watches did in the darkroom,”8 as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.

Sarah was dead—but her bones seemed very much alive: making impressions on photographic plates; carelessly emitting measurable radioactivity. It was all due, of course, to the radium. Sarah’s own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her had a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah’s bones for centuries, long after she was gone. Even though it had killed her, it kept on bombarding her body “every day, every week, month after month, year after year.”15

That is the voice of the ghost women speaking not only here in this room but to the world. This voice is going to strike the shackles off the industrial slaves of America. You girls have rights to better laws. That’s what the society is going to work for.

Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn’t first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami (or “knocking a few protons off the old hydrogen atom”). The same goes for Marie Curie. Before she discovered radium, you can be certain she first discovered the little man in the canoe.

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently—as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element—other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them.

Oh, that luminosity. That glow. Katherine Drinker was stunned by it. As the women undressed in the darkroom, she witnessed the dust lingering on their breasts, their undergarments, the inside of their thighs. It scattered everywhere, as intimate as a lover’s kiss, leaving its trace as it wound around the women’s limbs, across their cheeks, down the backs of their necks, and around their waists… Every inch of them was marked by it, by its feather-light dance that touched their soft and unseen skin. It was spectacular—and tenacious, once it had infiltrated the women’s clothing.

The Case of the Radium Girls was a mystery to challenge even the greatest of medical detectives. Martland took his new responsibilities seriously. As he himself said, “One of the main functions of a medical examiner is to prevent wastage of human life in industry.”6 The cynical would say, however, that this proclamation had absolutely nothing to do with why he took an interest in the radium cases at that moment. The cynical would say there was only one reason a high-profile specialist finally took up the cause. On June 7, 1925, the first male employee of the United States Radium Corporation died.

That was the thing. The worry. It put her “in a very precarious mental condition.”20 Her former company, keeping tabs on her, put it more harshly—they called her “mentally deranged.”21 “When you’re sick and can’t get around much,” Katherine herself said, “things are different. Your friends aren’t the same to you. They’re nice to you and all that, but you’re not one of them. I get so discouraged sometimes that I wish…well, I don’t wish pleasant things.”22

The pictures of her skull, meanwhile, with her jawbone missing, made her mouth stretch unnaturally wide, as though she was screaming—screaming for justice through all these years. There was a smudge of dark where her eye had once been, as though she was looking out, staring accusingly, setting straight a lie that had blackened her name.

concrete example will explain this more clearly. It is known that the atoms of radium, and of other radio-active substances, disintegrate into atoms of lead and helium with the mere passage of time, so that a mass of radium continually diminishes in amount, being replaced by lead and helium. The law which governs the rate of diminution is very remarkable. The amount of radium decreases in precisely the same way as a population would if there were no births, and a uniform death-rate which was the same for every individual, regardless of his age. Or again, it decreases in the same way as the numbers of a battalion of soldiers who are exposed to absolutely random undirected fire. In brief, old age appears to mean nothing to the individual radium atom; it does not die because it has lived its life, but rather because in some way fate knocks at the door.

True genius is the one of the heart, not of intellect. Because intellect-less heart, though exploited a lot, still does good, whereas heartless intellect, with or without the awareness of it, ends up only exploiting others. But here's the thing, even true genius of intellect is not without its fare sense of responsibility towards the society. It's only the genius of halfbaked intellect that has absolutely no sense of service towards society - the only sense they have towards society, is that of domination or control. That is why one of the guardians of nuclear physics, Albert Einstein though initially encouraged the US government in a letter, to develop a nuclear weapon of their own against the Nazi nuclear program, ended up being an outspoken activist of nuclear-disarmament, and called his letter to Roosevelt "one great mistake of life". That is why the mother of radioactivity, Marie Curie never made a dime out of her discovery of radium, because to her, even amidst obscurity, science was service, unlike most so-called scientists of the modern world. That is why the man who literally electrified the world with his invention of alternating current, Nikola Tesla embraced happily other people stealing his inventions, and died a poor man in his apartment. You see, it's easy to make billions out of other people's pioneering work, the sign of true genius is an uncorrupted sense of service.

We sat at long tables side by side in a big dusty room where we laughed and carried on until they told us to pipe down and paint. The running joke was how we glowed, the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lighting up our purses when we opened them at night, our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriends as a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room. "Would you die for science?" the reporter asked us, Edna and me, the main ones in the papers. Science? We mixed up glue, water and radium powder into a glowing greenish white paint and painted watch dials with a little brush, one number after another, taking one dial after another, all day long, from the racks sitting next to our chairs. After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape, and our bosses told us to point it with our lips. Was that science? I quit the watch factory to work in a bank and thought I'd gotten class, more money, a better life, until I lost a tooth in back and two in front and my jaw filled up with sores. We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me, but when we got to court, not one of us could raise our arms to take the oath. My teeth were gone by then. "Pretty Grace Fryer," they called me in the papers. All of us were dying. We heard the scientist in France, Marie Curie, could not believe "the manner in which we worked" and how we tasted that pretty paint a hundred times a day. Now, even our crumbling bones will glow forever in the black earth.

Grace was a particularly civic-minded young woman. “When Grace was just a schoolgirl,” a childhood friend of hers wrote, “she planned to be a real citizen when she grew up.”2 Her family was of a political bent; her father Daniel was a delegate to the carpenters’ union, and you couldn’t grow up in his house without picking up his principles. He was out of work rather a lot, as unionism was not popular at that time, but while the family may not have had much money, they did have a lot of love. Grace was one of ten children—she was number four—and she was especially close to her mother, also called Grace; perhaps because she was the eldest girl. There were six boys and four girls in total, and Grace was close to her siblings, especially her sister Adelaide, who was nearest to her in age, and her little brother Art

Dr. Knef was a medical man through and through. When Mollie Maggia’s jawbone had so shockingly broken against his fingers, he had been fascinated by it—so he had kept it, this oddly moth-eaten, misshapen piece of bone. Every now and again, after her death, he had examined it, turning it over in his hands, but he was none the wiser; anyway, she had died of syphilis, whatever the strangeness of her bones. He’d therefore popped the fragment into his desk drawer, where he kept his x-ray negatives, and eventually it slipped his mind. And then, one day, his duties had required him to dig through that crowded desk drawer for the x-ray films. He had scrambled through the bits and pieces he kept in there, searching for them. To his astonishment, when he finally pulled them out, the films were no longer ebony black. Instead, they were “fogged,”31 as though something had been emanating onto them.