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This play by DW Gregory, is a story of abuse perpetrated against the dial painters for years on end, with no regard for the workers' health. Despite the undeniable evidence of the terrible effects of exposure to Radium, the girls' employers touted the benefits of Radium, going to such extents as forging medical examinations. In Their Own Words: I thought that this was merely a touch of rheumatism and did nothing about it. - Grace Fryer, June 1923 When I first found out what I had, and learned it was incurable... I was horror stricken... I would look at people I knew and I would say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll never see you again.’ - Grace Fryer, 1925 Radium eats the bone as steadily and surely as fire burns wood. - Grace Fryer "Radium. It was a wonder element; everyone knew that." "Each dial-painter had her own supply. She mixed her own paint, dabbing a little radium powder into a small white crucible and adding a dash of water and a gum-arabic adhesive: a combination that created a greenish-white luminous paint, which went under the name ‘Undark’. (...) The smallest pocket watch they painted measured only three-and-a-half centimetres across its face, meaning the tiniest element for painting was a single millimetre in width. The girls could not go over the edges of these delicate parameters or there would be hell to pay. They had to make the brushes even finer – and there was only one way they knew of to do that. "We put the brushes in our mouths,’ Katherine said, quite simply." - The Radium Girls by Kate Moore |
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