The Canary Girls of WWI

[packman]

Something I haven't heard of before. Women in Britian were called on to work in munition factories due to the man-power shortage of WWI . Working with TNT they developed a yellow skin condition and various health problems.

"...At lunchtime, the women had to be separated in the cafeteria because everything they touched turned yellow. They were called the “Canary Girls” because of their bright yellow skin and green or ginger-coloured hair. With the nation’s men at war and male labour in short supply, Britain’s women had been recruited to ramp up production ammunition and were paid on average less than half of what the men were paid. By the end of the war, roughly 80% of the weaponry used by the British army was being made by women who were in fact paying very dearly to “do their bit”."






http://www.messynessychic.com/2016/02/17/the-canary-girls-and-the-wwi-poisons-that-turned-them-yellow/

Reminded me of the women who painted the dials of watches with luminescent paint which got its glow from radium. To get a fine point on the paint brushes they licked them causing mouth and throat cancers years later.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Fascinating.....

that whole site is a marvelous time sink.......

[femmocrat]

2. K & R

Thank you. Great read.

[hunter]

3. War sucks.

It's one of the reasons the bosses of this world won't abandon high energy industrial societies. They are afraid of the "other guy" winning. Nazis, Communists, Capitalists... whoever.

I wonder what munitions work is like in North Korea, even nuclear weapons work. Is it high status work, or work of unimaginable horror?

[IcyPeas]

4. The Radium Girls

?t=1m59s

[LongTomH]

5. There's a link to another article about: "The Radium Girls"

The Radium Girls and the Generation That Brushed Its Teeth With Radioactive Toothpase:

The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new army gadget used by American soldiers. The women were told that the glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint was harmless, and so they painted 250 dials a day, licking their brushes every few strokes with their lips and tongue to give them a fine point.

.............//snip

Between 1917 and 1926, the U.S. Radium Corporation hired around 70 women from Essex County, NJ, and by 1927, more than 50 of those women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning that was eating their bones from the inside, to put it simply. At the dawn of the 1920s, an estimated total of 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada alone to paint watch faces after the initial success in developing a glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint. The inventor of the paint, Dr. von Sochocky, died himself in 1928 from his exposure to the radioactive material. It’s still unknown how many died from exposure to radiation but it’s clear how many could have been saved.

.............//snip

But the most baffling part about this story is not the fact that the general public had no idea that radium was so dangerous, but the fact that some people most certainly did! And yet, they sat back and watched as everyone around them was poisoning themselves. The suits and scientists behind the U.S. Radium Corporation were probably the worst. Knowing very well that UnDark’s key ingredient was approximately one million times more active than uranium, they were careful to avoid any exposure to it themselves. While their young female factory workers fresh out of high school were literally encouraged to swallow radium on a daily basis, the owners and chemists were using lead screens, masks and tongs to handle the radium.

.............//snip

In the early 1920s, the radium girls started to experience the first symptoms of their demise. Their jaws began to swell and deteriorate, their teeth falling out for no reason. There was a horrific report of one woman going to the dentist to have a tooth pulled and ending up with an entire piece of her jaw being accidentally removed. A local dentist began to investigate the mysterious phenomenon of deteriorating jawbones among women in his town and soon enough discovered the link that they had all worked for the US Radium plant, licking radio-active paintbrushes at one time or another.

.............//snip

US Radium continued making luminous watches and other materials using radium paint for the army but after the new worker safety laws were introduced, not a single factory worker ever suffered from radium sickness at their plant again. That’s how easily these girls’ lives could have been saved.

There's more in the article about the enthusiasm for radioactive materials in the early 20th Century, including ads for cosmetics and toothpastes containing radium and/or thorium:



When I was growing up in small-town Oklahoma, there was still a sign on an old hotel advertising "radium water baths." The baths had closed down by then; but, the sign remained.

[dembotoz]

6. i am so clumsy i would take out 1/2 the town