Undark™ The Radioactive Paint
Glow in the dark paint first hit the scene in the early 1900’s with the arrival of Undark - a hot new paint pigment. And when I say hot, I mean HOT. This UV-reactive pigment was made with radium-226, and as the name implies -- radium is radioactive.
Undark gained infamy with the poisoning of the Radium Girls -- a group of factory workers who applied the luminescent paint to watch hands in a dial factory.
To maintain consistently thin lines, they would twirl the brush tips with their tongues -- ingesting the radioactive paint daily. NEVER SHAPE YOUR BRUSHES WITH YOUR MOUTH.
It wasn’t their fault. The Radium Girls were not only told by their employers that the paint was safe -- they were instructed to “lip, dip, [and] paint,” by their supervisors. These women believed their employers, so much so that they painted their nails, teeth, and faces with the radioactive paint. That is, until some of them started to get sick with “Radium Jaw.”
Symptoms of this disease include bleeding gums, bone tumors, facial distortion, necrosis of the lower mandible, and death. As workers, the radium girls took on risks they did not understand because the actual cost was hidden from them. As a result, thousands of women unknowingly sacrificed their health and lives, all for the convenience of being able to sell the ability to see in the dark.
The Radium Girls offer a complete story about the hazards of radium paint, but how did something so awful happen in the first place? Today we’re going to be talking about the inventor of Radium paint and the company he started. Thanks for joining me for this broadcast of Creative Hazards Story Time. I’m your host Michael, this is the story of Undark™, the radioactive paint.
Dr. Sabin von Sochocky invented Radium paint in 1908. What I mean by “invented” is that he added radium to a binder and recognized the market potential. Not exactly rocket appliances -- but definitely rudimentary radioactive science. By 1914, he had opened a small laboratory in New York City and developed a commercially viable paint formula. With a capital investment of $500,000 ($12M in inflation adjusted monies) he began production in New York as the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation. It would be renamed The United States Radium Corporation seven years later.
The US Radium Corp. building is also a US Superfund Site. For those that don’t know, a Superfund is a federal program that pays for the cleanup of sites contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants.
It’s a statistic that 70% of the funds for superfund sites come from the companies responsible, but The US Radium Corp. went defunct in 1970 -- 13 years before the Superfund designation. From 1914 to 1970, the US Radium Corp. processed an conservative average of 1,000 pounds of radioactive ore daily, which was dumped on-site. Over 250 homes and businesses were contaminated with radiation in this time. From 1983 to 2005, the site was cleaned up through remediation and removal of radioactive material. Over 1,600 tons of radioactive material was removed from the facility, which also contaminated the surrounding area.
Florence E. Wall, Sochocky’s lab assistant and cosmetological chemist in 1917, recalls her observations on-site in “Early Days of Radioactivity in Industry.”
“... busy with war contracts, the radium extraction plant operated day and night."
See, they began manufacturing in the middle of World War I, and that meant plenty of military contracts for glowing rifle sights, instruments, and control panels. This demand was an obvious stressor on production, and when that happens, output can take precedence over safety.
Wall’s writings also tell of the constant stream of materials and odd items sent in to be painted.
"... to the rear was a railroad siding where a constant stream of cars unloaded carnotite ore and, from various factories throughout the country, boxes of equipment to be touched up with luminous paint."
Despite working directly with the radioactive ore during extraction, Wall lived to the age of 95. Her writings reinforce the fact that chemists at the plant used protective equipment as part of their safety procedures. Why these procedures disregarded on the application side of manufacturing is dubious at best.
Ultimately, this radioactive pigment contaminated the environment, destroyed a community, and cost lives. The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation knew that it was dangerous way back in 1917, as evident from the precautions their chemists took when making the paint. They encouraged their workers to lick their radioactive brushes because they thought they could get away with it. The icing on this cake, is that they also exposed the general public to thousands of gallons of radioactive paint. And consider this, all those radioactive painted items are still out there, somewhere.
Does karma exist? In this story it does in some sense. Dr. Sochocky, inventor of Undark™, founder of the United States Radium Corporation, and the man responsible for every drop of Radium paint on earth, would not escape the horrors of his creation. Toothless and fingerless, he died on November 14, 1928 at just 45.
PS. Just in case you were wondering, the heads at the US Radium Corporation saw the writing on the wall. In 1968, after just a half century of bad press, the company realized it was time to restructure. They closed plants and consolidated operations to produce high tech glow-sticks and wayfinding signage.
In 1979, a shiny new corporation was created to hold the assets of their manufacturing plant. Operations weren’t left out of this corporate restructuring either, and each got their own subsidiary companies. In 1980, the US Radium Corporation created a new holding company, USR Industries, INC., which then absorbed the US Radium Corporation.
The EPA declined to renew their license in 2005 before designating the site as another Superfund. That was the final end of the US Radium Corporation. Well at least the corporation, which are people, don’t forget.