The Poisoner's Handbook (27 page)
TO MAKE real sense of that question, one had to look back some thirty years, to when scientists in France had announced a startling discovery. The rocks of the Earth’s crust, they declared, were not all cold dead chunks of metal and mineral. Some were strangely alive. Some sizzled with energy and even emitted radiation.
The French physicist Henri Becquerel reported the first such discovery in 1896. He’d conducted experiments showing that the element uranium emitted tiny atomic particles that could pass through metal foil, creating a spatter of light spots on photographic film. Two colleagues, newly married physicists named Pierre and Marie Curie, took up Becquerel’s work. Marie especially found these living rocks fascinating. Sifting through trays of uranium tailings—a fine radioactive rubble left over when uranium ore is processed—and carefully measuring “uranium rays,” she realized quickly that the emission levels were too high to be explained by the uranium alone.
After two more laborious years of sifting, testing, and recording light spatter on film, the Curies announced that they had discovered two new elements, both of which emitted particles at a greater rate than uranium. One they named polonium, after Marie Curie’s native Poland. The second they simply named for radiation itself, calling it radium. They proposed that elements like radium and polonium, with their peculiar atomic snap and sizzle, should be known as “radioactive” elements.
It was radium—“my beautiful radium” as Marie called it—that seemed the most promising of these new materials. Polonium was too intensely active, burning itself away within a year. Uranium was more stable but less energized, dribbling its radiation comparatively slowly away. Radium, on the other hand, glowed with promise. It decayed slowly; its half-life was sixteen hundred years, yet it spat and sparked with a steady release of energy. The Curies had measured radium’s intensity at some three thousand times that of uranium. It was rather like finding a tiny star buried in the dirt. A very tiny star—the Curies had isolated only 100 milligrams of pure radium from some three tons of uranium ore. But that gave it the allure of something truly rare.
Within two years physicians had learned that the application of radium salts to a tumor would shrink the cancer. “Radium therapy” was introduced into hospitals shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Physicians reported healing effects that seemed miraculous, especially compared to the therapies of old. The newspapers compared radium’s magic to the golden healthful rays of the sun. Everyone wanted to stand in what seemed a naturally healing light.
Radium use spread quickly into consumer products. There were bottles of radium water (guaranteed to make the drinker sparkle with energy), radium soda, radium candy, radium-laced facial creams (to rejuvenate the skin) radium-sprinkled face powder (in four clearly labeled tints: white, natural, tan, and African), soaps and pain-relieving liniments and lotions. Researchers discovered that the European hot springs, famed for their healing powers, contained radon, a gas created by the decay of radium, released as water dissolved minerals in the rocks that lay beneath the springs. Perhaps, scientists suggested, the health effects of the mineral hot springs came from radioactive elements in the ground. Spas in upstate New York rushed to compete by dropping uranium ores into their swimming pools. A New Jersey company grew rich selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of Radithor: Certified Radioactive Water as a tonic that guaranteed new vigor and energy.
Radiant health, the ads proclaimed—beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight.
MARTLAND FOUND radium to be neither beautiful nor inspirational.
He’d been drawn into researching it by a peculiar health crisis in Orange, New Jersey, a community just northwest of Newark. Situated on a main turnpike to Pennsylvania, Orange had long been a bustling little industrial city. It was a popular stop on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western railroad line. The trains made a flurry of stops at the Orange terminal, picking up and dropping off passengers, delivering Pennsylvania coal, and carrying away factory products: clocks, pencil sharpeners, boxes of shoes. Until Prohibition, the Orange Brewery had shipped its beer out on the DL&W. The old building stood dark now. But other businesses thrived in its place. The U.S. Radium Corporation, which had opened a plant there in 1917, was busier than ever.
The Radium Corporation had gotten its start in the Great War, with its new technological demands. Soldiers, huddled in the muddy trenches of Europe, learned quickly that the pocket watches they carried were unsuited to battlefields. They fell out of pockets and were crushed by the next crawling soldier; if the watches somehow weren’t smashed, they were hopelessly unreadable at night. Driven by military need, watch companies began putting watches on straps, which could be safely buckled onto wrists, and they looked for a way to make watch faces glow in the dark.
Luckily, some years before the war, German scientists had developed a “self-luminous” paint. This paint glowed, due to a rather neat little cascade of chemical interactions: if radium salts were mixed with a zinc compound, particles emitted by the radium caused the zinc atoms to vibrate. The vibration created a buzz of energy, visible as a faint shiver of light. This pale greenish glow was easily outshone by daylight, but in the dark it was just luminous enough to make an instrument readable without making it easily detectable to a watching enemy.
After American troops joined the war in Europe, the factory in Orange won a contract to supply radium-dial instruments to the military. By the time the war ended, wristwatches with their glowing dials and handy wristbands were all the style. So were luminous-faced clocks, nicely dressed up in gold and ebony for elegant homes. The corporation’s business was as healthy as ever—as healthy, you might say, as radium itself.
Hardly a quibble, hardly a doubt was raised, that radium might not really be the golden child of the elements.
AT THE FACTORY the dial painters were taught to shape their brushes with their lips, producing the sharp tip needed to paint the tiny numbers and lines of watch dials and the lacy designs of fashionable clocks. Each worker was expected to paint 250 dials a day, five and a half days a week. They earned about twenty dollars a week for that work, at a rate of one and a half cents per completed dial.
The painters were teenage girls and young women who became friendly during their hours together and entertained themselves during breaks by playing with the paint. They sprinkled the luminous liquid in their hair to make their curls twinkle in the dark. They brightened their fingernails with it. One girl covered her teeth to give herself a Cheshire cat smile when she went home at night. None of them considered this behavior risky. Why would they, when doctors were using the same material to cure people? When wealthy spa residents were paying good money to soak in the stuff? When a neighboring company promoted the popular tonic Radithor? No one—certainly not the dial painters themselves—saw anything to worry about.
Until one by one the young workers began, mysteriously, to fall ill. Their teeth fell out, their mouths filled with sores, their jaws rotted, and they wasted away, weakened by an apparently unstoppable anemia. By 1924 nine of the dial painters were dead. They were all women in their twenties, formerly healthy, with little in common except for those hours they had spent, sitting at their iron and wood desks at the factory, painting tiny bright numbers on delicate instruments.
The bones that Martland asked Charles Norris and his staff to evaluate for radioactivity belonged to one of the first dial painters to die in Orange. Martland had ordered her body dug up and her bones sent to New York for the work. His decision got enough attention that the Newark newspaper took a picture of the New Jersey pathologist with the bones before they were sent off: a carefully posed shot of Harrison Martland with a crumbling jaw in his hand.
THE INDUSTRIAL SCANDAL in New Jersey foretold a change in attitude, both by scientists and by members of the public, toward radioactive elements. The change came on gradually—after all, radium had first been seen as a miracle cure. It would take more than twenty years for the element to be recognized as a killer as well as a savior.
Marie and Pierre Curie, along with Henri Becquerel, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their work with radioactive elements; Marie later donated much of her share of the prize money to the Allied war effort. She’d toured the United States, seeking money for radium research in 1921. She’d received, during that visit, the cheering welcome accorded to a woman of heroic stature.
As Curie demonstrated on her tour, she did not fear her own discovery. She kept vials of radioactive isotopes in her skirt pockets, bringing them out to show off during her lectures. She liked to see them in the dark, she’d say, to sit back and watch their pretty blue-green light. Curie was entirely reassuring about that luminous glow, but in other quarters a certain scientific wariness was surfacing regarding radium. Rumor had it that her husband, Pierre, killed in 1906 by a horse-drawn carriage, had stumbled into the street due to radiation-induced weakness. Several scientists from the European radium laboratories had developed disturbing leukemias. And when Curie finished her tour, American dignitaries presented her with a gram of radium as a gift from the United States—but it was carefully contained in a 110-pound lead box.
The occasional deaths of scientists in Europe stirred little reaction in the United States. In New Jersey, however, worries about the element grew as illness spread among the dial workers. Ironically, they began falling ill shortly after Curie’s triumphant American tour. By 1924, as the painters continued to die, managers at the U.S. Radium Corporation hired a team of scientists from Harvard University to investigate the inexplicably accelerating deaths.
The Harvard scientists discovered that the watch factory was thick with radium dust. The employees were frequently covered in it. In the dark, one researcher said, the dial painters glowed like luminous ghosts. The researchers concluded that the deaths were connected to the factory work.
Connected to
rather than
caused by
: radium had a safe reputation, and they were reluctant to blame it completely. Even this cautious assessment did not go over well with factory management. The U.S. Radium Corporation refused to allow the study to be published, saying the information was too sensitive to be released.
Connected to
rather than
caused by
: radium had a safe reputation, and they were reluctant to blame it completely. Even this cautious assessment did not go over well with factory management. The U.S. Radium Corporation refused to allow the study to be published, saying the information was too sensitive to be released.
The same year, though, a team of less cooperative scientists pursued the problem at U.S. Radium, running tests on many of the ailing workers, some still employed, others who had moved on to other jobs. The doctors from the New Jersey Consumers’ League, already well known for its uncompromising positions on worker safety, published their findings, summing up with a declaration that the factory in Orange was incubating a new, strange, and terrible occupational disease.
At this point Harrison Martland decided to conduct his own investigation, one that would be uncolored by claims of pro-management or pro-worker bias. He soon agreed that radium exposure had to be the source of the problem. In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss.
The women were exhaling radon gas.
THAT FINDING PROVIDED the first real clue as to what was happening inside the workers’ bodies. It also provided an early insight as to the way radium behaves, causing damage based on its naturally self-destructive nature.
The element’s atomic structure is a deeply unstable one. Essentially, it exists in a state of perpetual breakdown, discarding excess parts as it decays. Subatomic particles fizz away in all directions, leaving behind an even more crazily unbalanced chemical arrangement, prone to immediate further decay. Radium is actually a breakdown product itself, created when uranium decays. Its own disintegration produces the hypercharged element polonium (sometimes called radium A) and radon gas.
Radium, then, is “radioactive” because it is constantly turning into something else, discarding unwanted parts in the form of energetic subatomic particles. The primary emissions from radium are called alpha particles; they are basically tight little bundles of protons and neutrons.
As alpha particles speed away, they take with them some of the element’s energy-charged life. This high-speed flight is radiation, or alpha radiation, to be specific. Radium also emits, to a lesser degree, two other kinds of radiation: beta radiation, which consists of electrons, and gamma radiation, which consists of dangerous particles with a higher energy than X-rays.
During his evaluation of the dial painter illnesses, Martland calculated that more than 90 percent of the particles shooting out of radium were alpha radiation. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been an external exposure. Outside the body, alpha particles are rather wishy-washy bits of atomic energy. They can be stopped by a sheet of paper or a layer of clothing, even the upper layer of dead cells that overlies the skin. The two other forms of radiation are more penetrating: beta radiation easily slices through paper, although it can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum. Gamma radiation is the toughest; it takes a dense metal like lead to halt its flying particles.
But once inside the body, as Martland would soon realize, alpha radiation creates a precisely engineered internal poisoning. The radium dust noted by the Harvard team was a definite hazard because it could be inhaled. But it wasn’t the source of the lethal illness among the dial painters, who were dying at a higher rate than others in the plant. The source was their practice of lip-pointing the brushes. Every time a painter put a brush in her mouth, to bring the bristles to a sharper point, she swallowed a bit of radium.
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