Sodium Girls Research Paper

In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced they had discovered a new element that “behaved like pure barium” to the world. They named it radium for its radioactive properties. The Curies would have to prove their discovery with copious amounts of radium, and to do so needed to extract it on its own. They used the ore of pitchblende, which was high in supply in the Joachimsthal mine in Bohemia, to experiment with extracting the radium (Fröman, 2014). Marie used the process of boiling the pitchblende in acid used for cleaning and bleaching, which then left her with radium mixed with other metals. She then boiled what was left with a different solution and washed it, which cleared it of some of the metals (McClafferty, 2006). Marie boiled the remaining compound in another solution, washed it with water, and treated it with corrosive agents. These extensive processes allowed Marie to separate the metals from the radium sulfate and barium sulfate. To turn the sulfates into radium salt, she boiled them again.

The book “Radioactive Boy Scout” is a true story about a boy named David Hahn that attended a Michigan high school. His goal was to set out and build a fast breeder reactor in his garden shed. He educated himself in these things by reading popular mechanics and the golden book of chemistry experiments. Whatever he could not get from laboratory suppliers, universities, hospitals, and nuclear agencies, he made himself. David collected household smoke detectors and extracted americium-24. He also got assembled gas mantle covers and pulverized them to get radioactive thorium and took the Geiger counter in to an antique shop where he found a clock with a phial of radium paint left in it. With a little bit of things he had

who said “All this colonial business is a sham, but we need it for elections”

Radium City is a 1920s documentary about the Radium Girls of Ottawa, Illinois. These young women were in high school or just graduated from high school and went to work at Radium Dial; it was a plant where watches and clock dial were painted with radium. In order for the women to paint the best fine point font, they were to bring the paintbrush to a point with their lips, dip the brush into the radium, and begin painting the numbers. The watches and clocks were painted with radium because it was known to glow in the dark, so the young women also painted their faces, and even some painted their teeth, with the radium. During this time period, it was unclear to the public the danger of the radioactive chemical. It was not until these young women began to

In order to start the Manhattan project, they needed specific resources; Uranium and Plutonium. Later on they discovered that with the nuclear fission of these two chemicals they could start chain reactions that would pass on a large amount of disastrous heat energy. Though what the citizens didn’t know was that each miner that was working to find Uranium, instantly had his life at risk for the project. Those miners were exposed to radioactive rays that could cause

The Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee case raised new questions about safety of workers in the nuclear industry. At the plant where Silkwood was employed, employees worked with plutonium, which presents a high risk of serious health complications on the internal organs, tissues, and bone,

In the early 1900’s radium was “the latest miracle substance” (Hersher & Blum, 2014). Salesmen promised that it extended lifespans, increased sex drive, made women more beautiful, and had many other fantastic effects. The world was infatuated with radium and displayed this by putting it in slews of items including face cream, bread, chocolate, suppositories, toy sets for children, drinking water (as shown in figure 1), toothpaste, watch faces, and many more products. (List from scribal.com, 2007) It was used often in pharmaceuticals and described by advertisers as “nature’s way to health.” “Doctors used it to treat everything from colds to cancer.” (Hersher & Blum, 2014) However, the “magical” substance that was radium turned out to

In the early 1970s, Silkwood worked as a lab analyst in an Oklahoma Kerr-McGee plant which manufactured plutonium pins used as fuel for nuclear reactors (The Karen Silkwood Story, 2004).. Plutonium, a radioactive chemical element, is known to be highly toxic and carcinogenic. Silkwood, an elected union official and outspoken critic of Kerr-McGee’s health and safety practices, began collecting and recording information to substantiate her charges that employees at the plant were dangerously exposed to toxic chemicals. In early November 1974, Silkwood was

Jane Hall was an American physicist born in 1915 at a small town outside Denver Colorado. Shortly after receiving her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1942, Hall became a research assistant at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory. Her reputation like so many other determined female scientist of the time proved an excellent scientist and administrator earning her a position as a Senior Supervisor at Hanford less than a year later. At Hanford, in addition to her normal duties, she led several studies that uncovered information about the effects of plutonium inhalation on the human body. After the war, Hall and her husband, David Hall, moved to Los Alamos to work for Los Alamos National Laboratory. She was a firm believer in the

In the movie, Radium Girls, took place in the 1900’s, during War World II. People would apply for jobs at Radium City, a factory, to paint radium on dial clocks. Not knowing that the newly discovered radium was hurting them from the inside out. The exudatives that worked for this company was not telling these people that the radium would hurt them.

Although radioactivity was at first just at the surface, later studies showed that these radioactive elements were absorbed by the soil and that their effects would be long-lasting (Gould 69). Within a short amount of time animals consumed these radioactive plants, and these particles worked their way up the food chain. Soon, not only berry crops in Austria had to be discarded, but also milk supplies in Italy (68, 69). More than twenty European nations received enough fallout to require food restrictions, and 100 million people altered their diets in the ensuing months (Flavin 6, 16). Adding to this paranoia was the fact that even the experts had little knowledge of what was happening. Most nations were unprepared, and many implemented differing safety guidelines for food (15). Some governments outright lied to quell the public’s fear (Gould 70). In the end, millions of people were exposed to unhealthy doses of radiation, and estimates for future deaths from cancer caused by this exposure range as high as one million, with half being fatal (Flavin 18). These are clearly examples of the externalities of a nuclear disaster.

They now began the tedious and monumental task of isolating these elements so that their chemical properties could be determined. During the next four years, working in a leaky wooden shed, they processed a ton of pitchblende, laboriously isolating from it a fraction of a gram of radium.      In 1903,

With this stability and mass production, x-rays machines became very common everywhere. From large factories, to doctors offices, all the way to the corner store of small towns, where children and adults alike could insert a coin into a machine and view the bones in their feet. (3.) Because of their relative adolescences in the world, not much was known about x-rays or their effects on the human body. The first theories about the rays’ effects on the human body were that they had beneficial applications. With this being the only theory about their effect, widespread use went on, unmonitored, and unregulated. This unregulated use led to injuries but because of their slow onset the injuries were never attributed to x-rays. While some scientists tied certain skin burns to over exposure of x-rays it wasn’t until popular minds of the world like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and William J. Morton expressed that they experienced eye pain when dealing with the rays for extended periods of time that people began to connect the dots and understand the negative

     It was not easy for Marie and Pierre to convince the science community of their new findings. Marie succeeded in separating the radium from the barium, but it wasn't easy. She had to treat very large amounts of pitchblende, but she had plenty of pitchblende to use. (The Curie's

I chose to do my project on Marie Curie, the woman who discovered radium and polonium. She was born Mary Sklodowska on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland and died July 4, 1934 in Passy, France at the age of 67. In 1895, Marie married a professor named Pierre Curie at the age of 26. She was the first woman to complete a doctorate in France in MMMM at the age xxx. And in MMMMM, Curie was also the first female professor at the Sorbonne. She was the first person to use the term “radioactivity”, which is the term still used till this day.