A radium watch wouldn’t be particularly dangerous to the wearer, since it’s bound up in the paint and sealed away behind the glass. The danger is to the people making it, working in an environment with the radium paint, where traces of it could get into the air or otherwise ingested.
The workers formed a habit of licking their brushes to get a finer point.
Yes, and that at least can be eliminated via proper training and non-oral brush-pointing tools. But even if you stop the workers from licking the brushes, there’s still a lot more room for problems in a factory with buckets full of the stuff than in a completed watch.
It’s hard to pin down where it was. 57th St is parallel to Central Park, but 2 blocks over. And the article states “…at 57th St facing Central Park…”. not on 57th St. So it is even more ambiguous.
The Sanborn Fire Insurance maps might have a clue, but I don’t have access to the ones from NYC. I’m searching around to see if any of the colleges have free access.
Dennis
I found a 1920-22 atlas of NYC online and looked at 57th St. If the building was at 57th I assume that means on a cross ave, at the corner of 57th, so here is a list of the buildings on the corners of 57th from 5th Ave to 8th (facing the park as it states, so south side of 57th) Addresses starting at 5th Ave and going west, looking for a tall building:
(2) Stores, offices and studios
(68) Sherwood Studio attached to the Central Market bldg
(100) Shops
(160 Carnegie Hall
(200) Rodin Studios
(220) General Motors
(250) lofts
(264) St Augustine
So the only thing that stands out is the General Motors Bldg. No we need a list of tenants from 1923.
Dennis
In doing some related reading, I ran acrossan interesting piece that possibly illuminates (heh) things a bit. This would seem to be a story of scientific hubris, quack medicine, and capitalism run amok. But is there a bit more to the story that we’re ignoring?
A couple excerpts:
*"WhoWhatWhy investigation has shown that it is likely that the material stems from the World War II nuclear weapons program and was dumped into a public landfill by radium companies that were little more than public fronts for the United States government during its effort to build the first atomic bomb.
In 1939 the United States, convinced it was in a race with Germany for the bomb, purchased all the uranium it could find. Belgian owners of the ore coveted the phenomenally valuable radium that existed side-by-side with the uranium. When the price of radium collapsed a few years later as better and safer sources of radioactivity were developed, the excess and unneeded radium would end up in the public waste stream."
<SNIP>
"The owners escaped liability by morphing into new companies under different names and slightly different boards of directors. Still, the ownership of the radium always seemed to trace back to Joseph A. Kelly Sr., a pioneer in marketing radium. His interlocking network of radium paint companies would become one of the largest World War II government contractors by supplying luminescent dials for fighter planes and bombers. He would also quietly become a major supplier of radium and other rare elements used in the Manhattan Project.
The radium business was long over when the cleanup bill came due."
*
Voltaire, thanks for that interesting link, and it might cross reference with the article I found.
“According to Manhattan Project troubleshooter George A. Cowan, his radiation monitor “went berserk” on a 1943 trip to the Radium Chemical Company offices in a “big building” on Sixth Avenue.””
The corner of Sixth Avenue is one of the 57th St addresses I listed, the Sherwood Studio and the shops. Of course the “big building” might have been a bit further south on 6th, a tall building would overlook short ones at the corner and still be considered to be facing the park.
Presumably it has been cleaned by now.
Dennis
Related link for further possible reference:https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html
I’m not especially convinced by this as history. For a start, people tend not to realise the scale of the radium-based “first generation nuclear industry” prior to WWII, or that of the problems it left behind. In that period there were countless companies in every major industrial nation trying to cash-in on the craze about the wonders of the new element. For much the same reason, merely pointing to the most notorious companies from period – though not to suggest that the less notorious ones weren’t just as hazardous - isn’t necessarily likely to pinpoint the specific location asked for by the OP.
Nor does the Great Kill Park instance strike me as particularly notable example as legacy issues go. For local research in lots of different countries in the last couple of decade have identified many, many sites where contamination or dumping from radium companies in this period have required addressing. It’s got a specific UK bias, but David Harvie’s 2005 book Deadly Sunshine (Tempus) can be recommended on this sort of stuff. As I’ve probably mentioned before on the Dope, I stumbled across a similar French case about a decade ago. Doing the patient boyfriend thing in the lobby while my then-girlfriend sorted out some administrative hurdle in the local mairie in a town near Paris, I was brushing up my French by reading the various council leaflets. One of which was all about radium contamination in the very neighbourhood that she’d just moved into. Turns out that the Curies’ first assistants had early on started up a firm in the area to commercially produce radium and it had recently been realised that nearby streets were riddled with measurable contamination, hence the need for official action. None of these are isolated cases. Of all due concern to local residents, but not isolated cases. In the Great Kill Park case, jumping straight to “Last Secret of the Atom Bomb” seems a bit sensationalistic. (Not that the Manhattan Project didn’t leave its own legacy of contamination and dumping.)
Nor does “radium companies that were little more than public fronts for the United States government during its effort to build the first atomic bomb” seem especially plausible. These companies had been up and running for years, even decades, prior to WWII. No doubt the Manhattan Project represented a chance for them to cash in, but that’s a different matter. If anybody was being a “front” for the Manhattan Project when it came to supplying the raw material, it was more the likes of Union Carbide.
Similarly, stuff like:
just seems off. It’s minor, but 1939 is just far too early a date here. And it’s not as if Union Minière – those “Belgian owners” - weren’t very much in the uranium selling business.
So, without further evidence, I’m neither especially convinced that Great Kill Park is either necessarily particularly connected to either the location decribed in the OP or the Manhattan Project. The issues are just, well, messier.
Lots of interesting information. Looks like the radium and uranium business was conducted everywhere.
Heck, we had a small nuclear reactor at the Lewis Research Center (now Glenn). The Zero Power Reactor is very hard to find information on. I worked in the building in the mid 1960s when it was decommissioned and we had a health physics group in the building to monitor things. There were radioactive items stored in ordinary cabinets.
Dennis
There are several accounts of Radium causing skin damage:
.
How is this possible? Radium is an alpha-particle emitter. Wouldn’t any container stop the alphas?
bonzer: All good points. I realized after I posted that I didn’t really make clear why I was posting it or what point I was trying to make, because I wasn’t even trying to answer the question in the OP.
If was more in response to the question of why, if the dangers of radium had started to become known as early as the '20s, were we still practically swimming in the stuff decades later.
The fortuitous fact that a Belgian businessman just happened to bring practically the world’s whole known supply of easily exploitable uranium ore to Manhattan on his own initiative because some British scientists had made him aware of its impending strategic value probably had something to do with it.
Am not really seeing this as a coherent argument. Sorry.
Of course Sengier is central to the whole issue of the Manhattan Project’s uranium supply. See Helmreich’s Gathering Rare Ores (Princeton, 1986) for the dry academic details of the negotiations. Or Susan Williams’s very recent Spies in the Congo (Hurst, 2016) for a particular angle on that stuff.
But I’m also unclear what any of that has to do with the OP.