Erik Reuter wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 01:35:59AM -0500, Bryon Daly wrote:
>
> > Anyone have any ideas what that might be?
>
> Radium, mixed with a phosphor, can make a nifty glow in the dark effect.
> It used to be used extensively in watch dials. A friend of mine tells a
> (possibly apocryphal) story how the makers of said dials used to lick
> their fingers while assembling and years later a number of them had
> cancerous growths in their tongues...
I'd heard they'd licked the *brushes* to get them wet for a finer point
for painting the radium on the bits of the dials they were supposed to
paint.
And maybe cancers of the throat were involved, as well as those of the
tongue.
I heard this from my mother, both of whose parents had easy access to
medical journals at the time the cancers were being noted, and they
might very well have been her source. (On top of it, one of them was a
cancer researcher.)
Julia
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