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My aunt painted radium instrument dials by hand during WW2. They employed many women in this shop. They had a habit of wetting the end of the paint brush in their mouth to get a fine tip. Many of the women developed cancer, especially of the mouth, tongue and stomach including my aunt.

One of these instrument shops was in a loft building in Toronto. The building was condemned just a few years ago as a radiation hazard due to the radium paint soaked into the wooden floor.

There was one of those fluoroscope machines in the local shoe store when I was a little tyke. Gould's Shoe Store, Established 1886. As you say, they disappeared about 1960.

In the last century the cancer rate has gone from 1 in 50 or 100 to 1 in 2. Wonder why.

In the US they did the exact same thing. The Radium Dial Co. in Ottawa Illinois is the most famous one. The gals who worked there had a terrible fate with many hundreds dying before the age of 30. I suspect some of the gauges in our cars were done there. I was looking at a new guage today and as I got to a dimly lit area it glowed. I wonder what the half life is.

I wonder what the half life is.


You'll be an old man.

Even one of the radium replacement elements hangs around.

"Tritium is a gas and has a half-life of 12.43 years."

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Confirmed. According to wikipedia: "...At the peak of devices popularity in the early 1950s, about 10,000 machines were in use ... In 1949, the danger of the fluoroscope was revealed and the machines in the United States were quietly phased out during the 1950s..."

To delve into the subject it could be a good starting point to recapitulate the differences and commonalities between fluorescence, luminescence and phosphorescence. Thank you for the interesting experience reports, especially the habit of wetting the end of the paint brush. When I was a child I knew "good" and "bad" pocket compasses. The good ones were those which shined long in the darkness.

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These Russians ...

<iframe width="500" height="405" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9Q1gksqqhLU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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I am an old man.

BTW Joel, I'm always happy to see one of the first and still (~radio~)active members of PackardInfo.

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Does anyone else remember the US govt Atoms for Peace (atoms are good for you!) campaign in the forties and fifties?

The same disinfo is still going on. Fukushima is 5 times worse than Chernobyl but when was the last time you heard anything about it on the news?

The fishing exclusion zone around Fukushima caught my eye. Who will teach the fishes not to cross the zonal borders?

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