PRINT CONNECTIONS

Touch and Glow

The Chicago Tribune hailed it as “the greatest find of history.” Mixed with water, it was widely sold and consumed as a health elixir, believed to cure just about everything from hay fever, to constipation, to cancer. It turned up in milk, butter, toothpaste, soap, face cream, even sprinkled in lingerie and jock straps. It was said that it could “make old men young,” and clinics and spas popped up all over the place to allow patients to take advantage of its magical healing powers. Such was its popularity that it even inspired a dance that was featured in a hit Broadway play.

What was this magical substance?

“My beautiful radium,” as its co-discoverer, Marie Curie, dubbed it. In the first decades of the 20th century, radium was the wonder drug du jour. Unfortunately, radium advocates — like proponents of today’s fad elixirs like unpasteurized milk and raw (i.e., untreated) water — couldn’t have been more wrong about its effects; radium is highly radioactive and as such doesn’t do especially good things to the human body.

No one was more keenly aware of the deleterious effects of radium than the so-called “radium girls,” who are at long last paid tribute in a recent book (just out in paperback) by Kate Moore called The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Radium actually did have one practical and effective use: it could make clock and watch faces, as well as other kinds of instruments and dials, glow in the dark. Before industrial printing systems could apply radium-based paint (or other kind of glow-in-the-dark material) to a clock face, the radium had to be applied by hand, and that task fell to hundreds of teenage and twenty-something women hired to trace over clock numerals with radium paint. This was long before OSHA (actually, the radium girls’ ordeal led to the creation to OSHA), and few people, particularly the owners of radium companies, were aware — or even cared — about the dangers of radium (it’s a terrifying, heart-breaking book), so the women would go home at night literally glowing. Even worse, though, was the technique they used while painting. Needing a very fine point on a tiny paintbrush, the best way to get that was to lick the tip of the brush and shape it with the lips. This was done literally hundreds of times a day — and the amount of radium the women eventually ingested was substantial. So substantial that before long, the women started getting sick. Teeth would loosen and fall out (followed by fragments of jawbone), hips would lock, bones would become honeycombed, wounds wouldn’t heal, skin became more fragile than rice paper, and worse. The women became anemic, and death was not far behind — all before most of them even turned 30. And if that weren’t bad enough, medical bills were piling up (although dial-painting paid very well, these were still not wealthy women). I’ll spare you the gorier details, but what was perhaps most upsetting was the fact that virtually no one — from (especially) the owners and managers of the radium companies, to doctors, to dentists, to lawyers — cared enough to do anything to help them, save for one or two doctors and lawyers.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book.

That a substance believed to be so beneficial could ultimately turn out to be the exact opposite is an old story that occurs time and again throughout history. One particular case that, as we’ll see, is relevant to this story starts in an Albany, N.Y. print shop. John Wesley Hyatt (1837–1920) trained as a printer in Illinois (the company printed game boards and made game pieces). Hyatt was of a mechanical bent and entrepreneurial spirit and, in 1861, he patented a knife sharpener which gave him the funds to head east and start up his own printing company in upstate New York. Also working on game boards and other related items, he specialized in checkers and dominoes. At the time, game pieces and tokens were made from ivory, which was expensive (this was a more important concern at that time than protecting elephants), so people were eager for a cheaper substitute. Hyatt and his brother Isaiah started playing around — as it were — with a cellulose-based material called Parkesine that Alexander Parkes had developed in England a few years earlier. They also fiddled with a form of liquid nitrocellulose called collodion, which had been used as a film to protect printers’ fingers.

Then came an offer the Hyatts couldn’t refuse: billiard table manufacturer Phelan & Collender was offering $10,000 (several hundred thousand dollars today) for the best ivory substitute for billiard balls. The brothers Hyatt went to work, added camphor to Parkes’ cellulose compound, and came up with a material that could be easily molded under moderate heat and pressure, yet became hard and strong when it cooled. It could be painted easily and, even better, was cheap to make. Alas, the Hyatts found themselves behind the eight ball: Phelan & Collender reneged on the deal and no one ever got the prize money. Still, Hyatt didn’t scratch; he got to patent his material as well as the machinery for manufacturing it. He called it Celluloid.

There was a slight design flaw in the Hyatts’ Celluloid that had particularly dire consequences in certain social settings. It was initially made with nitrocellulose, also known as pyroxylin — or guncotton. What that meant was that when two billiard balls hit each other — which tends to happen (unless I’m playing) — they exploded. Think about playing pool in a saloon in the Old West and hearing an explosive pop. “We had a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado,” Hyatt later recalled, “mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it, but that instantly every man in the room pulled his gun” (Eschner, 2017).

Hyatt would form the Hyatt Billiard Ball Company as well as the Hyatt Manufacturing Company, and license the material to be used in a plethora of other applications, such as combs, dental plates, collar stays, and so on. Oh, and of course, film, perhaps its most iconic and enduring use (for now) and the one that inspired Ray Davies to write “Celluloid Heroes.” There is a historical marker in Albany today that marks the site of the “First Plastic,” which Celluloid indeed was.

The explosive tendencies of nitrocellulose, while perhaps not ideal for billiards, were pursued by others looking to develop explosive materials for mining, warfare, and other uses that require big booms. French chemist Théophile-Jules Pelouze (1807–1867) mucked about with guncotton and other nitrosulphates, and his student, Ascanio Sobrero, discovered nitroglycerin in 1847 — although he strongly advocated against ever using it given how unstable a substance it could be. A colleague of Sobrero’s was a young Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) who sought to develop a safer explosive material (think about that for a moment...) than nitroglycerin, especially as his warehouses kept exploding. This resulted in Nobel’s invention of the comparatively safe dynamite in 1867. Nobel would eventually invent gelignite, safer still than dynamite. He became quite wealthy and had founded nearly 100 armaments factories.

There is a story — believed to be apocryphal — that in 1888, when Alfred’s brother Ludvig died, a few sloppy newspapers got the wrong Nobel, and published Alfred’s obituary by mistake. Reading his own obituary supposedly terrified Alfred, as one French paper is said to have written, “Le marchand de la mort est mort” (“The merchant of death is dead”). Not eager to be remembered by posterity as the merchant of death, he is then said to have made the decision to use his fortune to found the Nobel Prizes. Thing is, the newspapers often cited don’t appear to have existed and corroborating evidence has not been found. Cool story, though, but even the Nobel Foundation itself doesn’t mention it.

Regardless of what triggered the decision, when Nobel died, he did in fact place his fortune in a trust to fund the Nobel Prizes, which launched at the turn of the century.

So, in 1901, the first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen for his discovery of x-rays. Discovered in 1896, the x-ray made quite a wave in the physics world, as it were, and Henri Becquerel, inspired by both phosphorescent materials and Röntgen’s x-rays, would discover radioactivity, for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. He would share this prize with two other pioneering physicists: Pierre and Marie Curie.

In 1898, while studying pitchblende and extracting the uranium, the Curies discovered another hitherto unknown radioactive element: radium, so named from the Latin radius (“ray”), acknowledging the material’s emission of energy in the form of rays, rays which can adversely affect the human body.

Radium is treated by the body like calcium; it’s deposited in the bones. Unlike calcium, which builds bone, radium degrades bone and bone marrow, causes sarcomas (bone tumors that can grow to the size of cantaloupes) and many many more unpleasant effects, nearly all of which were experienced by the Radium Girls — and even by Marie Curie herself, who died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, said to have been caused by long-term exposure to her beautiful radium.

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