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The time he studied with the Curies, Pierre was heard to remark that “he would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him.” By that time the Curies were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Sochocky had studied under the Curies and understood that radium carried great dangers. Sochocky had invented the “paint” they used to paint watch dial numerals and hands with the luminous substance that made them visible in the dark. In 1913, Sabin von Sochocky and George Willis, both physicians, founded in Newark, New Jersey, the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation (RLMC). It was so difficult to extract from its source that only a few grams were available anywhere in the world. Marie and Pierre Curie, in 1898, discovered radium. Kate Moore's purpose was to put the radium girls center stage and tell the story from their perspective. Although two previous books ( 2, 3) had been written on the radium girls' stories, they focused entirely on the legal and scientific aspects. She walked in the women's footsteps, met their families, and visited their homes and graves and the sites of the dial-painting “studios.” The result is a magnificent but sad book. Her research took her to New York, Washington, DC, Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois. In 2015, she directed a production of These Shining Lights, a play about the radium girls, and found the dial painters' stories so powerful that she was inspired to write the above-titled book.
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Kate Moore is a Sunday Times (London, UK) best-selling author, book editor, and ghostwriter. It describes the consequences of that radium poisoning.
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The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a shocking, heartbreaking, and tragic story involving a number of mainly teenage immigrant girls in Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and in Ottawa, Illinois, who painted watch dials containing radium ( 1).
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