Not all radium dials stain, but those that are stained are usually radium dials. If you ever see an old dial that the glass above the needle is stained brown and the needle is dark brown, it's almost certainly a radium dial. Generally, radium dials tend to turn grocery bag brown, and can 'stain' the material around them. Suffice it to say your radium dial is just as radioactive today as it was when it was made, regardless of it's ability to glow. Radium 226 is the isotope found in the dials, and it has a half life of just over a millennia and a half. The other part of the equation is the radium itself. Sometimes you can get it to wake up with a UV light, but that only lasts as long as there is UV on it. The zinc paint would essentially be worn out from constant radioactive bombardment after several decades at most, and would then loose it's ability to glow from the radiation alone. The problem is that you have two materials with wildly different operational lifespans and this leads people to conclude that a dark dial is a safe dial. Think of it like a TON of lightning bugs in a jar. Get enough alpha particles and the paint appears to glow. Instead, the luminosity was created by an alpha particle interacting with the paint to make it 'blink' for a brief moment and produce visible light. If you had enough radium on your desk to get a cherenkov glow (the blue glow everyone associates with nuclear material), you'd be dead. The radioactivity itself did not create the glow. The radium was used as an alpha emitter (helium nucleus basically) to excite a zinc compound in the paint to make it self luminous. Lots of our conversations changed topic with, "I can't tell you that."Īnyway, radium painted dials were extremely common in the aviation world, and can still be found in the warbird community with ease. I probably learned about as much from him as he did from me, albeit from different subjects. It helped that one of my students at a former job was a reactor operator on an Ohio class boat. By some governmental standards, that makes me a rad worker, especially in Europe. My office is in the front of a pressurized metal tube 5-6 miles above the ground, so I did a ton of research to make sure my profession wasn't going to kill me before my time. You will be known for this job, for your losses, for the precautions that will rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of your greenish fire.My humble opinion. Lessons in industrial hazards, in workplace safety, will center on you. Your fight will become part of case studies. On syphilis, poor hygiene, or something else. You will write letters, give interviews, testify. Should injury or death occur, please be advised we will not be eager to accept responsibility. You will carry light and glow with it, but then the eagle will come to exact the Promethean tax. You may be able to pluck out pieces of it by hand. In the interest of full disclosure, we must tell you: your bones may fog photographic film. This is an excellent job: sitting in a studio, painting. Paint the numbers one through twelve over and over, marking off minutes and hours, marking off time. At night, as they hang in your room, you may mistake them for ghosts.Ĭome, paint instruments for war. You will wear light the radium dust will sparkle on you. We will teach you to shape the paintbrushes with your lips, like the china painters before you. You will paint light, taste light, swallow light. How many other employers could promise this?
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