The United States Radium Corporation was a company, most notorious for its operations between the years 1917 to 1926 in Orange, New Jersey, in the United States that led to stronger worker protection laws. After initial success in developing a glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint, the company was subject to several lawsuits in the late 1920s in the wake of severe illnesses and deaths of workers (the Radium Girls) who had ingested radioactive material. The workers had been told that the paint was harmless. During World War I and World War II, the company produced luminous watches and gauges for the United States Army for use by soldiers.
U.S. Radium was the subject of major radioactive contamination of its workers, primarily women who painted the dials of watches and other instruments with luminous paint. The company has also been linked to U.S. Army's secret Cold War experiments with zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles sprayed with planes and chemical sprayers in St. Louis and other cities during the 1950s and 60s.
Read more about United States Radium Corporation: History, Immediate Aftermath, Superfund Site, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or corporation:
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“... when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everyone will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses were always hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon to-day has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“The traveler to the United States will do well ... to prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)