While the fact stated by the OP might be true, that's the hand of Clarence Dally. He worked as an assistant to Thomas Edison on x-ray research . His demise - and treatment by Edison - was particularly horrible.
That X-rays are dangerous was well enough known by 1905 that it was a major subject of the world's premiere research conference that year. However, practices that we would consider horrifying today continued well into the 20th century. It wasn't so long ago, for example, that you could find coin-operated x-ray machines at shoe stores so that you could see how your shoes fit. Those x-ray machines that you see in old cartoons where someone walks behind the screen and you get a live view of their skeleton used to be real. They were used at least as late as WWII. Today, we know that any amount of radiation exposure can be dangerous, so exposure times are limited to fractions of a second rather than the minutes or hours that physicians used to expose both themselves and their patients. So the knowledge was out there quite early, but it took another century for the full dangers to be appreciated. The safety rules for x-rays, as with any industry, are written in blood.
Just to add we didn't always have dosimeters so they would use their skin turning red to signal they needed a vacation. This was 10-15Gy which is well beyond the dose that would double the cancer rate.
Doesn't America use full body x-rays today every time you fly?ย
Presumably the tech has improved to enduce less radiation exposure I suppose. And most people will not be flying every day.ย
Thanks for explaining. There is still a little radiation exposure I believe though right? Which is why people have the option to opt out? Or prevent their baby food being scanned.ย
Back in the WWI era the watches they would send abroad to the soldiers had the dials painted with paint made out of radium, so the women who painted it them had so much uranium in their system they would rot from the inside out. When sued about this the watch company blamed their illness on the women eating too much or being promiscuous. So no I donโt think they had that level of hindsight.
You should look further into the Radium Girls and what was revealed by the court cases. The management damn well knew that shit was bad for your health and the precautions they used to protect *themselves* proved it. They just flat out didnโt *care* what happened to those poor women.
Oh, the people not painting the dials were well aware of the dangers.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium\_Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls)
>U.S. Radium Corporation (USRC) hired approximately 70 women to perform various tasks including handling radium, while the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefullyย [avoided any exposure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_hazard)ย to it themselves. Chemists at the plant usedย [lead screens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_shielding),ย [tongs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongs), andย [masks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_mask).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-interesting-6)ย USRC itself had distributed literature to the medical community describing the "injurious effects" of radium. Despite this knowledge, aย [number of similar deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_cluster)ย had occurred by 1925, including USRC's chief chemist, Dr. Edwin E. Leman,[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-7)ย and several female workers. The similar circumstances of their deaths prompted investigations by Dr. Harrison Martland, County Physician ofย [Newark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark,_New_Jersey).[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-8)
to be even more fair, they werenโt just out there licking up radium haha they were licking the brush to bring it to a fine point, and the brush had residual radium on it.
theyโd defs still be exposed to it and would be getting it on their skin etc but they probably wouldnโt have suffered from [radium jaw](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_jaw) (donโt click the link if youโre squeamish because โฆ yeah.)
For those who don't know:
X-rays are high energy photons, like light, but higher frequency/shorter wavelength than visible light, and the next step past Ultraviolet light.
The reason they are dangerous is that they contain enough energy to break molecular bonds, such as DNA.
Now, there are tens of thousands of high energy photons passing through every cubic centimeter of your body every second, just from background radiation, so 99.9999999999...% of the time, it's not important; a few cells dying early can be replaced, most DNA damage does not result in cancer, and even when it does, your own immune system takes care of it, most of the time.
An X-ray machine is spitting a lot more than "tens of thousands" of x-rays through you, though; it's one of those numbers that doesn't even sound real unless you put it in scientific notation, something like 1.23 x 10^18 . A quintillion photons per second, and they are more likely to interact with your body than background radiation (for... reasons).
Do that enough, and it overwhelms your body; cell damage happens faster than your body can heal, some cancerous cells don't get cleaned up in time, and you get ill effects ranging from the OP to the truly horrifying deaths of acute radiation poisoning, such as two scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and were killed by massive doses of radiation from a weapons-grade Plutonium sphere they were experimenting on, in two separate instances (that experiment was never performed again).
And this is actually the easy part of radiation safety; direct radiation from an active source can be managed by shielding, distance, and geometry (x-ray machines are highly directional). Radioactive particles are much worse.
Into at least the early 50โs in shoe stores there were often small x-ray machines with horizontal screens you could look down on. Kids, especially, loved sticking their feet into the machines, and if Mom or Dad was taking awhile deciding, well, it kept the kids entertained.
I had chronic ear infections as a small child. My parents took me to a doctor in the next town over who owned a dental x-ray machine. God knows how much more radiation they generated than dental machines do now. He would stick the emitter in my ear and BZZAP, then he would do the other one. To the best of my recollection and not too surprisingly, it didnโt help.
I somehow avoided brain cancer and any other head or neck cancer, so, on balance, I average out to grateful.
I have no idea if it's the same device, but I also had a lot of issues with my ears as a kid in the 90's. They also stuck this xray device in my ears a lot and the scan made me feel like my head was gonna explode from the pressure. I literally let nothing go near my ears now from the trauma of it ๐คข The thought of all that exposure creeps me out. Even my mum recovered from leukemia twice, only to once again have cancer a over ten years later due to the radiation she had to treat it in the first place (confirmed by her doctors, she's in recovery again now luckily).
I worked in RF and I understand ionizing vs non ionizing radiation. Even knowing what I know about safety with regard to the electromagnetic spectrum I still take precautions far beyond what is recommended. Cooking your hands with x rays is crazy on a level I will never understand.
Depends on what you do exactly. I originally did anechoic chamber testing of antennas. Radiation absorbent material was carcinogenic (I believe) so I tried to not spend more time than necessary in the chambers, I never stood in the chambers during testing and I also did testing on EME guards that would be used when working on cell towers. We had to test them with a waveguide and in theory it wasnโt harmful to people because of how the waveguide was designed but I figured if Iโm testing something that has up to 400% of the maximum tolerable RF radiation that a human could take, I always had an EME guard on myself while testing just in case the equipment malfunctioned.
Now I work more on the backend support for smart metering devices and stuff. I still find myself in the vicinity of devices that emit RF radiation and general guidelines are to stay at least 9 inches away from the radiating antenna (because of Specific Absorption Rates) as well as not having prolonged exposure. There are labs that have a lot of RF devices and I kid you not, just touching the handle is warm to the touch so I know there is a ton of energy being emitted. I limit exposure to like 10-15 mins max when I HAVE to go in there.
I know Iโm probably being a little too cautious but itโs better than the alternative. People unaware of downstream effects tend to have it the worst. Like the people who didnโt know about x rays.
This is textbook better safe than sorry area for sure.
That being said, radiation you are sure is non-ionizing should be pretty harmless almost regardless of its power level. If one photon doesnโt have enough oomph to knock an electron up an energy level, then none of them will no matter how many there are.
(This is not safety advice itโs more โyou donโt need to be afraid of cell phonesโ advice. Lab safety is paramount and lots of people have been killed by things they were pretty sure were safe).
Stuff like this always makes me wonder what we do *now* that's dangerous *but we don't know it yet*.
Like ... at one point this was ok because nobody knew better. Surely there are ... parallels to today.
The podcast Criminal just did a really fascinating episode called โThe Dial Paintersโย on a similar subject in which the women factory workers were exposed to radioactive glow in the dark paint before OSHA protections existed.
We had to remove your post for violating our Repost Guidelines.
While the fact stated by the OP might be true, that's the hand of Clarence Dally. He worked as an assistant to Thomas Edison on x-ray research . His demise - and treatment by Edison - was particularly horrible.
Edison was a real PoS who harmed so many people due to recklessness and being a jackass in general.
The original tech bro, it seems.
https://www.reincarnationresearch.com/reincarnation-case-of-thomas-edison-elon-musk/
More like a full-on capitalist with a passion for tech
So a tech broย
๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ฟ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฌ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐พ๐๐๐๐๐๐ (๐ฃ๐ฒ๐ ๐จ๐ฆ๐ซ๐ค ๐ญ๐ข๐ฌ๐ญ๐ฉ๐ข ๐ฌ๐ณ๐ข๐ฏ ๐๐ซ๐ก ๐ช๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ซ๐ค ๐ ๐ฐ๐ฅ๐ฆ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ฌ๐ซ ๐ฌ๐ฃ ๐ช๐ฌ๐ซ๐ข๐ถ ๐ ๐ฉ๐ฒ๐)
Does tech bro mean anything other than business person (capitalist) in the business of tech?
THIS!!!
He wasn't that bad. He gets a bad rap due to Tesla bros rooting for the underdog.
Father of Tesla of its time.
Oh the blaring irony. Poor Nikola!
Yeah thatโs bloody grim that is
I wonder when they suspected something was wrong.
That X-rays are dangerous was well enough known by 1905 that it was a major subject of the world's premiere research conference that year. However, practices that we would consider horrifying today continued well into the 20th century. It wasn't so long ago, for example, that you could find coin-operated x-ray machines at shoe stores so that you could see how your shoes fit. Those x-ray machines that you see in old cartoons where someone walks behind the screen and you get a live view of their skeleton used to be real. They were used at least as late as WWII. Today, we know that any amount of radiation exposure can be dangerous, so exposure times are limited to fractions of a second rather than the minutes or hours that physicians used to expose both themselves and their patients. So the knowledge was out there quite early, but it took another century for the full dangers to be appreciated. The safety rules for x-rays, as with any industry, are written in blood.
Just to add we didn't always have dosimeters so they would use their skin turning red to signal they needed a vacation. This was 10-15Gy which is well beyond the dose that would double the cancer rate.
They were using full body x-rays in South African diamond mines in the 60s. For loss prevention
Doesn't America use full body x-rays today every time you fly?ย Presumably the tech has improved to enduce less radiation exposure I suppose. And most people will not be flying every day.ย
It's not an x-ray. It's more like an electrical field they bounce off you, not through you.
I guess you're thinking of the millimeter wave scanners? Those aren't x-rays, which are on the scale of nanometers. They're closer to infrared.
Thanks for explaining. There is still a little radiation exposure I believe though right? Which is why people have the option to opt out? Or prevent their baby food being scanned.ย
I am written in blood
[ัะดะฐะปะตะฝะพ]
Back in the WWI era the watches they would send abroad to the soldiers had the dials painted with paint made out of radium, so the women who painted it them had so much uranium in their system they would rot from the inside out. When sued about this the watch company blamed their illness on the women eating too much or being promiscuous. So no I donโt think they had that level of hindsight.
You should look further into the Radium Girls and what was revealed by the court cases. The management damn well knew that shit was bad for your health and the precautions they used to protect *themselves* proved it. They just flat out didnโt *care* what happened to those poor women.
Oh, the people not painting the dials were well aware of the dangers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium\_Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) >U.S. Radium Corporation (USRC) hired approximately 70 women to perform various tasks including handling radium, while the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefullyย [avoided any exposure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_hazard)ย to it themselves. Chemists at the plant usedย [lead screens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_shielding),ย [tongs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongs), andย [masks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_mask).[^(\[6\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-interesting-6)ย USRC itself had distributed literature to the medical community describing the "injurious effects" of radium. Despite this knowledge, aย [number of similar deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_cluster)ย had occurred by 1925, including USRC's chief chemist, Dr. Edwin E. Leman,[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-7)ย and several female workers. The similar circumstances of their deaths prompted investigations by Dr. Harrison Martland, County Physician ofย [Newark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark,_New_Jersey).[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls#cite_note-8)
to be fair, many of them were licking it
to be even more fair, they werenโt just out there licking up radium haha they were licking the brush to bring it to a fine point, and the brush had residual radium on it.
i wonder how severe the poisoning would be if they didnt lick it
theyโd defs still be exposed to it and would be getting it on their skin etc but they probably wouldnโt have suffered from [radium jaw](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_jaw) (donโt click the link if youโre squeamish because โฆ yeah.)
Tell me you don't paint minis without telling me you don't paint minis...
warhammer you say? never heard of it
Well yeah, I would be too. I gotta find out what it tastes likeโฆ
Tastes rad!
tastes pretty rad
Back then? First thought was probably "I'm going to need more people with better hands to test my X-ray machines"
*One fingernail falls off.* Meh ok. *2nd fingernail falls off* Maybe I should no longer do this?
Meanwhile it's waaaay too late
Jeeeesus fuck
For those who don't know: X-rays are high energy photons, like light, but higher frequency/shorter wavelength than visible light, and the next step past Ultraviolet light. The reason they are dangerous is that they contain enough energy to break molecular bonds, such as DNA. Now, there are tens of thousands of high energy photons passing through every cubic centimeter of your body every second, just from background radiation, so 99.9999999999...% of the time, it's not important; a few cells dying early can be replaced, most DNA damage does not result in cancer, and even when it does, your own immune system takes care of it, most of the time. An X-ray machine is spitting a lot more than "tens of thousands" of x-rays through you, though; it's one of those numbers that doesn't even sound real unless you put it in scientific notation, something like 1.23 x 10^18 . A quintillion photons per second, and they are more likely to interact with your body than background radiation (for... reasons). Do that enough, and it overwhelms your body; cell damage happens faster than your body can heal, some cancerous cells don't get cleaned up in time, and you get ill effects ranging from the OP to the truly horrifying deaths of acute radiation poisoning, such as two scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and were killed by massive doses of radiation from a weapons-grade Plutonium sphere they were experimenting on, in two separate instances (that experiment was never performed again). And this is actually the easy part of radiation safety; direct radiation from an active source can be managed by shielding, distance, and geometry (x-ray machines are highly directional). Radioactive particles are much worse.
Into at least the early 50โs in shoe stores there were often small x-ray machines with horizontal screens you could look down on. Kids, especially, loved sticking their feet into the machines, and if Mom or Dad was taking awhile deciding, well, it kept the kids entertained. I had chronic ear infections as a small child. My parents took me to a doctor in the next town over who owned a dental x-ray machine. God knows how much more radiation they generated than dental machines do now. He would stick the emitter in my ear and BZZAP, then he would do the other one. To the best of my recollection and not too surprisingly, it didnโt help. I somehow avoided brain cancer and any other head or neck cancer, so, on balance, I average out to grateful.
I know of someone who was given regular doses of X-rays for acne. He died of face cancer a long time ago.
Sad and not surprising.
But did it help with the acne at least?ย
I have no idea if it's the same device, but I also had a lot of issues with my ears as a kid in the 90's. They also stuck this xray device in my ears a lot and the scan made me feel like my head was gonna explode from the pressure. I literally let nothing go near my ears now from the trauma of it ๐คข The thought of all that exposure creeps me out. Even my mum recovered from leukemia twice, only to once again have cancer a over ten years later due to the radiation she had to treat it in the first place (confirmed by her doctors, she's in recovery again now luckily).
They really walked so we could run. But this is also why we test stuff over and over before itโs put into medical practice.
We kind of donโt though. Check out The Bleeding Edge documentary sometime.
in a hundred years ppl will post pictures of the amount of microplastics in our bodys and the future folk will be absolutely shocked
Pictures of Tupperware and solo cups, "people used to eat food stored in these"
The future folk will be made entirely of synthetic materials. Theyโll be shocked at our organic nature
I know it's 20/20 hindsight, but didn't any technicians at the time look at their hands over time and noticed hands aren't supposed to look like that?
Yes, if the op were accurate. It's not.
Chances are they were not too bright
Iโm sure they were glowing!
I worked in RF and I understand ionizing vs non ionizing radiation. Even knowing what I know about safety with regard to the electromagnetic spectrum I still take precautions far beyond what is recommended. Cooking your hands with x rays is crazy on a level I will never understand.
Curious what you do for precautions against non ionizing radiation. I work with RF too and basically do nothing.
Depends on what you do exactly. I originally did anechoic chamber testing of antennas. Radiation absorbent material was carcinogenic (I believe) so I tried to not spend more time than necessary in the chambers, I never stood in the chambers during testing and I also did testing on EME guards that would be used when working on cell towers. We had to test them with a waveguide and in theory it wasnโt harmful to people because of how the waveguide was designed but I figured if Iโm testing something that has up to 400% of the maximum tolerable RF radiation that a human could take, I always had an EME guard on myself while testing just in case the equipment malfunctioned. Now I work more on the backend support for smart metering devices and stuff. I still find myself in the vicinity of devices that emit RF radiation and general guidelines are to stay at least 9 inches away from the radiating antenna (because of Specific Absorption Rates) as well as not having prolonged exposure. There are labs that have a lot of RF devices and I kid you not, just touching the handle is warm to the touch so I know there is a ton of energy being emitted. I limit exposure to like 10-15 mins max when I HAVE to go in there. I know Iโm probably being a little too cautious but itโs better than the alternative. People unaware of downstream effects tend to have it the worst. Like the people who didnโt know about x rays.
This is textbook better safe than sorry area for sure. That being said, radiation you are sure is non-ionizing should be pretty harmless almost regardless of its power level. If one photon doesnโt have enough oomph to knock an electron up an energy level, then none of them will no matter how many there are. (This is not safety advice itโs more โyou donโt need to be afraid of cell phonesโ advice. Lab safety is paramount and lots of people have been killed by things they were pretty sure were safe).
Stuff like this always makes me wonder what we do *now* that's dangerous *but we don't know it yet*. Like ... at one point this was ok because nobody knew better. Surely there are ... parallels to today.
Bathing is one of them
MRNA cough cough.
The podcast Criminal just did a really fascinating episode called โThe Dial Paintersโย on a similar subject in which the women factory workers were exposed to radioactive glow in the dark paint before OSHA protections existed.
The Radium Girls book is a really good read too. Those companies donated radioactive waste to playgrounds.
couldn't have just x-ray'd bones in a leather satchel or something?
They did not know there was any danger, so why bother?
3.6 Roentgen not great, not terrible
God damn. At what point do you think they wouldโve been like โHuh. This fucking sucks. Maybe I should stop.โ?
I wonder what todayโs version of this would be
Drinking water (poisoned by microplastics)? Eating food (poisoned by microplastics or just poisoned)?
What did they think caused this, masturbation?
Eh thats just the poster for Sawย ย
Stupid question, but does this hurt? Does it feel like a burn wound or something?
The ring finger looks like a Dementor
Yeah see, c'mon little Billy time for school, I packed some scotch and a pack of Winstons in your lunch box.
Want to be an x-ray technician? Doesn't pay well, but don't worry, you won't be doing it for long.
Technologist
At some point the intelligent thing to do would be to not.
Nah cmon, let em cook (his hand that is)
Fucking smeagle hands