eli5 How come if highly radioactive radium was on watches that the wearers didn’t succumb to radiation poisoning at the wrist?
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It was usually a minuscule amount of radium-laced paint on the hands of the watch. The main reason why the watch factory workers (the “radium girls”) got radiation poisoning was because they worked with large quantities of radium paint on a daily basis. And since science was unaware of the radioactive effects at the time, they’d do stuff like lick the tips of their paintbrushes to taper the point, so they were actively ingesting it too.
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