Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

SOME FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON STANDARDS 341
though measurable, was and, with some qualifications, still is considered
harmless. Ingestion of the radium paint was something else again, yet no
one gave any thought to the hundreds of girls who during the war painted
the dials, putting the radium.tipped brushes in their mouths to point them.
In the early twenties a number of the girls fell mysteriously ill and died. It
was 1927 before their illness was identified as radium sickness.129
Staff artists on the tabloids drew lurid front.page pictures of young
girls in nightgowns glowing in the dark of their bedrooms before full.length
mirrors, while captions beneath described this terrifying experience in the
night as the initial clue to the sickness. If the drawings were medically
unsound, the poisoning was real, and in 1932, after extensive studies of the
radium nostrums on the market, the American Medical Association removed
radium for internal administration, in any form, from its list of remedies.
Bureau research on radioactive luminous compounds, particularly their safe
handling in industry, found it way into the handbook on radium protection in
1934 and by 1941 merited a handbook (H27) of its own.13°
Among other fundamental studies accelerated in the thirties was Dr.
Meggers' work in spectroanalysis, leading to the compilation of new and ac-
curate measurements of the atomic emission spectra of chemical elements,
rare gases, rare metals, and to analyses of their structures. In a specially
equipped laboratory, Meggers began an investigation to standardize the
emission spectra of elements, with the intention of developing methods for
quantitative chemical analysis by means of partial spectra. The systematic
observation of the relation of various spectral lines to atomic structure pointed
the way to fundamental factors that were to provide a valuable guide later
in the chemical purification of metals, in testing materials of specific purity,
sorting scrap metal, and controlling the composition of alloys.'31
The progress in spectrochemical analysis, increasingly used in both
research and industrial laboratories, was mirrored in an index, published by
the American Society for Testing Materials, that listed almost a thousand
papers on the subject spanning the period 1920_37.132 Even as the stacks of
graph paper with their six- and eight-digit columns of figures mounted in the
spectrographic laboratories in Washington, another tabular project of the
Bureau, equally ambitious, got under way in New York City.
Lang, "A most valuable accident," The New Yorker, May 2, 1959, pp. 49—92.
For Surgeon General—NBS conferences on radium sickness, see memo, L. F. Curtiss for
GKB, Dec. 21, 1948 (NBS Box 230, ID—Div IV).
In the 1960's the watch industry began using tritium, a radioisotope of hydrogen, as
a substitute for radium in dial paints, its radiation so slight it cannot be detected outside
the watch.
" NBS Annual Report 1933, p. 53; Annual Report 1937, pp. 64—65.
"NBS Annual Report 1939, p. 55.