Happy birthday, British actress Jane Lapotaire!

Jane Lapotaire, born January 26, 1944 in Suffolk, England, is an actress who I first saw in the miniseries Marie Curie in 1977.  More recently, she appeared in Downton Abbey as Princess Irina, appearing with Dame Maggie Smith.  I found out she was in another favorite movie, One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing in 1975 with Helen Hayes.  In 2006, she starred with Sir Patrick Stewart in the mini-series thriller Eleventh Hour.  In 2020, she appeared in the remake of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

It's interesting to note that she was born on the anniversary of Marie Curie's discovery of radium in 1898. 

Book review - "The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore delves into the lives of the women who painted dials and clocks for the U.S. military during World War I.  The paint they used contained radium, a radioactive substance that glowed in the dark, thus its use for aircraft indicators.  The girls, hired by U.S. Radium Corporation (USRC), were unaware of the dangers of the radium compound they used, and the company reassured them frequently that the substance was perfectly safe.  The girls, mostly teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, developed a technique to make their lines straight.  They put the brushes with the radium compound into their mouth so the bristles could produce the tiny lines required by the company.

Lip…dip…paint.

The girls also painted their fingernails with the compound and put it on their eyelashes, loving the glow-in-the-dark effect it had.  Their jobs were lucrative and they enjoyed having parties and wearing fashionable clothes.  Even after the war ended, there was a demand for radium painted products.

After a few years, some of the women began developing serious health problems and then dying.  It took a while for them, their dentists, and their doctors to make the connection between their jobs and the radium.  Naturally, they went after USRC, whom they claimed knew about the dangers of radium but withheld the information from them.

Naturally, the company did everything it could denying any responsibility and would not claim liability.  The women spent years fighting USRC and time, realizing that they might not live long enough to see justice served.

Moore based her book on a number of interviews with the relatives of the radium girls, and plenty of court records.  Most disturbing, though, was the details in which she describes the deteriorating health of the radium girls, chronicling their rapid declines and suffering to death meticulously.  It got rather stomach-churning in some instances to read what was happening to these women.  In fact, there were times in the book, I thought Moore might be putting too much detail in their symptoms but it does illustrate how poorly these women were treated by their employers, doctors and even townsfolk. 

What is chilling about this book is the corruption of the USRC to deny these girls the lives they should have had all for the sake of making a buck.  The dangers of radium had been known since 1901 when the Curies first discovered it.  The company knew of those dangers but deliberately lied to the girls to cover their complicity.

Sound familiar?

Marie Curie awarded second Nobel Prize 1911

For over a century, the Nobel Prize committee has not only fallen for the greatest hoax of all time, science, but has continued to promulgate the lies and deceit from the evilest of evil people, scientists!  Just look at not one, but TWO incidents that happened on this day in history.  First of all, in 1911, Marie Curie was awarded her second(!) Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry.  A woman!  She is the only person, male or female, to win two prizes in different categories.  She won the first one with her husband in 1903 for Physics (but I'm sure he did most of the work). Don’t they know women don’t like or are not interested in math and science?  And just think of the dangers of radiation.  It would have been better if she had just left all that stuff alone.  If she had, we wouldn't be bothered with Godzilla or Spiderman!

Eleven years later, Neils Bohr was giving his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in Physics (just as liberal as chemistry, but at least it was a man this time!), when two of his contemporaries announced they had discovered the element hafnium.  What a stupid name. Supposedly it is the “Roman” name for Copenhagen.  Why couldn’t they have stayed with good ol' English name and called it Copenhagenium or Denmarkium? I have never even seen a hafnium?  Have you?

It’s all a conspiracy by the ultra-mega-platinum left-wing liberals to undermine our own education system with facts!  Conservatives don’t need no facts!

Marie Curie, 2 x Nobel prize winner, born 1867

Marie Curie, born November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, is still the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the first person (and only woman) to win TWO Nobel prizes and the ONLY person to win a Nobel prize in two different categories!

Although she studied and worked in France, she remained loyal to her home country of Poland and named the first chemical element she discovered 'polonium' after it.

She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre for their work in radiation research. 

Her husband died in a tragic road accident in 1906, which devastated her, but the University of Paris where Pierre taught decided to offer his chair to Marie.  She accepted and became the first woman to teach at the university.

In 1911, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in discovering and isolating the elements polonium and radium.

Due to her long exposure to radiation, Marie Curie contracted leukemia and passed away in 1934.