[knarf]

I'll TRY to accept that ...

Take a good product off of the market because the monkeys were eating the paint

Wouldn't a $2 fan and a 10 cent paper mask have helped ?

[lacrew]

As the story goes, the workers were licking the strips, to get them to stick to the watch hands...and a lot of them ended up with mouth cancer. It is supposed to be one of the first instances where it became understood that environmental factors could cause cancer - and it wasn’t just random or genetic.

But I think a machine could be found to apply the strips these days.

[JohnBovenmyer]

There once was a real problem, which became a scandal, over painting radium on watch dials: Radium Girls. This was well before the 50s and as far as I know the changed work practices that resulted from the scandal were successful in preventing radium poisoning of watch workers. I don't know why the radium use eventually ceased, but there were certainly a lot of anti-nuke nuts back then.

[meatloaf]

Weren’t they putting the brushes in their mouths to align the bristles into a tip?

[Rodamala]

The dials were hand painted my women with a fine artist’s brush like modelers use. They would dab the brush on the tip of their tongue to give the brush a sharp point. The we’re called “The Radium Girls”. Look it up.