9/18/2023 0 Comments Radium dial watch companyLike many East Coasters, he decides to pursue his fortune out West, but unlike many of his peers, he skips the bustling Second City in favor of a promising river & railroad region downstate where the towns of Peru, LaSalle and Ottawa intersect. The story begins with a Connecticut clockmaker named Charles Stahlberg getting a patent for a new alarm clock design in 1885. is even more impressive considering the company didn’t have all the resources of an established, major metropolis to draw from. In some respects, the early rise of the Western Clock MFG Co. wasn’t born in Chicago or headquartered here, the immediate aftershocks of the company’s cultural and industrial impact certainly reached our shores in a hurry, no interstate required. Above all else, though, the rise and fall of Westclox-and the deeper history of these Big Ben clocks, in particular-is simply far too intriguing to dismiss just because of a long-distance commute. Well, the company certainly maintained some major salesrooms here, and many of their employees came from the city and its suburbs. So, does Westclox really belong in the Made In Chicago Museum? Even today, with the considerable help of a thing called Interstate 80, it’s still about a two-hour journey from LaSalle Street to LaSalle County. Located at 41.3275° N, 89.1290° W on the map, the company’s former plant is admittedly on the absolute fringes of what would typically be designated “Chicagoland” turf. Unfortunately, they also hint at a tragic chapter in American industrial history, when the appeal of a “luminous” new kind of paint wound up putting hundreds of workers-mostly young women-at great personal risk.īefore we get to that, though, we have to start with the issue of geography as it concerns the business in question.įor at least four generations, the Western Clock Manufacturing Company, aka Westclox, was the lifeblood and largest employer in the small town of Peru, Illinois (with a mailing address in its twin city of LaSalle). Purchased from a man who claimed to have salvaged them from the backroom of an unnamed Chicago watch repair shop, each round and weathered face represents the lasting work of an international manufacturing giant at the peak of its powers. Made By: Western Clock MFG Company, aka Westclox, 350 5th St., Peru, Illinois Ī clock without hands might seem indifferent to the passage of time, but these old “Big Ben” and “Baby Ben” dials have some serious stories to tell. “We didn’t know anything about the paint.Museum Artifacts: Luminous “Big Ben” & “Baby Ben” Clock Dials (1940s) and Style 1A “Big Ben” Alarm Clock (1920s) “We were young,” she told The Hartford Courant in 2004. Keane had expected it to be easy work, and the pay was good: a few cents for each dial she completed. Painting watch dials was promoted as ideally suited for delicate female hands. Cohn’s son, Timothy, a student at Pomperaug High School, won a bronze medal at the 2012 National History Day Contest for his project, a photography exhibition called “Radium Girls: Tragedy Leading to Industrial Reform.” Keane’s husband of 40 years, Timothy Keane, a police detective, died in 1981. She graduated from Wilby High School and, after leaving the watch company, spent many years doing administrative work at the Plume & Atwood Manufacturing Company, which made brass lamps and the parts for them. Her mother, the former Catherine Lynch, worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Her father, William, was a foreman in a Waterbury factory. Mae Keane was born Mary O’Donnell on May 28, 1906, in Waterbury, the daughter of Irish immigrants who gave her the nickname Mae. Within two decades she had lost all her teeth. Keane did not like the taste and texture of the paint or the tedium of the work. They did not necessarily know why.īut Mrs. Many lost their teeth some also lost their jawbones. Others succumbed later, and to other health problems related to radium exposure. Many were still in their 20s when they died of cancer from radiation poisoning. Keane stayed longer, she might have become one of the many sad stories involving the so-called radium girls, the hundreds of young women who worked with radium paint in factories early in the 20th century. Watchmakers liked it because it glowed in the dark. It was made with a relatively new material that most people did not know much about, something called radium. Like other young women working at the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut the 1920s, Mae Keane was taught a specific technique for applying paint to the numbers on wristwatch dials: Put the tip of the tiny brush between your lips to shape the bristles into the finest of points.
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