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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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They got dizzy - all kinds of things. They had longer or shorter periods of illness, some claiming that some people had died of it. That we never really established, but certainly there were a number of people made ill by something. What it was, nobody knew.

We began to look into it and discovered that a rumor was going around that something in the process of making rayon had brought about insanity in some cases. We had no evidence of that either. But we did compare notes with a number of other plants. We got considerable help from the engineers and chemists of the DuPont Company. By this time, under the reorganized Department of Labor, we had some very high-grade industrial hygienists. They were called inspectors of the ninth grade, I believe, who were industrial hygienists. They were either medical men or physiologists, or something of that sort. We had two or three of those, so we put them on to the study of it.

After a study it became clear that the situation was that at the point where this substance comes out of the spinnerettes a gas - carbon monoxide - is released. This is very sickening to some people, but not to everybody. Some people seem to suffer from it. The greatest number of people in that plant who had been sick were at the actual point where the threads came out of the spinnerettes. The





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