Radium clocks and watches were all the rave during the Roaring Twenties. The watch faces glowed all the time and didn’t require charging in sunlight, like florescent paint. Everyone who was anyone had to have one. The Radium Girls were not rich debutants who flashed their wristwatches, but rather the simple factory women who hand-painted the radioactive radium onto the clock faces.
The new element Radium was discovered in Paris in 1898 by Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie. Radium was particularly intriguing because it glowed in the dark. Marie Curie herself noted, “These gleamings suspended the darkness, stirred ever-new emotion and enchantment”.
Soon enough, radium became a veritable craze. After doctors learned that radium could treat some cancers, many thought it could also be used to treat virtually ALL diseases. Before long, radium was widely considered the long awaited “Miracle Cure,” or a least a very powerful health tonic. Bottles were sold in pharmacies for everything from arthritis to aging to impotence. Newspaper advertisements boldly claimed its use would “Add years to your life!”
Radium gave the illusion of good health because it stimulated the production red blood cells giving you a healthy blush. Companies sold radium toothpaste, radium cosmetics, and even radium water. People took this “Perpetual Sunshine” like we take vitamins and supplements today. Radioactivity was after all … energy! So people didn’t see how adding some extra energy to their bodies could possibly be dangerous, right?
Far from being a cure-all, radium in fact released deadly levels radioactivity.
American inventor William Hammer went to Paris and obtained a sample of radium salt crystals from Marie Curie. Hammer discovered that by mixing the radium with zinc and glue, he could make a glow-in-the-dark paint. His discovery would be used by the new U.S. Radium Corporation to manufacture wristwatches with light-green glowing dials. Paint advertisements for UNDARK, boasted “The Magic of Radium!”
Glow-in-the-dark radium watches were an instant hit. U.S. Radium Corp. also received lucrative government contracts during World War I to produce instruments dials for the army and navy. One of the first factories to produce watches opened in Orange, New Jersey in 1916. It hired about 70 women, the first of thousands to be employed across the U.S. Many of them were teenagers fresh out of high school, with small, petite hands, perfect for the tedious, artistic work.
Being a ‘Radium Girl’ was a well-paid, even glamorous job. After all, it used one of the most expensive substances in the world. Adding to the allure, the girls were listed as ‘Artists’ in their town directories. Dial painting was an elite job for poor working girls and paid three times the salary of a grueling factory job. It provided them financial freedom and even female empowerment. Word spread and ladies encouraged their sisters and girlfriends to join them. The Radium Girls believed the hype, that they were getting healthier as a fringe benefit.
At the USRC factory, NO safety precautions were taken to protect the young girls. For the delicate task of applying the paint to the small dials, the women were trained to point their fine brush tips with their lips or tongue. The practice was called lip-pointing, or a “Lip, Dip, Paint.” Unfortunately, the women were ingesting small quantities of radioactive radium with every lick and brushstroke.
By the end of the day, the women would actually glow!
It came from the radioactive paint on their clothes and skin. Dust swept from the workroom was all luminous in the dark. Their hair, faces, hands, arms, dresses, even their corsets were luminous. At the time, the girls loved it. They wore their best dresses to the plant, so that when they would go to dance halls later that night, they’d be literally be glowing. Female dial painters also became known as “The Ghost Girls” as they themselves now glowed in the dark.
The girls didn’t blindly embrace this brush wetting technique. They asked their foremen, Was the radium paint harmful? But managers repeatedly said it was perfectly safe. The women were lied to. Marie Curie herself suffered radiation burns and warned the French public of its danger. Men at the radium manufacturing companies were given lead aprons and handled the radium with tongs. The Radium Girls weren’t given such protection, or even warned it might be necessary.
Radiation poisoning isn’t immediate, so years went by before any of the women started developing symptoms. Within a few years though, dozens of the girls began showing serious signs of illness. The human body takes in radium much like calcium, incorporating it into your bones, then irradiating them from within. In the early 1920s, it began innocent enough, with some of the girls developing toothaches.
Then the first Radium Girl death occurred in 1922.
Poor 22-year-old Mollie Maggia died after living through a year of horrendous symptoms. Mollie had to quit working because of her illness. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. It had started with aching teeth. Her dentist pulled them. Then in the place of the missing teeth, painful red ulcers erupted. They seeped pus constantly into her mouth. She then suffered aching limbs, so agonizing she was unable to walk or move her arms. The doctor thought she had rheumatism and prescribed her aspirin, the new painkiller.
Mollie became desperate. She’d lost most of her teeth and the mysterious ulcers spread to her tongue and the roof of her mouth. But then the worst consequence of all came. Her dentist was able to remove her diseased lower jaw by simply lifting it out with his fingers. By this time, other Radium Girls were having trouble with their teeth, jaw and joints as well. Suddenly their once attractive glow at night brought new meaning to their nickname “The Ghost Girls.”
Within months, Mollie’s strange infection spread down to her throat. She subsisted on a liquid diet and no longer went out in public. Then her jugular vein hemorrhaged. Her mouth flooded with blood and she died of asphyxiation and blood loss. She was only 24. Her baffled doctor listed the cause of her death on the death certificate as “Syphilis.” Like clockwork thereafter, Mollie’s friends and colleagues followed her to the grave, one by one by one.
For 2 years, USRC denied any responsibility for the Radium Girls’ deaths.
Attempts by employees to receive compensation from USRC were all futile. Medical and legal costs were enormous for a young, unmarried girl. And U.S. Radium held a prominent position as an important government contractor. Sales began to suffer though due to the inevitable public gossip. So USRC commissioned an independent expert to look into the so-called “rumors.”
In 1924, their expert confirmed the link between the radium and the women’s illnesses. USRC’s President was livid and continued to deny the link. He paid for new studies by other “experts” that published the opposite conclusion. He publicly denounced the women as trying to blame their illnesses on USRC in an attempt to get their medical bills paid for.
Then in 1925, Grace Fryer, one of the workers from the New Jersey plant, decided to sue. Eight years earlier, at just 18, she started work as a dial painter at USRC. With two enlisted brothers in World War I, Grace wanted to do her part for the war effort. She led the legal fight for the Radium Girls. Grace was determined to find a lawyer after countless turned her down, either from disbelief or fear of the powerful USRC. The challenge was proving the link between their mysterious disease and radium paint.
Grace Fryer was the daughter of a union delegate, and would NOT give up the fight.
They had to fight the widespread belief that radium was still safe and in fact healthy. In 1925, Dr. Harrison Martland devised a medical test proving that radium had poisoned the women. Dr. Martland also was able to explain what was happening inside the girls’ bodies. He realized the poisoning was fatal AND there was no way of removing the radium from the poor girls’ bones.
The women continued to have their teeth fall out, bones break, and spines collapse. By 1927, more than 50 had died. Then finally, a young lawyer named Raymond Berry accepted their case. Grace finally filed her suit in 1927 along with 4 fellow workers for damages of $250,000. It made front-page news around the world. The radium industry banded together and attempted to discredit Dr. Martland while dealing with the tenacity of the radium girls. Their story became a national sensation
“It is not for just myself that I care, but for the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.”
Grace Fryer, 1927
But time was running out: Their doctors had given the five women just four months to live. By then, Grace Fryer’s own spine was crumbling and she had to wear a steel back brace. With the clock ticking, they would eventually settle a year later for just $10,000 each and a $600 annual payment. None of them would live longer than two years after the historic settlement.
There were other small victories. Death certificates would now start reporting the correct cause of death – Radium Poisoning. They had successfully raised the warning flag. The Food and Drug Administration eventually banned the deceptive packaging of radium-based products as good for your health.
The Radium Girls’ case became a milestone of occupational hazard and safety law. The dangers of radium were now in full view to the world. The lip-pointing technique was stopped in all factories and the workers were being given protective gear to wear.
A second, more-decisive trial occurred in 1938.
Radium Girl Catherine Wolfe Donohue vs. the Illinois Radium Dial Company. It ended in victory after an ugly decade-long cover up. Catherine had also watched her friends die, lost her teeth and developed a large cancerous tumor on her hip. She gave evidence to the judge from her deathbed. With the help of a brave, pro bono lawyer, Leonard Grossman, she finally won justice not only for herself, but for all the Radium Girls.
In 1939, the Supreme Court rejected the radium companies’ last appeal. In 1949, the United States Congress passed a historic workplace safety law which gave workers the right to receive compensation for occupational illnesses. That case led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately the creation of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970.
While the use of UNDARK paint for decades was a catastrophe, it nevertheless disclosed the dangers of radiation exposure. Robert Oppenheimer and scientific teams researching the properties of plutonium for the Manhattan Project wrote regulations and took appropriate safety precautions. Safety regulations based on the Radium Girls experience.
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission noted, “If it hadn’t been for those female dial-painters, thousands of workers on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos would have been in great danger.” A great deal that we know about the effect of radiation in the human body, we owe to them. A movie about their struggles, Radium Girls, was released in 2018, starring the actress Joey King.
Watches and clocks would continue to be manufactured safely with radium paint until 1968, when the practice was discontinued. Look at any antique from your grandparents and you’ll likely find its softly glowing green dial.
The exactly number of women who became ill is not known, but the number is in the thousands. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so once inside those women’s bones, it is there for centuries. So The Ghost Girls will in fact be glowing in their graves for a very long time.
Hi Paul, what an appalling story. All those poor woman abused and poisoned. Worse is the indifference by management to their plight. Sickening! Greed could be the worst disease of all causing so much pain to others. No end to it today.
Thank you so much for such an interesting and sad story. I am glad to hear of it.