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Podcast Transcript
In the early 20th century, a glowing new element promised progress, prosperity, and even health.
It lit watch dials, captivated the public, and symbolized the cutting edge of science.
But behind that glow was a hidden danger that slowly poisoned the very workers who brought it to life.
Their suffering would expose corporate negligence, transform workplace safety laws, and forever change how we understand industrial safety.
Learn more about the Radium Girls on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Radium is the 88th element on the periodic Table. It was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie while studying uranium ores. They isolated it from pitchblende and identified it as a highly radioactive element that emitted heat and light spontaneously.
Radium’s most striking attributes are its intense radioactivity and its ability to glow in the dark, a property which, at the time, made it seem almost miraculous.
In the very early days of research surrounding radioactive elements, scientists knew what it did and developed a theory for how it worked, but they had no clue how it affected the human body.
Within 20 years of radium’s discovery, companies began using it commercially.
Founded in 1914, the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) operated as a radium processing company in the US. The primary mission of USRC was to extract and purify trace amounts of radium from carnotite, a radioactive, hazardous mineral that primarily contains potassium and uranium.
Radium became common in manufacturing, even in products like toothpaste and cosmetics. Companies, not knowing any better, were promoting radium as a health additive.
One of the biggest uses of radium was in luminous paints. These glow-in-the-dark paints were used to illuminate watch faces and instruments.
USRC was one of the major suppliers of radium-luminescent watches, which the military used to tell time on the battlefield. Radium was the perfect element for the paint, as it is long-lasting and can glow for thousands of years.
As USRC opened plants to manufacture these watches, they hired young women, later known as the Radium Girls, believing their small hands were best suited for painting precise watch faces.
They opened three factories in the United States. The first began operating in 1917 in Orange, New Jersey; the two others opened in the 1920s, one in Waterbury, Connecticut, and the other in Ottawa, Illinois.
The women at the factory were paid a penny and a half per completed watch dial. This meant that the women, on average, earned a daily wage of $3.75, which is equivalent to about $95 today adjusted for inflation. To make this amount, they needed to paint 250 watch dials per shift.
Women were assigned various radium tasks and told it was safe, but scientists and managers in the factory avoided radium exposure. The chemists who worked at the plant wore masks, only touched the element with tongs, and used a lead screen to protect themselves from the radium.
At this time, medical literature was beginning to report the adverse effects of radium, so it made sense for the experts to take safety precautions.
This was in stark contrast with the exposure the women painting the dials faced every day. Because the women were told the element was completely safe, they had no problem interacting with the radium-infused paint.
The women painted the watch faces inside a small crucible, a container for substances heated to high temperatures, like metal. Inside the crucible, the women painted the watch faces with camel-hair paintbrushes, small brushes with soft bristles made from natural hair.
To ensure the watch dials were of the highest quality, their UNRC supervisors encouraged the women to maintain the shape of the brush point by molding it with their lips. This technique was called “lip, dip, paint.” This technique was highly effective in keeping the brush tip sharp.
Furthermore, because the women were never notified of radium’s side effects, they often played with the paint. They used luminescent paints to adorn their nails, faces, teeth, and other body parts for fun, unaware of the risks.
Unsurprisingly, the side effects for these women were severe. Constant exposure to radium was dangerous, and they were heavily contaminated.
The “lip, dip, paint” technique meant that these women, no matter how careful, were inevitably ingesting the hazardous chemical. When leaving the factory, the women were often glowing from the amount of radium on their clothes and skin.
If you remember back to my episode on radiation, strong alpha emitters like radium are relatively easy to block. However, the one thing you never ever want to do is ingest it, and that is exactly what the women at the UNRC facility were doing.
By the early 1920s, the results of the radium exposure were already being seen.
The first group to realize the danger was dentists. Many of the painters who visited the dentist reported problems with their teeth, mouths, and jaws.
Women developed loose teeth, ulcers, lesions, and noticed that tooth extraction sites didn’t heal.
The women also developed conditions like anemia and were significantly more prone to bone fracturing. They experienced issues with their menstrual cycles, some of the women became sterile, and many developed cancer from the exposure.
One of the best-known side effects was a condition now known as radium jaw. This saw the girls develop radium deposits in their bones, which decayed the upper and lower jaw bones, leading to necrosis of the skin, muscles, and bones in the area. In other words, the jaw literally died.
Many women, aware that their health was worsening, sought medical help, but much of it was unreliable.
USRC had a contract with Columbia University’s industrial toxicologist, Frederick Flynn. Flynn, along with many of the other doctors to whom the patients were referred, lacked medical training and had no license to practice.
This meant that many of the medical examinations for the women were nothing more than a ruse and a way to control the information about the dangers of radium from getting to them.
USRC and other watch companies also requested that medical professionals, such as doctors and dentists, not release their findings on the dangers of radium. Many of the medical doctors complied with this request for a period of time.
In 1922, the first documented death from radium poisoning at a USRC factory occurred. Amelia “Mollie” Maggia had suffered toothaches and ulcers early on, followed by necrosis of the jaw, which needed to be removed, and ultimately resulted in her death that year.
By 1924, 50 more women at the New Jersey plant had died from similar conditions.
The high illness rate led USRC to investigate their New Jersey factory.
The investigation led to shocking results. They found an environment that held shockingly large amounts of loose radium throughout, with absolutely no protection for the workers.
The chief investigators, Cecil Kent Drinker and Katherine Rotan, from the Harvard School of Public Health, were convinced that the illnesses the factory was facing were caused by radium and reported this to the USRC President, Arthur Roeder.
Roeder dismissed these findings, attributing his employees’ health issues to outside infections. At the company’s insistence, medical professionals similarly blamed Syphilis for the illnesses and deaths.
Syphilis was likely chosen due to how notorious it was at the time. The sexually transmitted disease was often used to smear women’s reputations.
USRC attempted to evade responsibility for the illnesses and deaths by exploiting the stereotype of the women they hired as “unfit to work elsewhere.” Roeder tried to shift the blame to the women, painting them as irresponsible and at fault, rather than acknowledging the company’s culpability.
Drinker had planned to publish his findings on the radium contamination, but was threatened by Roeder. However, it came to light that Roeder had fabricated reports to the New Jersey Department of Labor to paint the USRC in a better light.
With Roeder’s reputation in tatters, Drinker had no problem publishing the report.
After the New Jersey Labor Commission reviewed Drinker’s report, it mandated safety measures, resulting in the factory’s closure.
In 1925, a pathologist named Harrison Martland conclusively proved that the girls were dying from radium poisoning acquired during their work painting watch faces.
While the radium industry attempted to discredit Martland’s findings, the affected women were furious. Many knew they were living on borrowed time, but wanted to make a difference for themselves and their colleagues who had worked with the substance.
A worker named Grace Fryer and several other women spearheaded a lawsuit filed against the company.
The case struggled to find legal representation for two years until Raymond Berry took it on in 1927. The ensuing legal drama, coupled with the shocking details of the factory’s abuse and the resulting damages, quickly became a major media story.
Due to the slow pace of the legal system, the women who sued the company were often compelled to settle out of court, as many only had months left to live. The first court appearance in these lengthy legal battles did not take place until 1928.
That year, five of the factory workers, Grace Fryer, Edna Mussman, Quinta McDonald, Katherine Schaub, and Labina Larice, made it to court. Two of them were bedridden, and none of them was able to raise their hand to take the oath.
The five became dubbed the “Radium Girls” by the media, with many newspapers describing the women as being the “living dead.”
Despite initially denying culpability, USRC eventually settled the lawsuit out of court with the Radium Girls. The terms of the settlement included a $10,000 payment to each woman, plus an annual annuity of $600. Furthermore, the company was required to cover all associated medical and legal expenses.
Tragically, all of five women were dead before the end of 1933.
Despite settling out of court, the legal battles between radium companies and radium girls continued. It is important to note that USRC was not the only company involved in the legal troubles. Notably, the Radium Dial Company, used the same technique as USRC and saw the exact same side effects.
Those at Radium Dial eventually heard about the lawsuits in New Jersey but were told by the company that those involved had infections and that radium was not the cause. They were told the material was safe and were promised they could return to work.
After learning more about the impact of radium and being inspired by the earlier Radium Girls Lawsuit, multiple legal cases against Radium Dial were filed in Illinois starting in 1927.
Between 1927 and the mid 1930s, the factory workers lost lawsuit after lawsuit. However, in 1936, something changed.
In 1936, Illinois passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act. Part of the act required that employers cover cases of industrial poisoning. This act was a direct result of the radium girls’ cases.
After the law passed, multiple Radium Girls, led by Catherine Donohue, filed a lawsuit against Radium Dial. This lawsuit found Radium Dial guilty and ordered them to pay the women $10,000 in compensation.
The Radium Girls case holds deep significance as a landmark legal precedent. It represents one of the earliest successful instances where a corporation was held liable for injuries sustained by its own employees.
The case helped pave the way for more workers to sue to protect their own health and safety, which, in turn, led companies to create stronger protections and regulations for their workers. Something everyone benefits from.
In particular, the Radium Girls lawsuit was instrumental in establishing the Occupational Disease Labor Law and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The Radium Girls has been the subject of a 2016 book by Kate Moore, a 2018 film, and a stage play. These have brought the story of the Radium Girls to wider audiences, emphasizing both the human tragedy and the legal impact.
The legacy of the Radium Girls serves as a cautionary tale about industrial safety and illustrates that even the faintest glow can cast a very long shadow.