The Terrifying Story Of The Radium Girls

In 1917, scores of patriotic young girls counted their lucky stars to have secured jobs working at a large warehouse complex in Orange, New Jersey. The task was tedious and repetitive, but it paid well, and they were pleased to be "doing their bit" for the war effort.

But little did they know for most girls that job would also lead to a gruesome untimely demise. In fact, when a New Jersey Doctor performed autopsies on some of the so-called "Radium Girls" in 1928, he concluded that they were “still glowing in their coffins” and rumor has it they still glow to this day.

Radiation Exposure

To uncover the terrifying truth about the Radium Girls, let’s first turn our attention to their namesake: Radium. Back in 1896, French physicist Henri Becquerel was the first to report that the rocks of the Earth’s crust were not all cold, dead chunks of metal and mining materials.

Some parts like the element uranium were strangely alive, and even emitted radiation. His work was continued by newly-married physicists Pierre and Marie Curie, who discovered two new elements that were even more powerful than uranium: one they named Polonium after Marie’s Polish homeland, and the other was named Radium after radiation itself.

They declared that such elements should henceforth be known as “radioactive”. In 1903, all three scientists shared the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics for their pioneering work but little did they know, Radium was set to become an unexpected breakout star.

Not much was known about that new element, other than the fact it gave off a faint, greenish glow but it wasn’t long until scientific research mostly paid for by radium companies came in thick and fast touting its miracle health-giving properties.

Before long, that radioactive element was being used in all manner of consumer products, from toothpastes to rejuvenating face creams, candy, and even bottled water that had been fortified with radium, promising to make the drinker "sparkle" with energy. And yet, the Curies were not blind to the dangers of their new discovery.

Although Marie referred to it as “my beautiful radium”, she had given herself several unpleasant burns while handling the unpredictable element. Pierre once said that he couldn’t bear the thought of being in the room with even a kilogram of the stuff, because he was afraid it would blind him and burn off his skin.

In fact, it wouldn’t be long until people realized that radium actually promised the very opposite of health and vitality. While it seemed like ingesting radium was the next best thing to taking a dip in the fountain of youth, a company called U.S. Radium Corp, which operated radium mines in Colorado and Utah had found a very different use for the element.

They used radium to formulate a luminescent paint they called “Undark”, I hate to imagine what the marketing meeting was like if that’s the best name they could come up with! Interestingly, the success story of U.S. Radium Corporation’s new glow in the dark paint began in the muddy trenches of Europe during the first world war.

The old fashioned pocket watches soldiers carried were totally unsuited to the battlefields. The timepieces would fall out of pockets and be easily crushed and more importantly, couldn’t be read in the dark of night.

The solution to the first problem was simple: watch companies started putting straps on their timepieces. But they also needed a way to make the watch face visible enough to be read at night without being easily detectable by the enemy. The answer, of course, was the pale, greenish glow of the oh so catchy Undark.

United States Radium Corporation

After American troops joined the war in Europe, the U.S. Radium Corporations factory in Orange, New Jersey won a contract to supply radium dial watches to the military. The factory employed droves of teenage girls and young women as "dial painters" who would be tasked with painting the tiny numbers and lines of the watch faces with Undark paint.

The company believed that women’s small and delicate hands would be better suited to the meticulous job, and by 1920 it was reported that about 300 girls were employed at the plant. Each worker was expected to paint 250 dials a day, 5 ½ days a week, and earned about $20 per week at a rate of 1 ½ Cents per completed dial.

At the time, that was an excellent opportunity for the girls who flocked to work there some as young as 11. Dial painting paid far more than any other factory job and was considered “the elite job for the poor working girls”.

In fact, those lucky enough to land a job there ranked in the top 5% of female workers nationally. But it wasn’t long until the Radium Girls, as they later became known discovered the terrifying truth.

At the factory, the girls were taught to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to shape them into a fine point before dipping them back into the Undark paint. It was known as the “lip, dip, paint” technique.

The girls were assured that the paint was perfectly safe after all, it was being promoted elsewhere as a health supplement, so many of the workers actually considered the radium-laced paint to be a perk of the job.

Soon, they had earned themselves the ominous nickname “the ghost girls” because of the way their clothes and even their bodies had a faint glow after they left the factory each night. Many of the women took advantage of the perk and would even wear their best dresses to the plant so they’d shine in the dance halls in the evening.

During their breaks, the girls played with the paint without a care in the world. They sprinkled it in their hair to make their curls twinkle. They brightened their nails with it. One girl even painted her teeth with Undark to give herself a Cheshire Cat style grin.

None of them considered the dangers of handling and ingesting countless doses of radioactive poison, because radium had been hailed as a miracle ingredient. While the Radium Girls poisoned themselves in blissful ignorance, the all-male management and scientists at the company made no secret of their understanding of radium’s toxic truth.

They used lead screens, masks and tongs to ensure that they never came into contact with radium or the paint that contained it. In fact, when the inventor of Undark Dr. Sabin A. Von Sochocky visited the factory and saw one of the women putting the paintbrush to her lips, he reportedly told her to stop, saying “it’ll make you sick”.

But when the woman asked her manager about the comment, he dismissed the scientists warning. Radium was deadly, and they knew it. People had died from radium poisoning before the first dial painter even picked up her brush. But there was money to be made, and the women, it seemed were disposable.

Radiation Poisoning

It took years until the workers started experiencing mysterious health issues. It started with body aches and fatigue, but then their gums started bleeding, their teeth fell out, their mouths filled with painful sores and their jaws rotted.

Some of the women suffered miscarriages or delivered stillborn babies, and cancer rates skyrocketed among the dial painters. Other women’s bones were so weakened that they would fracture under the slightest pressure, making it impossible to walk.

A few unfortunate individuals also suffered from so-called "radium jaw", a mysterious condition in which enormous abscesses grew completely unchecked across the lower portion of the face.

X-rays of the sick women showed that their jaws and other bones were completely riddled with holes like honeycombs. Many of the women were blissfully unaware that they had been affected by radium poisoning until they caught a glimpse of themselves in the mirror in the middle of the night and saw their ghostly reflection glowing back at them.

The first woman to get sick was 24 year old Amelia “Mollie” Maggia. It started in January 1922 with a simple toothache, and then her teeth started to fall out altogether. By May, she had become so weakened by a seemingly unstoppable anemia that she was forced to leave the factory.

Her jaw was in excruciating pain, but the doctor simply diagnosed her with rheumatism and told her to take aspirin. When the ulcers around her missing teeth kept bleeding and became infected, she went to the dentist. When he pulled out a decaying tooth, to his horror a significant portion of her lower jaw came out with it, the bone crumbling like ash in a fireplace.

Maggia was the first to die on 12th September 1922 of massive hemorrhaging from the ulcers that covered both her mouth and skull, just 8 months after her first toothache. Her death certificate read “ulcerative stomatitis”.

By 1924, nine of the dial painters were dead. All of them were young, healthy women in their 20s with only one more thing in common: they’d spent hours painting at U.S. Radium, licking their brushes and ingesting tiny bits of radioactive poison each time.

By then, many of the women were desperately seeking explanations for their mysterious ailments. But their symptoms were either dismissed entirely by medical professionals or misdiagnosed as tuberculosis, other viral infections or worse simply ‘psychosomatic’ illness. Little did they know, U.S. Radium was secretly paying doctors to hide their findings.

As other dial painters followed Maggia to the grave, the company and the corrupt doctors publicly stated that their cause of death was syphilis, which was particularly prevalent at the time. It was the perfect cover up that served to smear the women’s reputations at the same time but they weren’t going down that easy.

In 1924, U.S. Radium hired Dr. Cecil Drinker a Harvard physiology professor, to look into the working conditions at the Orange, New Jersey plant. Unsurprisingly, Drinker concluded that the women’s “mysterious” health conditions were connected with radium consumption.

His research showed that there was extensive contamination at the plant: every single dial painter was covered in radioactive dust, and nearly all of them had high levels of blood contamination. Drinker made several safety recommendations, including the immediate termination of the “lip, dip, paint” technique.

Unsurprisingly, the company ignored Drinker’s suggestions and even banned him from publishing his findings. When U.S Radium submitted Drinkers report to the New Jersey Department of Labor, it barely resembled the original document.

Every mention of the unsafe working conditions had been replaced with glowing praise, and the report even went as far as to state that “every girl is in perfect working condition”. As the women began to suspect that their work at U.S. Radium was somehow linked to their gory deaths, they faced the persisting belief that radium was totally safe and even somehow good for others.

Of course, what they didn’t know at the time is what ghastly effects radium consumption can actually have on the body. The radium dust at the plant was dangerous enough, but the dial painters suffered the most because they were actually swallowing radium every time they put the paintbrush to their lips.

Structurally, radium could be considered the kooky cousin of the element calcium, seeing as both are silvery white alkaline earth metals built by cubic crystalline structures. And those weren’t the only similarities.

When a person ingests radium directly, the body channels it in a similar way to calcium: some is metabolized away, some goes toward nerve and muscle function, while most is deposited directly into the bones. But unlike calcium, which builds bone tissue radium kills it, causing the skeleton itself to crumble.

As the Curies had discovered, radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, meaning that, once it takes hold of the bones it emits constant, destructive radiation long after the person who once inhabited them has died.

One of the dial painters Grace Fryer, who started working at the factory at the age of 18 in 1917 suffered the same symptoms as many of the women before her. Luckily, a new doctor named Frederick Flynn said he had heard about her suffering and offered to study her worsening condition.

But after a hasty exam, he declared that Fryer was actually in perfect health. Later, it would be revealed that Flynn was nothing but a sham doctor hired by U.S. Radium to squash emerging speculation about the life threatening effects of radium poisoning. Things went from bad to worse when Fryers spine collapsed, and she could only remain upright with the aid of a metal brace.

But Fryer was the intelligent daughter of a union rep, and she wasn’t going down without a good fight. In fact, she decided to sue U.S. Radium under New Jersey’s occupational injuries law. Four of her former co-workers Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub and Maggia’s surviving sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice, decided to join Fryer in her valiant fight for justice.

For two years, no attorney would agree to take up the case of the Radium Girls. After all, any money the women had to pay for an attorney was already being spent on medical care for their own baffling ailments. Not to mention the fact that their case wasn’t totally clear. Not even the women themselves could explain why they were exhibiting those strange symptoms.

All they had to go on were the fraudulent doctors diagnoses that referred to non-work related illnesses. What’s more, “radium poisoning” wasn’t even recognized as a compensable illness or injury at the time. Although it seemed the odds were stacked against them, the tables were about to turn on U.S. Radium.

Around the same time that the Radium Girls had vowed to prove to the world that their former dial painting job was slowly killing them off one by one, a chief medical examiner from Essex County named Harrison S. Martland was launching his own investigation into U.S. Radium’s practices.

He reopened Amelia Maggia’s case and tested her aging bones to find that every piece of bone and tissue he examined glowed with radioactivity. If a dead woman’s bones could sparkle with radiation long after she went to the grave, there was no doubt that the surviving Radium Girls bones glowed too.

In his final examination of the living dial painters, he discovered a terrifying fact: the women were exhaling radon gas. As the radium decayed within the skeleton, the gas diffused into the bloodstream, was carried into the lungs and exhaled to drift away. Those findings provided the first clues that the women were all indeed suffering from radium sickness.

In 1925, Martland detailed those principles of radiation poisoning in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The next breakthrough finally came in 1927 when a smart young lawyer named Raymond Berry agreed to take on the case pro-bono. But the remaining Radium Girls were already living on borrowed time.

Both of Quinta McDonald’s hips had fractured. Albina Larice was totally bedridden, while one of her legs was now four inches shorter than the other. Edna Hussman was barely mobile, and Grace Fryer who now worked at a bank, had a supportive brace fixed from her neck to her hips.

Katherine Schaub’s jaw was starting to break apart. She hoped the $250,000 each they were asking for in damages would pay for her funeral, telling her lawyers “if I won my $250,000, mightn’t I have lots of roses?”

U.S Radium used every trick in the book to delay the legal proceedings for three long years, during which time thirteen other dial painters also died. At their first court appearance in January 1928, none of the women could even raise their hands to take their oaths, while Quinta and Albina literally testified from their death beds.

Then, U.S. Radium claimed that the statute of limitations had run out on the plaintiff’s injuries, suggesting that the women should have come to court when they were actually exposed to the radium not now, when they no longer worked at the factory. New Jersey law required court action within two years of injury, and most of the women had left U.S. Radium long before the lawsuit was filed in 1925.

But the plaintiff’s lawyers proposed that radium poisoning was a different kind of injury. That wasn’t just a one time thing: even now, the remaining women were still being poisoned by the radioactive substance that bubbled in their bones. The judges were struck by the horror of that argument and immediately dismissed U.S. Radium’s claims.

Then in November 1928 Von Sochocky, the inventor of Undark, became next known victim of radium paint poisoning. His death helped prove the Radium Girls’ case, and it was finally settled out of court by the end of that year. Each of the surviving women received $10,000, over $150,000 in today’s money, as well as a $600 per year annuity, and the payment of all their existing medical and legal expenses.

But it didn’t come without a catch. In return, U.S. Radium would admit no legal wrongdoing for their actions. In fact, the president of U.S. Radium, Clarence Lee wrote “we unfortunately gave work to a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry. Cripples and persons similarly incapacitated were engaged. What was considered an act of kindness on our part has since been turned against us.” Talk about keeping things classy!

The money the Radium Girls won could only pay for their own funerals, because all five women would be dead by the mid-1930s. But their deaths were not in vain. The New Jersey Radium Girls volunteered to let scientists study them during their last days so that the world could learn more about the dangerous effects of radium poisoning.

Grace Fryer even reportedly said “it is not for myself I care, I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.” And she was right. In total, it is estimated that 112 former dial painters succumbed to exposure to radium.

Many Dial Painters at a Radium Dial plant in Illinois had also suffered the same gruesome fate, and the surviving women decided to fight for legal justice after hearing about the New Jersey women’s hard won victory. Although their legal battle was equally as grueling, Radium Dial was eventually forced to pay up after their case reached the Supreme Court on October 23rd, 1939.

Historical Impact

The media storm that surrounded the curious case of the Radium Girls also had massive cultural implications that can still be felt to this day. Their case was one of the first in which an employer was held responsible for the health of their employees, and their fight ultimately won workers the right to sue for damages from corporations.

In fact, the case eventually led to the U.S. government creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to ensure safe working conditions for all workers. The health and safety protocols developed as a result of the Radium Girls’ case is also sometimes directly credited to saving the lives of the scientists who would later work on the atomic bomb!

As for U.S. Radium, the company went bankrupt in the 1940s. Unsurprisingly in 1979 the United States Environmental Protection Agency found the former site of its manufacturing plant to be extremely contaminated, and it became a superfund site, which gives EPA the funds and authority to provide a proper clean up operation.

In the many years since those fearless young women and girls spent countless hours licking paintbrushes laced with radioactive poison, radium itself has experienced a fall from grace in the world of consumerism. It’s safe to say that the radioactive element is no longer being sold in face creams or bottled up as some glorified energy drink and is instead treated with the precautions it deserves.

There are many lessons to be learned from that terrifying underappreciated chapter of history, but perhaps the greatest is one summarized by Kate Moore author of “The Radium Girls”.

According to Moore, the saga should be viewed as a cautionary tale about “the commercial instinct of prioritizing profits over people”. The Radium Girl’s lives may have been cut short, but their legacy much like their aging bones will continue to shine on for years to come.

I hope you were amazed at the terrifying story of the radium girls! Thanks for reading.