Deathly Glow by Nicky Hoover

The Radium Craze Part

How the new

glow in the dark element

took over America

THE NEW ELEMENT Amidst World War I, One of the most sought-after jobs for young girls and women in America involved something exciting and brand new: radium.

Sparkling, glowing, and beautiful, radium according to companies

was also completely ^

harmless. Radium was widely heralded as a wondrous new substance after it was first discovered by Marie Curie. The radioactive metal’s unusual and unique properties captured the imaginations of the scientific community and the public. Within forty years radium had permeated American society to the point where it was so engrained within the popular consciousness that scarcely a person in the civilized world was unfamiliar with the word radium. It came to represent America’s burgeoning modernity and symbolize the country’s progress.

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p oth To

aste

ce Fa

Powder

fi gure 3: Ra diu

Water

ing ink

fi gure 2: Ra diu

fi gure 1: Rad ium

THE NEW ELEMENT The radium craze permeated almost every aspect of American society, it featured in everything from religious sermons to cartoons and films. It became a plot device in novels and influenced the naming of consumer products ranging from fertilizers to cigarettes to cosmetics. There was even a nightclub in Brooklyn called ‘The Radium Club’ and casinos began playing radium roulette played in the dark with a ball and roulette wheel painted with glowing radium. The extreme rarity of radium made it a pres-

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tige item, in 1903 the New York Times reported that a single gram cost $2,000. This rarity coupled with the element’s ability to glow in the dark captured the public’s imagination. Businesses soon began to capitalize on this popularity using radium as a selling point for everything from make-up to butter. While many of these products didn’t actually include any radium, others did. One such product was Radioluminescent paint.

U N D A R K PA I N T

Radioluminescent paint combines a radioactive salt with zinc sulfide crystals or a similar crystalline compound. and untested ^

Undark: the new radium paint that glows in the « is it safe?

dark.

Pa int Vile

The radium-based paint can be applied in a number of ways, including manually with a paintbrush, mechanically via machine press, or by dusting radium salt particles onto free paint. Radioluminescent paint first came into industrial use in 1917 when the Radium Luminous Material Corporation - later known as the United States Radium Corporation - developed a paint known as Undark, which used zinc sulfide crystals and radium salt and was the first radioluminescent paint.

r da

n fi gure 4: U

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UNDARK USES

Figure 5:

Un da

Undark was used by the United States Radium Corporation in the production of watch dials. In 1917, when the United States entered the war, the demand for radium watches and clocks skyrocketed, and lots of dial-painters were motivated by the idea of helping the troops. In 1918, 95 percent of all the radium produced in America was given over to the manufacture of radium paint for use on military dials. These watches were used in the trenches. When soldiers were wading through the mud and in the dark, they would be able to tell the time. Radium paint’s glow was relatively dim, but this was beneficial to soldiers because they could tell the time without revealing their positions.

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Formula int Pa k r

zinc sulfide crystals (ZnS) + Radium (Ra) = Undark: Radioluminescent Paint

Katherine Schaub New Jersey Dial Painter

UNDARK USES

Figure 5:

Un da

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Formula int Pa k r

zinc sulfide crystals (ZnS) + Radium (Ra) = Undark: Radioluminescent Paint

Katherine Schaub New Jersey Dial Painter

The Ghost Girls Part

The working women

who lit up

the night

A N E W J OB F O R W O M E N

Between 1917 and 1929, hundreds of young women were employed applying radium-activated paint to watches, aircraft controls, clocks and compass faces in factories in Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island, N.Y. The two largest factories were those in New Jersey and Illinois.

Getting about a penny and

along with radium ingestion

a half per dial, the women

at Radium Dial’s Ottawa, IL plant could earn about $18 a week, compared to the $5 they would likely earn (underpaying)

in other factory jobs. The United States Radium Corporation and the Radiant Dial company employed hundreds of women. Being a dial-painter was a desirable job among these young women. The job paid well, provided financial and personal freedom, was sociable and came with a bonus perk: access to radium.

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Dip ,

re 6: Lip,

Figu

hnique Tec nt i Pa

1. place the brush bristles into your mouth 2. using your tongue, make a fine point 3. dip your brush into Undark radium paint 4. paint your dials, redipping if needed 5. repeat. repeat. repeat.

They were instructed to use a technique called lip-pointing when painting the watch faces. In order to obtain the fine lines which the work required, a girl would place the bristles in her mouth, and by the action of her tongue and lips bring the bristles to a fine point. The brush was then dipped into the paint, the figures painted upon the dial until more paint was required or until the paint on the brush dried and hardened when the brush was dipped into a small crucible of water. This water remained in the crucible without change for a day or

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perhaps two days. The brush would then be repointed in the mouth and dipped into the paint or even repointed in such manner after being dipped into the paint itself, in a continuous process. The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point. Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little of the glowing green toxic paint. At peak, yearly production was nearly 55,200 dials per painter.

A G LO W I N G STAT U S

Dial painting was "the elite job for the poor working girls”; it paid more than three times the average factory job, and those lucky enough to land a position ranked in the top 5% of female workers nationally, giving the women financial freedom in a time of burgeoning female empowerment. Many of them were teenagers, with small hands perfect for the artistic work, and they spread the message of their new job’s appeal through their friend and family networks; often, whole sets of siblings worked alongside each other in the studio

Image 1: Dial-Painters Working in New Jersey

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By the time the dial painters finished their

painstakingly tedious

shifts their clothing would be covered with radium dust and they would glow “like ghosts”

in the dark.

The women made the most of this perk by wearing their best dresses to work so they would shine when they went out at night. Some would even paint radium on their teeth for a smile that would sparkle. These women were under the impression that radium was perfectly safe for them to be handling. (because of their careless employers) Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker, who later investigated the factories, reported, “Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room. Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous to the waist.”

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Charlotte Nevins Purcell Illinois Dial Painter

By the time the dial painters finished their

painstakingly tedious

shifts their clothing would be covered with radium dust and they would glow “like ghosts”

in the dark.

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Charlotte Nevins Purcell Illinois Dial Painter

The Medical Effects Part

The disastrous effects

of radium paint

on the body

Unfortunately, the bright deadly

element had a dark side. E F F E C T S O F D I A L PA I N T I N G

It wasn’t long before the “Radium Girls” began to experience the physical ravages of their exposure. Among the first was Amelia (“Mollie”) Maggia, who painted watches for the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. (later the United States Radium Corp.) in Orange, New Jersey. Maggia’s first symptom was a toothache, which required the removal of the tooth. Soon the tooth next to it also had to be extracted. Painful ulcers, bleeding and full of pus, developed where the teeth had been. When her dentist prodded delicately at her jawbone in her mouth, to his horror and shock, it broke against his fingers. He removed it, "not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out." The mysterious malady spread into other parts of her body. Maggia died on September 12, 1922, of a massive hemorrhage. Doctors were puzzled as to the cause of her condition, and, oddly, they determined that she had died of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease she had no symptoms of, which would taint her reputation forever. In growing numbers, many of the other girls began experiencing the same mysterious illness.

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HOW RADIUM CAUSES D A M A G E I N T H E B ODY

The only stable isotope of radium is radium-226, which has a half-life of 1,600 years. For as long as it lasts, any sample of radium will emit alpha particles in all directions. Inside the body, it wreaks godawful havoc on the body’s tissues. That warming glow radium puts out is caused by the element’s atoms acting like tiny batteries. Light photons strike the radium atom, bumping its electrons into a higher orbit. After the sun sets and it gets dark, those electrons spontaneously drop into lower orbits, emitting a particle and some photons as they go. The radium then fires off particle after particle at very close range, eventually mutating and killing the cells around it. When radium is placed next to human cells or in the bloodstream, like when it crosses a mucous membrane such as the gums, it acts as microscopic machine gun that gets lodged in the body’s tissues.

Image 2: Diagram of Necrosis of the Jaw

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Through this process, the that was seen as “safe”

radium mutates and kills ^

off cells within the body.

Figu

re 7: Sym pt om

in an unstoppable cycle.

R of

adium Poison ing

1. loose teeth and dental pain 2. lessions and ulcers 3. sterility and stillbirth 4. unhealing bone fractures 5. decaying “radium jaw” 6. cancer

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USRC’S RESPONSE

The young women's employer, USRC, denied any responsibility for the deaths for almost two years.

After suffering a downturn

due to what they saw as "gossip"

in business in 1924 they ^

commissioned an expert finally

to look into the rumored link between dial painting and the women’s deaths. Unlike the company’s own research into radium’s beneficence, this study was independent, and when the expert confirmed the link between the radium and the women’s illnesses, the president of the firm was outraged. Instead of accepting the findings, he paid for new studies that published the opposite conclusion; he also lied to the Department of Labor, which had begun investigating, about the verdict of the original report. Publicly, he denounced the women as trying to "palm off" their illnesses on the firm and decried their attempts to get some financial help for their mounting medical bills.

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Quinta Maggia Mcdonald New Jersey Dial Painter

USRC’S RESPONSE

The young women's employer, USRC, denied any responsibility for the deaths for almost two years.

After suffering a downturn

due to what they saw as "gossip"

in business in 1924 they ^

commissioned an expert finally

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Quinta Maggia Mcdonald New Jersey Dial Painter

The Legal Fight Part

Bringing the case

to the court

and facing the public

It was only after the first male employee of the radium firm died that experts finally took up the charge. PROVING THEIR POISONING

With the report hushed up, the women's biggest challenge was proving the link between their mysterious illnesses and the radium that they’d been ingesting hundreds of times a day. Though they themselves discussed the fact that their work must be to blame, they were fighting against the widespread belief that radium was safe. Following the death of a male employee, experts independent of the dial painting industry began to take interest in the case. In 1925, a doctor named Harrison Martland devised tests that proved once and for all that radium had poisoned the women.

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M A R T L A N D ’ S ST U DY

Martland explained what was happening inside the bodies of the dial painters. As early as 1901, it had been evident that radium could harm humans dramatically when applied externally; Pierre Curie once remarked that he would not want to be in room with a kilo of pure radium because he believed it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and "probably kill him." Martland discovered that when radium was ingested internally, even in tiny amounts, the damage was many thousands of times greater than externally.

It was literally boring holes inside them while they were alive. Martland determined that the ingested radium had subsequently settled in the women’s bodies and was now emitting constant, destructive radiation that "honeycombed" their bones. It attacked the women all over their bodies: Dial painter Grace Fryer’s spine was "crushed" and she had to wear a steel back brace; another girl’s jaw was eaten away to "a mere stump." The women’s legs shortened and spontaneously fractured, too.

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T H E L I G H T T H AT D O E S N ’ T L I E

Eerily, those damaged bones also began to glow from the radium embedded deep within them: the light that does not lie. Sometimes, the moment a woman realized she had radium poisoning was when she caught sight of herself in a mirror in the middle of the night — for a ghost girl was reflected there, shining with an unnatural luminosity that sealed her fate.

Martland had also realized that the poisoning was fatal. And now that it was inside of them, there was no way of removing the radium from the girls’ beleaguered bones. Despite the radium industry’s attempts to discredit Martland’s pioneering work, it hadn’t reckoned with the courage and tenacity of the radium girls themselves. They started banding together to fight against the injustice. During the fight, dial painters were still being employed all across the United States.

Image 3: Radium Girls v. US Radium Corp

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REVEALING THE TRUTH

Eventually, in 1927, a lawyer named Raymond Berry accepted their case, and Grace Fryer, a dial painter (along with four colleagues) were the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama.

By now, however, time was running out: The women had been given just four months to live, and the company was dragging out the proceedings. As a consequence, the girls were forced to settle out of court — but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning, just as Grace had planned. The New Jersey radium girls’ case was front-page news, and it sent shockwaves across America.

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In Ottawa, Illinois, a dial painter by the name of Catherine Wolfe read the coverage with horror. "There were meetings at [our] plant that bordered on riots," she remembered. "The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work." Yet the Illinois firm, Radium Dial, took a leaf out of USRC’s book and denied responsibility. Although the firm’s medical tests proved that the Illinois women were showing clear symptoms of radium poisoning, it lied about the results. It even placed an ad in the local paper: "If we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would at once have suspended operations." The company’s actions to hush up the scandal went as far as interfering in the girls’ autopsies when the dial painters began to die.

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: Newspaper ti Ar

cl eC

e as ove ring the C

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THE FINAL YEARS

If the women weren’t killed by the same jaw problems that had taken Mollie Maggia, they eventually suffered from sarcomas — huge cancerous bone tumors that could grow anywhere on their bodies. One dial painter, Irene La Porte, died from a pelvic tumor that was said to be “larger than two footballs.” In 1938, Catherine Wolfe Donohue developed a grapefruit-sized tumor that bulged on her hip. Like Mollie Maggia before her, she lost her teeth and had to pick pieces of her jawbone out of her mouth; she constantly held a patterned handkerchief to her jaw to absorb the ever-seeping pus. When Catherine started her fight for justice, it was the mid-1930s: America was in the grip of the Great Depression. Catherine and her friends were shunned by their community for suing one of the few firms left standing. Though close to death when her case went to court in 1938, Catherine ignored her doctors’ advice and instead gave evidence from her deathbed. Catherine won her case.

In doing so, she finally won justice not only for herself, but for workers everywhere. 00:31

Grace Fryer New Jersey Dial Painter

THE FINAL YEARS

In doing so, she finally won justice not only for herself, but for workers everywhere. 00:31

Grace Fryer New Jersey Dial Painter

Sources & Legacy

THE RADIUM GIRLS’ EVER G LO W I N G L E G A C Y

The radium girls’ case was one of the first in which an employer was made responsible for the health of the company’s employees. It led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now operates nationally in the United States to protect workers. Before OSHA was set up, 14,000 people died on the job every year; today, it is just over 4,500. The women also left a legacy to science that has been termed “invaluable.” But you won’t often read their names in the history books, for today the individual radium girls have largely been forgotten. Grace Fryer and Catherine Donohue — to name just two — are women we need to honor and salute as fearless champions. They shine through history with all that they achieved in their too-short lives. The ghost girls’ glowing legacy lives on.

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Q U OT E D D I A L PA I N T E R S

Katherine Schaub

Quinta Maggia Macdonald

Katherine was born on 10 March 1902 in Newark, the sec-

Quinta was the fifth Maggia daughter, thus her unusual

ond child of Mary (‘Mamie’) and William Schaub. She had

name; she often went by the nickname May instead. Born

an older sister, Josephine, and a younger brother and sis-

on St Valentine’s Day, she worked as a stenciller for a

ter. Her grandparents were German. Katherine began work

music-roll company before dial-painting but, she said, ‘My

at the radium factory in Newark on 1 February 1917, aged

sisters and I were attracted by the offer of “good pay for

14; she later became an instructress. She was described as

a fast worker”’; they felt ‘lucky to find work in the same

‘imaginative’ and longed to be a writer, later publishing an

plant’. Quinta had two children, Helen and Robert.

excerpt of her memoir.

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Charlotte Nevins Purcell

Grace Fryer

Charlotte Agnes Nevins was born on 27 January 1906 in

Grace was born on 14 March 1899 in Orange, NJ, one of

Ottawa, the youngest child of Patrick and Matilda (‘Tillie’)

eleven children in total (a brother died in infancy). A paper

Nevins. She had four sisters and one brother. Charlotte

wrote of her upbringing: ‘Grace has not been pampered,

was a parishioner of St Columba and very devout. A rela-

nor has she been taught to think first of her own happi-

tive said: ‘She was pretty outspoken. She told people what

ness.’ Grace’s little sister Adelaide also dial-painted but

she thought about things ... she spoke her mind about a

was fired for talking too much. The family was political,

lot of things.’ That perhaps explains why Charlotte played

with Grace’s father a union rep and Grace herself speaking

such an important role in the Illinois lawsuits.

publicly about her enthusiam for voting.

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I N F O R M AT I O N Anderson, Tim. “The Tragedy of the Radium Girls.”

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Love Affair.” The Radium Craze – America’s Lethal Love

derson2/.

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Carter, Laura Lee. “How the ‘Radium Girls’ Helped Shape American Labor Laws.” HistoryNet, HistoryNet, 2 Dec.

“The Radium Girls.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, 25 Apr.

2021, https://www.historynet.com/radium-girls-vs-us-radi-

2017, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/radium-girls.

um/. “Radium Girls: The Women Who Fought for Their Lives “The Forgotten Story of the Radium Girls, Whose Deaths

in a Killer Workplace.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Ency-

Saved Thousands of Workers’ Lives.” CWA, 8 May 2017,

clopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/

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dium_girls_whose_deaths_saved_thousands_of_work-

in-a-killer-workplace.

ers_lives. Roberts, William Clifford. “Facts and Ideas from AnyJurisMagazine. “The Radium Girls: A Tale of Workplace

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nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595405/.

ty/#:~:text=Sparkling%2C%20glowing%2C%20and%20beautiful%2C,first%20discovered%20by%20Marie%20Curie.

Stockton, Richard. “The Sad Deaths and Disfigurements of the ‘Radium Girls’.” All That’s Interesting, All That’s

Moore, Kate. “The Forgotten Story of the Radium Girls,

Interesting, 28 Oct. 2021, https://allthatsinteresting.com/

Whose Deaths Saved Thousands of Lives.” BuzzFeed,

radium-girls/2.

BuzzFeed, 20 July 2021, https://www.buzzfeed.com/authorkatemoore/the-light-that-does-not-lie.

Valerios, Rose. “Who Were the Radium Girls?” Medium, Medium, 28 Feb. 2022, https://medium.com/@RoseValerios/ who-were-the-radium-girls-3dd4ec972baf.

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IMAGES Figure 1: https://www.familytree.com/blog/strange-practic-

Photograph of Katherine Schaub:

es-done-by-our-ancestors/

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2017/11/28/radium-girls-thedark-story-of-americas-shining-women-by-kate-moore/

Figure 2: https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/ collection/radioactive-quack-cures/pills-potions-and-oth-

Photograph of Charlotte Nevins Purcell:

er-miscellany/doramad-radioactive-toothpaste.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/radium-girls-kate-moore/515685/

Figure 3: https://dummr.wordpress.com/tag/cosmetics/ Photograph of Quinta Maggia Macdonald: Figure 4: https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/tag/undark/

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/346495765080342100/

Image 1: https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/schol-

Photograph of Grace Fryer:

arship-female-watchmakers/

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2017/11/28/radium-girls-thedark-story-of-americas-shining-women-by-kate-moore/

Image 2: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phosphorusnecrosis-of-the-jaw-Credit-Skull-with-jaw-affected-byphosphorus-poisoning_fig2_346012004

Image 3: https://news.wttw.com/2017/05/11/america-s-for-

Visual Communication Design

gotten-radium-girls-take-lead-new-book

Kent State University, Spring 2022

Figure 8: https://radiumgirls-nhd.weebly.com/public-response--proceedings.html

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