The Radium Girls: Workers Who Painted with Radium, Suffered Exposure

During radium's heyday, between the years 1917 and 1926, its biggest use was in painting the dials of clocks and watches.

There were three companies in the U.S.: United States Radium in Orange, New Jersey, which began around 1917, the Radium Dial Corporation in Ottawa, Illinois, which began in 1922, and the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Massachusetts.

The companies mixed radium salts with zinc sulfide and glue to produce glowing paint. U.S. Radium patented their radium paint under the name "Undark."

WWI Increases Demand

When the U.S. entered WWI in 1917, soldiers on the front weren't able to see their watch dials at night, which made co-ordinating night attacks more difficult. The U.S. military entered into a contract with U.S. Radium to produce wristwatches with glowing dials for their soldiers, and the company staffed up.

The ideal dial painter was a very young woman, due to the size of their hands. While some of the girls were as young as 11 years old, the majority of the young women hired were 14, 15, and 16-year olds.

Most of the girls were from working-class families, and many were the daughters of immigrants. They were thrilled to have the job, the factory was clean and the pay was excellent.

The girls were instructed to make the tip of their camel hair brushes as fine as possible by licking the tip and compressing it between their lips. This process was called "pointing."

Dentists See Puzzling Cases

By the early 1920s, dentists in New Jersey and Illinois started seeing young women with serious dental problems. When dentists extracted their aching teeth, entire portions of their jawbones came out as well. Ultimately, this became known as radium necrosis or radium jaw.

One example was young Mollie Maggia, whose entire jaw disintegrated under her dentist's gentle prodding. Eventually, tumors invaded her jugular vein, drowning her in her own blood, and killing her at age 24.

Besides dental problems, the girls were experiencing ulcers on their skin, breaking bones and tumors in their legs, hips, and faces. Their bodies had treated the radium they had ingested through "tipping" as a calcium substitute, and it concentrated in their bones and teeth.

Often, the girls' first intimation that they had radium poisoning was catching sight of themselves in a mirror at night. Their bones literally glowed in the dark. Then, the girls started dying.