A girl of only 14 strides onto the factory
floor where she’s just landed a job painting the dials of watches. The paint contains radium,
a glowing substance that’s also said to cure all manner of diseases.
In between watch dial painting she and the other girls paint their lips with it, brush
it on their cheeks, apply it to their teeth, and paint their fingernails with it. When
they return home in the evening they look like radiant angels.
But then the girl starts suffering from terrible migraines. Her teeth ache and one night she
tugs on one of them and it falls right out, and then another comes out, and another. Within
a week, most of her teeth have fallen out. The skin on her face peels off, she grabs
her aching jaw one night and it breaks in her hands. Two weeks later…she’s dead.
Welcome to one of America’s worst nightmares, a story so horrifying it will chill you to
your bones. In 1898, radium was discovered by Marie Curie
and her husband Pierre. At the time the couple had no understanding of radiation poisoning.
Marie would walk around with her pockets full of test tubes containing radioactive isotopes…
leaving it all over the lab, remarking how it glowed so wonderfully.
A year before her book, “Radioactivity” was published in 1936, Marie was dead. At
the time of her death, she understood the “perils in radium”, but it was too late.
During her final years she was almost blind…her fingers were badly burned from touching radioactive
materials, and she had a severe case of aplastic anemia, the disease that would eventually
kill her. Prior to Curie’s understanding of radiation
poisoning, it was discovered that X-rays could treat some skin cancers and eradicate deep-lying
tumors. “Hurray for radiation!” thought medical science, not knowing the side effects
that were just lying in wait. Soon the quacks got in on the radium business,
touting the radioactive metal as a cure-all. If it could cure cancer, then surely there
were many more health benefits of radium… In the early 1920s, people were using “Doramad
Radioactive Toothpaste”, the antibacterial mush that claimed to not only make teeth glow
white, but also protect the gums. Around the same time, the American inventor
and salesman, one William J. A. Bailey, created a medicine made partly from radium salt that
he called, “Radithor.” You name the disease, it could cure it - depression,
impotence, rheumatic diseases, hypertension, anemia, cough, flu, cancer…in all, around
150 diseases, according to Bailey, which he called “a Cure for the Living Dead” and
“Perpetual Sunshine”. And Bailey had a posterboy for his product,
a wealthy American industrialist and socialite named Eben Byers.
Byers was an able athlete who began taking Radithor after an injury, but he liked it,
so he kept taking it. After a few years of daily use, he dropped dead. But this was after
his teeth started falling out, his entire upper jaw and most of his lower jaw had to
be removed, and holes started forming in his skull.
Even after the death of one of its biggest advocates, radium would still be used for
all kinds of treatments for years to come, and those young girls working in the paint
factory had also been told that radium was good for them.
And it wasn’t only used in the U.S.. In fact, while it was an American mineralogist
named George Kunz who patented radioluminescent paint, it was the Europeans who first used
it for everyday applications. One researcher said about Switzerland, “There
were so many radium painters in that country that it was common to recognize them on the
streets even on the darkest nights because of the glow around them: their hair sparkled
almost like a halo.” But what were people using it for?
A lot of things including signs, theater seat numbers, keyhole locators, house numbers,
fish bait, eyes for toy dolls, pretty much anything you can think of where luminescent
paint comes in handy. It was a big hit, and so in 1914, the United
States Radium Corporation was founded in New York City. The company started mixing radium
with zinc sulfide, which made a luminescent paint they called, “Undark.”
It was in high demand, especially since there was a war going on in Europe. Reading a watch
face in a dark trench at night was all but impossible, and shining a light on it to figure
out the time might get you killed. That’s where Undark came in. If the watch
dials were painted with this luminescent paint, then soldiers could see the time during the
night and keep their heads. It also worked well for instruments on planes.
Another company soon got in the act, but it only painted watch dials, unlike the Radium
Corporation that produced many things that used radium. The new kid on the block was
called the Radium Dial Company and it had its headquarters in Ottawa, Illinois.
At one point in the 1920s it employed 1,000 women who made around 4,300 dials each day.
It was believed that their smaller hands made it easier to do the job, and some of these
women were very young, as little as 11 years old.
In order to paint the tiny numbers and indices on the watch faces, they needed an incredibly
small brush and the end needed to be pointed. They were told that the best way to make a
sharp point was to put the bristles in their mouth and twirl them with their lips.
As we saw, most people at the time thought it provided health benefits, so the girls
had no qualms sticking the end of the radium covered paintbrush in their mouth.
The factories assured them that the paint was one hundred percent safe, and when they
weren’t working, they would paint their nails with it, or color their cheeks, or their
teeth, which would give them a radiant glow they found funny and attractive. Other women
were paying good money for radium face cream, or toothpaste, and were getting it for free!
A real job perk. Business was good, even after the war luminous
watches and clocks were all the rage and the girls were churning out dials for which they
were paid a penny and a half per dial, which was a lot of cash for the poor working class
girls. But soon something mysterious started happening.
Girls working at both the Radium Dial Company and the United States Radium Corporation started
to fall ill – in a horrifying way. Some began to lose weight and didn’t have
the energy to get out of bed. Next their teeth came out one by one. Their jaws rotted so
much that the lower and the top halves just broke.
This would later be termed, “Radium Jaw”, which means necrosis of the jaw, and it was
a sight to be seen. This was happening because the body treats
the radium as if it was calcium, and so the radium was deposited in the bone marrow. Unlike
calcium, it doesn't strengthen bones, but over time degrades them, so much so, they
become brittle and eventually destroyed. The first death came in 1922 and the victim
was named Mollie Maggia. She had to leave the factory after she came down with something
that perplexed doctors. She went to the dentist first, where after complaining of a toothache
the dentist pulled two teeth, which seemed to come out with ease. What shocked him more
though were the ulcers all over her mouth, which were bright red and oozing puss.
Mollie went back to the doctor and told him she ached all over, after which he told her
she had rheumatism and handed her some aspirin. He also noticed that her breath smelled horrible,
as if her mouth was rotting away. She returned to the dentist and he was horrified
to see her teeth coming out with the slightest touch. His shock turned to horror when he
prodded her jaw and it broke in his fingers. A few days later and her entire lower jaw
was gone. Her mouth soon filled with blood, the result
of an unstoppable hemorrhage, and she died. The cause of death? Well the death certificate
said syphilis, but by 1924, nine more radium girls were dead.
Another dial painter, Marguerite Carlough would die two years later, but before she
did she sued the company where she worked – the Waterbury Clock Company in New Jersey.
Soon, more girls filed lawsuits, but the problem was many of them would die before they were
given justice. The companies of course didn’t admit their culpability, and instead insisted
that the paint was safe and the poor girls must have come down with syphilis, since blaming
an STD also tarnished the reputations of the women.
Meanwhile many of the girls were bedridden and dying an agonizing death from radiation
poisoning, their bodies essentially falling apart in the worst way imaginable.
Then in 1925, a pathologist named Harrison Stanford Martland got on the case. He discovered
that small traces of radioactivity contained in luminescent paint had killed or seriously
injured young women who painted watch dials for a living.
He realized that when the women put brushes in their mouths to sharpen the nib, they had
been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, and that ingesting the stuff was far worse
than touching it. He discovered that what had happened, and
what was still happening, was that it wasn’t syphilis, but the radiation that was destroying
the women’s bodies from the inside out, what he called “honeycombing” their bones,
leading to spinal fractures and shortened limbs.
The girls now had proof, and they were determined to get justice, but it wouldn’t be easy.
One of the reasons was because the statute of limitations meant that the girls needed
to have filed their case not more than two years after they had been poisoned, but for
many it was several years before they experienced symptoms.
Eventually, a lawyer named Raymond Berry took the case against the Radium Corporation, which
predictably tried to slow proceedings down, hoping that the women affected would simply
die off. If that sounds bad, it was also discovered
that bosses and scientists at these companies had for some time actually suspected radium
of being poisonous. They themselves would only touch it while wearing gloves, or using
a pair of tongs, while at the same time telling the girls it was safe to put in their mouths.
The girls eventually settled with the Radium Corporation out of court, but the story made
front page news in the U.S. Now workers at other factories understood why they had been
falling ill and losing teeth. Moreover, many of them rightly wondered if they were at risk
for an early death, a very painful early death. Workers at the Radium Dial Company filed their
own lawsuit, after which the company did the predictable thing and lied.
In a statement, the company said, “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.” They even tried to cover up some deaths by
trying to hijack the autopsies, and they also tried to hide the radium-infused bones of
the women. Meanwhile, in the factory the women were told to get back to work…they were
informed that the sick people had just come down with a viral infection, and that they
were safe. In court, the Radium Dial company lost, but
it appealed, and it lost again. In fact, the women had to go through eight appeals until
eventually the company was held responsible and forced to pay compensation.
The win is now seen as a giant step for labor rights in the USA, but unfortunately many
of the victors in the radium girls’ case lived a life filled with sickness and pain,
and in total, around 50 girls died of radiation poisoning.
Every victim was compensated $10,000 ($149,000 in 2019), and an extra $600 per year annuity
($8,900 in 2019), plus another $12 a week ($200 in 2019) for the rest of their lives.
Their legal and medical expenses were also covered until their death.
In 2014, the last of the girls who’d worked in the factories died at 107 years old. She
had only lasted a week on the job though, since she was asked to resign after telling
the boss she wouldn’t put a brush in her mouth.
Now go watch this, “How I Survived Chernobyl”. Or have a look at this, “Chernobyl Suicide
Squad - 3 Men Who Prevented Even Worse Nuclear Disaster.”
