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.”