In our world today, we have all kinds of lights everywhere - phones, tvs, computers, street lights, indoor lights, flood lights, flash lights, etc. As time goes on, it has become nearly impossible to find true darkness, unless you’re out in the middle of nowhere.
The Rise of Luminated Products
But what contributed to the rise of luminated products like watches and clocks?
Before and throughout the 19th century, if you wanted to tell the time at night, you would need to light a candle in order to see your pocket watch or clock. But what if you were stuck in a situation where you couldn’t light a candle? Say, in battle maybe?
This issue would have a luminous solution in the beginning of the 20th century. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium in 1898 when they were able to isolate it from pitchblende and conduct studies on the new element first-hand. However, they were quick to realize that this was much more dangerous than they had at first thought.
Pitchblende is a mineral that also goes by the name uraninite, which some might know contains mostly uranium and radium, along with other material. To isolate radium, the Curies bought a whole bunch of pitchblende after uranium had been isolated from it, and from there started to really study how to extract or isolate the radium from the rest of the material that was there.
The reason they even did this in the first place was because they realized that the pitchblende was still radioactive even after the uranium was removed. If they knew it was radioactive, coming from the same mineral that uranium comes from - which is also a highly radioactive element… Why did they continue so closely working with this material anyway?
It was Marie who began to study radium’s possible practical applications. She believed that in small doses, it could be beneficial to one’s health. In fact, in the early days of these discoveries, medical professionals used radium as a method of cancer treatment.
During the time the Curies studied radium, they noticed that it was having serious negative effects on their physical health. The work to isolate radium was demanding and exhausting, and they started to feel sick and physically exhausted. Their hands were often inflamed, swollen, and raw due to the fact that they were handling radioactive material on a daily basis. Marie even occasionally burned her arms from improperly working with the material.
Interestingly enough, it is Marie who coined the term ‘radioactive.’ Although their studies were highly dangerous to their health, the Curies persevered. As one of Marie’s famous quotes goes, "I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy."
Contrary to popular belief, radium does not glow on its own. In the early 20th century, radium was used in paint substances that usually included a zinc sulfide phosphor, which when combined results in the luminous nature of the paint.
Despite knowing the harmful effects of radium, people still believed that it was okay to handle in tiny amounts. The Radium Luminous Material Corporation - or the U.S. Radium Corporation - at the time quickly took advantage of the glowing paint mixture by marketing it under the brand name “Undark.”
Mass Production of Radium Products
With World War I happening, the demand for watches, dials, and instruments painted with this mixture increased due to the fact that they were self-luminous. Soldiers at battle, for example, could tell the time in the middle of the night if they had one of these self-luminous watches.
So manufacturers were quick to adopt these paints which they used to make self-luminous watches, aircraft switches, instrument dials, and more. Factories sprung up all over the country, where workers would need to carefully paint each watch, for example, so that the numbers, dials, and faces would automatically glow. The main three of these factories were located in Orange, New Jersey; Ottawa, Illinois; and Waterbury, Connecticut.
It was here that mainly women were hired. The work was fairly easy if you had a steady hand and a good eye, and it paid well. You were even considered lucky to be working in one of these factories, especially because being around the radium dust would actually cause you to have a faint glow on your clothes, skin, and nails.
Some women who were hired would even go as far as wearing their best party dresses to work, so that when they were off and went out on the town to socialize, their dresses would glow. They were called “ghost girls” by others, because of their glow, and quickly became the early 1900s equivalent of local celebrities.
Effects of the Radium Paint
One of these women who worked at the Orange, New Jersey location was named Amelia, or ‘Mollie,’ Maggia. Mollie was an exceptional dial painter. At the factory, workers were told to point the tip of their paint brushes with their lips or tongue in order to make it easier to paint with precision and detail. All day every day, Mollie would dip her brush in the glowing radium paint, apply it to the watch dials, lick the tip of the brush to point it, and repeat the process over and over again just like all of her coworkers.
The women would ask the corporation about whether it was safe to be doing this, and they would assure them that there wasn’t anything to be concerned about. Even though this was far from the truth.
She, among the many other women employed by the U.S. Radium Corporation, were glad to be contributing to the war efforts while also making a decent living. Three of her six sisters, in fact, also worked in the same field. Mollie, however, was the among the first of the radium girls to suffer the devastating effects of radium ingestion.
At first, it was just a toothache. After visiting the dentist, they told her the tooth needed to be removed. After this, the tooth beside it began to ache, too. They proceeded to extract this one as well. At the root of the now extracted teeth, painful, bloody ulcers formed. This quickly spread throughout all of Mollie’s upper and lower jaws. The condition of her lower jaw was so bad that they had to remove it completely.
Eventually, two years after her first symptoms, Mollie was the first radium girl to die. Doctors who examined her were confused and unsure of the exact cause of her death. They ended up chalking it all up to syphilis.
As Mollie’s symptoms were worsening, other women who worked as radium painters also began to have strikingly similar agonizing symptoms. Soon, controversy spread about the radium corporation and whether radium was safe to use, especially after the death of Mollie Maggia.
Other women who worked at the factories were experiencing absolutely horrible symptoms such as their teeth falling out, anemia, and cancerous tumors. The deterioration of the jawbone became a common symptom among these women, so much so that it was later recognized as ‘radium necrosis’ or ‘radium jaw.’
Radium Testing
In an effort to protect their business, the U.S. Radium Corporation denied any connection of radium to the strange deaths of the women who worked in their factories. This didn’t fix the problem though. Radium soon became increasingly unpopular as more and more radium girls suffered terrible deaths, which forced the corporation to commission independent studies on the radium paint.
Their findings were not surprising - it was confirmed that the women had died from the direct and consistent radium exposure that they faced in their everyday work.
The company was NOT having this though. They didn’t want to see their business go down, so they decided to be extremely slimy about everything, and ordered that new studies be conducted that would have the exact opposite results - that radium was safe. They even ended up publishing those studies, not the accurate one. All so they can keep making a quick buck at the expense of so many women’s lives.
Because of these false studies that were published, the public continued using products with radium and the companies continued employing people to paint with the “Undark” paint.
These factory owners and even the man who invented the paint knew that it was not safe. How do we know this? Well, because workers who manufactured the paint and handled it before it went into the hands of the painters used protective gear when being anywhere near it. They used lead screens, masks, and tongs that helped them keep a distance from the radioactive element.
And on top of that, Marie and Pierre Curie had warned the director of the US Radium Corporation of the dangers of radium before the “Undark” paint was in production. Marie herself required her staff at the Radium Institute to take several precautions when handling the substance. She would have them take blood tests on a regular basis, and make sure to get plenty of exercise and fresh air during their work days.
Many people had died due to radium exposure in the past, even before these factories existed.
The warning signs don't end there. Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, the inventor of the radium based paint, Undark, and technical director of the US Radium Corporation found himself obsessed with radium. He first came into close contact with it and experienced its effects first hand when a small bit of the substance got on the tip of the nail of his left index finger. It is said that this contact with the radium was so painful that he proceeded to cut off the tip of his finger to alleviate the pain.
One source we found stated that “By 1917, he was so heavily contaminated with radioactivity that his presence caused false readings when measuring the levels of purity of radium salts taken in the electroscope laboratory at the plant.”
Finally in 1925, a test was run to definitively find what caused the death of the women who worked with radium by a pathologist named Harrison Martland. After it was run, it was finally confirmed without question that the radium had been slowly breaking down their bones until it eventually killed them.
After radium is ingested, 80% exits the body through the feces. The other 20% enters the bloodstream. From there, because the body treats it as calcium, radium mainly collects in the bones. This is where it comes into contact with the bone marrow and degrades it, causing mutations in the body’s bone cells. This degradation of the bone cells was seen in so many of the girl’s cases, especially with the radium jaw that just ate away at the bones in their face.
Lawsuit
After the cause of death was confirmed, it was clear that the use of radium paints in the manufacturing of these watches and instruments needed to be stopped immediately for the safety of the public. The women who were experiencing symptoms knew this.
Five of these women, from the New Jersey factory sued the U.S. Radium Corporation due to the fact that they had been completely misled about the dangers of working with ‘Undark’ paint. They were specifically instructed to lick the tips of their brushes as a part of their job, which lead to significant radium poisoning.
As a result, women who worked in these factories suffered all kinds of radiation-related illnesses, and the majority were doomed to die from the exposure. These five radium girls were fully aware of what was ahead for them, but still wanted to try to do some good for other women and colleagues who were still employed at the factories.
They sued the corporation in 1927, but their efforts were hindered by a two-year statute of limitations. Even when they could finally testify in January of 1928, the U.S. Radium Corporation was granted an adjournment until September.
This caused a LOT of media backlash. Newspapers everywhere were publishing the New Jersey radium girls’ story, exposing the injustice to the rest of the public. On June 4th, 1928, the women accepted an out-of-court settlement, and the U.S. Radium Corporation wouldn’t take full responsibility for the deaths of the women until 1938 - ten years later.
This final settlement was reached when a dying radium girl by the name of Catherine Wolfe Donohue along with other dial painters from the Ottawa factory decided to sue the Radium Dial Co. Catherine was cunning when it came to seeking out justice for these girls. Although she had severe radium poisoning symptoms, she managed to make it to court to testify against the corporation. During her testimony, she collapsed because she was so weakened by these symptoms. This did not stop her, though - Catherine finished her testimony from her sickbed at home. Ultimately, the women won the lawsuit and finally were recognized for the suffering they were going through.
Because the company was held accountable for the damages to their workers’ lives, this became a standard across the board for employees and employers. It became punishable in court to put employees in danger, and if another instance ever happened where workers’ health was affected, they could claim damages.
More Radium Deaths
So remember the scientists who discovered radium? Marie and Pierre Curie? They also suffered the consequences of being exposed to the element for too long. Pierre once fastened a tube of radium to his arm and kept it there for ten hours. After the ten hours, he removed the tube and noticed what appeared to be a skin lesion exactly where it had been attached to his arm. Marie Curie died in 1934 from aplastic pernicious anemia determined to be caused by her exposure to radium over the years of her studies of the deadly radioactive substance.
Marie and Pierre Curie were the first co-winners in history of the Nobel prize. On orders of the French president Mitterand, Pierre and Marie’s bodies were moved and reburied in the Pantheon.
In 1928, Dr. Sabin, remember that guy? The dude that cut off the tip of his own finger? Yeah he died from his own invention. It was stated in a New York Times article from 1928 that the presence of radium was discovered in his body about three years before his death. After this discovery, Dr. Sabin had a positive outlook and truly thought that he would recover. It wasn’t until two years later that he fell extremely ill and would receive 13 blood transfusions throughout his last year alive. Despite his hopes for recovery, he died from aplastic anemia at the age of 45.
A Change in History
Although the radium girls didn’t quite get a happy ending for themselves personally, they changed history forever through their sacrifice. Their lawsuits are what made it possible for so many workers for generations to win compensation for unfortunate occupational hazards - especially those that were realized when it was already too late. Their sacrifice will never go unappreciated, and they definitely won’t be forgotten.
To this day, if you visit their online obituaries, people still leave virtual flowers for them to commemorate their lives. In Illinois, a memorial statue in the form of Mollie Maggia - the first radium girl to pass away - stands as a symbol of their sacrifice. Every year around Christmas time, locals will drape a handmade red scarf around the statue to keep her warm during winter.
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