The Radium Girls

Join Kelli as she gives the history of the Radium Girls - young women who worked in factories painting watches and dials with paint containing RADIUM. The girls were encouraged to use their lips to keep the brushes pointy, and as a result, they were consuming alpha radiation particles from the radioactive radium. The result? Disintegrating bones, rotting necrotic tissue, and painful death.

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Sources referenced:
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric

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Chapters

• 0:28 Intro
• 2:43 Historical Context
• 5:07 Radium and Radioactivity
• 12:21 The Dial-Painting Factories
• 21:50 The Girls
• 31:19 Outro

Transcript

The Radium Girls

Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

So today we’re going to talk about the radium girls. Back in the early 20th century, that’s the 1900s, young women were employed to work in factories painting the dials and numbers on watches, clocks, stuff like that. The products were called “luminous” because they glowed in the dark. But what made them glow in the dark was radium.

Now radium, if you don’t already know, is a naturally occurring radioactive metal. The kind of stuff you don’t want to touch or be near because the alpha, beta, and gamma radiation it produces will kill you. We’ll get into that in more detail later.

But these girls were hired to use paint with radium in it to help the watches glow at night - a desirable luxury on the market, but also something really useful in a military setting.

And unfortunately for these young women, the technique they were taught to get the brushes nice and sharp was something called lip-pointing; they would sharpen the brush in their mouths, dip it in radioactive paint, then use it. When the brush hardened, they would repeat the process.

They were readily ingesting radioactive radium - small quantities of at a time, but regularly enough so that each girl who worked as a dial painter was doomed to a horrible, painful death.

So today, we’ll take a look at the history that explains why these girls were working in radium-paint factories. Why radium? How does that work? Why were girls hired to paint watches? What was life like for these young women? After looking at the historical context, we’ll focus on a few women to give you a better sense of what happened here. Finally, we’ll recap the after effects - how and why did this process end, and what are the bigger picture ramifications of the radium girls?

So let’s get started!

Historical Context
Now the beginning of our story here takes place in the days of World War I. The US entered the war in April 1917, and many of our nation's young men were enlisted and sent overseas. But while we were fighting to help our British, French, and Russian allies over in Europe, there was still work to be done back home - who would keep the factories going, producing things needed for the war like ammunition? Guns? And stuff used domestically? Well, women stepped up and entered the workforce, taking on jobs that were previously denied to them.

A few episodes ago we learned about HH Holmes, and I mentioned that in his day, around the 1890s, women who worked traditionally had jobs like being a secretary, or stenographer. But this changed with WWI. Women were now going into the factories, making more money, and proving to be the real backbone of the US war efforts. This carried over into other aspects of life, too. The women’s suffrage movement, which was the decades-long movement for women to have the right to vote, gained real momentum and was ratified as the 19th amendment to the US Constitution on August 18th, 1920.

Now not all factory work was equal. Some jobs were more dangerous than others, some paid better than others. But there was one growing business in northern NJ that seemed too good to be true - a company called the Radium Luminous Materials Corp, on Third Street in Newark, was hiring young women watch-dial painters. They would paint the numbers and hands of watches with an almost magical glowing paint, and they would be paid for each watch they completed; some of these girls made more money than they ever dreamed they would have.

But what the girls didn’t realize was the paint, which glowed because of the radium inside it, was radioactive. Their jobs were deadly.

Radium and radioactivity
Radium was first discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie. Now when talking about radium, most people are discussing radium-226, the most stable isotope. For those of you who didn’t listen to my Chernobyl episode, or just forgot all that complicated science, let’s review isotopes for a minute.

So you may remember from HS science that each element has a specific number of protons, neutrons, and electrons, right? In fact, the number of protons is what determines the element’s atomic number - the first element on the periodic table is hydrogen, and it has an atomic number of 1 - it has one proton. Radium, for those of you curious, has an atomic number of 88 - so 88 protons. What can be different is the number of neutrons.

Normally, radium has 138 neutrons. When combined with the protons, so 88, we get our atomic mass - 226. The atomic mass is the protons and neutrons added together. So when we think about normal ol’ radium, we are actually thinking about radium-226.

But sometimes, the number of neutrons can change, and it changes the stability of the element. Radium actually has 33 known isotopes ranging in atomic mass from 202 to 234, and all 33 of those isotopes of radium are radioactive.

We’ll pretty much just be talking about radium-226 today, the most stable of all isotopes, which I’ll get into in a second. I just find all this stuff really fascinating.

So Marie and Pierre Curie discovered that radium is produced during the radioactive decay of uranium-238. Radioactive decay happens when an element is unstable; it needs to get rid of excess energy in order to become stable, and in the process of doing so, it releases radiation. We can’t really detect radiation without specific equipment. Now when an element, like uranium-238, undergoes radioactive decay, it creates other elements, including our friend radium.

Radium, like uranium, is radioactive.

Now for radioactive elements, this means they are unstable; they will always have what we call a half-life (not the videogame). Half life is the amount of time it takes for one-half of the radioactive isotope to decay. The half-life is constant and is not affected by things like temperature, weight, the starting amount, none of that. It’s just time. Sometimes the half-life of a radioactive element will be super super long, but sometimes it can be really short. It just depends on the isotope.

Radium-226, the isotope we’ll be discussing today, is the most stable of the radium isotopes. It has the longest half-life of 1,600 years. What this means in normal-people talk is that it takes 1,600 years for the intensity of the radiation coming from radium to decrease by, well, a half. So it stays radioactive for a long time. But what makes this the most stable is that it takes 1,600 years before it breaks down, or release all that extra energy it’s got that makes it radioactive.

So when radiation is emitted, it can take three forms - alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Radioactive material that emits alpha particles can’t really penetrate through most things, so you can block it by wearing clothing or even with, like, a piece of paper. We’ll come back to alpha radiation in a second.

Beta particles can also be blocked by a layer of clothing or a thick layer of something to protect you, but it can easily penetrate the skin and cause a burn.

Gamma particles are generally considered to be the most dangerous ones because they can penetrate a lot more than alpha and beta ones. Gamma rays, and also x-rays, can penetrate through clothes and stuff, so normally you’d need to shelter under a few feet of concrete or a few inches of lead. This is why, if you’ve ever gotten an x-ray done, they had to drape that heavy lead apron over you, then leave the room. It can stop the radiation from penetrating. Small doses, like getting an x-ray doen safely, will just pass through your body. You just don’t want to be exposed to gamma particles or x-ray all the time, or in massive quantities.

Let’s jump back to alpha, though. Alpha particles are usually given off by the heavier radioactive elements, including our friend radium. Though it can easily be blocked by bu clothing, where it is most dangerous is when it’s ingested; if you inhale it, swallow it, or if it gets absorbed directly into the blood stream… it’s bad. Like, really bad. It can completely destroy living tissue. In fact, alpha particles are the most harmful type of radiation inside the body; they are large, they are in charge, and they will absolutely ruin your insides.

So externally, gamma particles are the most dangerous. Internally, it’s alpha particles.

And this is where we get back to our radium girls - their lip-pointing technique had them regularly, sometimes for years, ingesting radium. They were putting that stuff directly into their body.

The Dial-Painting Factories
Now it wasn’t the only dial-painting factory, but the Radium Luminous Materials Corp in Newark was one of the bigger ones. It offered these young women new prospects - they could earn good money and support the war effort.

Luminous watches were essentially clocks, watches, and other important dials that were painted with luminous paint, a paint made by combining radium powder, water, an adhesive to help it stick, and zinc sulfide. They found that when the alpha particles emitted from radium hit the zinc sulfide, it would glow. The Newark company, including the man who invented the paint, Dr. Sabin van Sochocky, would put this radium paint on the numbers and hands of these watches so they could be viewed in the dark and at night. They called it “undark.”

The luminous watches got so popular, and were so widely used in the US military too, that the company expanded to a bigger warehouse in Orange. Eventually, the company changed hands a bit and rebranded as the United States Radium Corporation.

Now to get this radium-laced paint on the numbers and hands of the clocks and dials, the young women they hired had to use super fine brushes and paint them all by hand. The best painters could go through dozens upon dozens of these a day, and since the girls were paid per piece, they wanted to work fast.

The problem with this undark luminous paint was that the radium dried out the brushes really quickly and they would fray; this is where the lip-pointing technique came in. They found that by putting the tip of the brush to your lips and rolling it slightly, it helped keep the tip pointed in a way where they could be more precise with their painting. Radium was hard to come by and produce, so every little bit of paint mattered - their bosses certainly didn’t want them to waste any of it. So it was lip, dip, and paint. Point the brush with your lips, dip it into the mixture, and paint. Over and over. All day. For as long as you worked as a dial-painter.

One woman, Grace Fryer, said she could only paint two numbers on a dial before she needed to lip-point and fix the brush. Another, Edna Bolz, had to lip point after every number, sometimes multiple times per number.

It’s estimated that the dial-painters would lip point an average of 250 times per day, which was like ingesting 2 grams of radium-paint and 43 micrograms of radioactive alpha particles.

Now the radium paint had a relatively low amount of radiation coming from it, but consider that the girls were putting low levels of radiactive materials, including the super dangerous-if-you-consume-them alpha particles, into their bodies constantly. And consistently.

Now you may be asking at this point - how much did the company know, right? Did people back them know radium was dangerous and radioactive? Was this just a thing where people weren’t super aware of the long-term consequences at first, like cigarettes? Or did they know radium was dangerous?

Oh, they knew. And they knew the girls were lip-pointing. Yet the companies kinda just let these practices continue, exercising gross negligence that ended up with most of these girls dying in excruciating ways.

Van Sochocky, who invented the radium-paint, had studied under the Curies in France. He knew that radium was dangerous, so the men who worked in the lab producing the paint had to wear lead-lined aprons and take all these precautions. But unfortunately, the American public was undergoing what I will describe as radium-fever; everyone was obsessed with this new wonder elements as a medical cure.

There were radium-lined cups that people were encouraged to drink from, so their water would be enriched with radium and they’d be cured of all their ailments. Radium was added to toothpaste, cosmetics, even food. Now it’s impossivle to know if companies were actually putting radium in their products, or just taking advantage of the craze with some false advertising, but there’s no denying that radium was the hot new thing. It was called “liquid sunshine,” and the fact that it had this ghostly glow was more magical than terrifying, at the time. For those of you chronologically challenged, this is way, way before all the nuclear power plant incidents, before we dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - before we knew of the deadly and destructive power of radiation. At the tail end of WWI, radium was the hot new thing. And the girls who worked at the plant would glow and sparkle after a days work - this didn’t trouble them, it made them feel like movie stars.

So while scientists familiar with radium knew it was dangerous, a lot of people were quite blase about it all - how can liquid sunshine be bad for you, right? And this is before the long-term effects were studied. Our radium girls were a big part of the reason why we don’t have radium lining our products today - too much exposure, particularly internally, causes death.

It also didn’t help that the factory girls were outright told that the radium wasn’t dangerous. A really popular book came out in 2017 called The Radium Girls: the Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. The author did a really good job of diving deep into this history, making it feel like a good story while being a well-researched piece. I’ll leave a link in the podcast description for those of you interested in reading it. In her book, Kate Moore quotes a conversation the girls would have with their floor supervisor -

“The very first thing we asked was ‘does this stuff hurt you?’ And they said ‘No.’ Mr. Savoy said that it wasn’t dangerous, that we didn’t need to be afraid. After all, radium was the wonder drug; the girls, if anything, should benefit from their exposure. They soon grew so used to the brushes in their mouths that they stopped even thinking about it. End quote.

It was so early in the life of radium in a commercial and industrial setting that there was no conclusive statement on whether or not it was safe to work with. And it’s not like the FDA was there making sure it was safe to use before hitting hte market - though the FDA was formed properly in 1906, it didn’t regulate radium on the market until after the radium girls brought it’s danger to the public spotlight with some lawsuits against their former employers as they were dying of radiation poisoning.

But again, those in the know knew that radium was dangerous. Van Sochocky is quoted in 1921 as saying that “only by taking the greatest precautions” one could handle radium.

But because the physical quantity of radium in the paint was so small, they assumed it was safe, so the girls were not afforded the same protective equipment that the men in the lab upstairs were given.

I think I’ll spare you all my rant on that one. But is anyone surprised that the specialists upstairs were given better treatment and precautions than the workers on the factory floor?

Anyway.

As new girls were brought into the factory, they were all taught the lip-point technique as a way to maximize their productivity. Swishing the paintbrush around in water wasted too much paint, so the floor managers didn’t typically like them using water cups. Rags were given out too, but again, there were issues with wasted paint. Lip-pointing was just allowed to go on, out of sight, out of mind.

Now there was one incident when Van Sochocky walked through the factory floor. According to a lot of the girls, the higher ups didn’t normally walk down on the painting floor. But once, when Van Sochocky saw the girls using lip-pointing, he told a woman named Grace Fryer not to put the paintbrush in her mouth, as it would make her sick. But after that moment, the girls were not told to stop.

In fact, one woman, Katherine Schaub, suddenly developed pimples one day, which for her was uncharacteristic. Other people around Katherine were started to complain of weird symptoms of things, so just to check, she went to the doctor. The doctor noticed some weird things in her bloodwork, and asked if she had worked with phosphorus at her factory, as her symptoms mirrors phosporus poisioning. This alarmed poor Katherine.

So the girls, en masse, confronted their floor manager about whether or not radium was safe to work with. The manager went to his manager, who brought in a so-called radium specialist to lecture the girls about how radium isn’t dangerous. This calmed them all down, because as Kate Moor puts it in her book, “When one of the greatest radium authorities in the world tells you that you have no need to worry, quite simply, you don’t.”

But of course, things got worse for the girls the longer and harder they worked. Let’s look at a few in particular to see how ingesting radium on the daily, and intaking all those alpha particles, killed them.

The Girls
So I want to talk about some of the girls who worked in the factory and were instrumental, in varying ways, to bringing to light how dangerous radium is and how corrupt and awful capitalist corporations can be without checks and balances.

I want to start with Mollie Maggia. Her name was actually Amelia, but she went by Mollie. She was one of seven sisters born to Italian immigrants, and three of her sisters also worked as a radium dial-painter. Mollie joined the US Radium Corporation, which I’ll just call the USRC from now on, and was a really fast and efficient painter. One day at work, she started feeling tooth pain. She figured she just needed it removed, so she went to the dentist and had it taken out. But the pain didn’t go away.

Now over time, the pain got worse - it had spread to her lower gums and jaw. She says the pain was almost unbearable, so she went back to the dentist in October 1921. This time, though, she went to a specialist in weird mouth pain. The dentist diagnosed her with pyorrhea, an inflammatory disease of the gums, because she seemed to have all the symptoms of it. The problem though was that treatment didn’t help, and her pain got worse. Worse than that, actually - the pain spread to other parts of her body. She started getting aches and pains in her legs and hips - younger sister Quinta, who also ended up getting sick and dying, commented that she thought Mollie was coming down with rheumatism.

But nothing could be done to help Mollie - nurses brought to the house couldn’t help, the dentist couldn’t help, and Mollie was just getting worse and worse. In fact, the more the dentist tried to help, the worse it got. Mollie’s teeth started to fall out on their own. They were literally disintegrating. Her mouth was falling apart.

They considered maybe syphilis - she had some of the common symptoms: sores, joint pain, tiredness… but the test came back negative.

This dentist, like the first, considered phosphorus poisoning - something called “phossy jaw” - which also mirrored Mollie’s symptoms. But since Mollie didn’t work with phosphorus, it couldn’t be this.

As the dentist was trying to figure out what was happening, Mollie’s condition considered to get worse. Her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and up to her ear was basically one big abscess now. By May, she barely had any teeth left. Where the teeth fell out, the holes never healed, instead leaving behing raw, red ulcers. Her jaw was in immense pain as well; when the dentist touched it, it broke apart at the slightest bit of pressure. He - ready for this? - removed her lower jaw by just putting his fingers in her her mouth and lifting the bone out. But that didn’t stop her condition from worsening - the infection spread, necrosis started eating away at her top jaw bone. Once it spread to her neck, it ate through her jugular, and she bled out with a river of blood pouring out of what was left of her mouth.

She was 24 years old.

Other girls were starting to come down with similar symptoms - Irene Rudolph, Helen Quinlan, Hazel Vincent. Some of these girls still worked for USRC, but others had left years before the symptoms showed up, and that’s because of how the alpha particles were attacking the body.

Now what the girls and scientists didn’t know at the time was how the radium was affecting their internal organs. Some of the alpha particles would get into the bloodstream, and from there, be carried throughout the body. But, like with calcium, it is especially carried into bone tissue. Yes, bone is a tissue. Now according to the National Library of Medicine, the reason for this is because calcium and radium are chemically similar. But anyway, once the alpha particles are in the bone tissue, is just breaks it all from the inside. This is why the dentist was able to break apart poor Mollie’s jaw with the slightest of touches - it was crumbling from the inside.

While their bodies were crumbling away from the inside - many of the girls actually lost inches in one or both legs as the bones broke and crushed - necrosis would eat away at their soft tissues as well, causing immense physical and psychological pain. And in case there was any doubt - there is no cure for radium poisoning. These girls were doomed to die.

Now years after they quit, when many of the radium girls were on their deathbeds, they fought back against the USRC with lawsuits, trying to get money to recompense their medical bills and families, but also to make it so that radium poisoning was one of the handful of occupational diseases covered by workers comp - the problem, though, is that symptoms would appear years after exposure, so there was a lot of legal grey area that the USRC tried to exploit to get out of
a) paying the girls any money for their troubles, and
b) taking any blame or responisibilty for their workplace injuries and any future claims.

You know, classical corporate stuff. It’s not our fault, you can’t sue, good luck. 

Let’s talk about another radium girl, Grace Freyer, who was instrumental in bringing their plight and their lawsuits into the public eye.

Grace Fryer joined the USRC as an 18-year-old in 1917. She, like many other young women her age, was compelled to join the war effort, get a good factory job, make some money, maybe find a husband, and just enjoy her life as an independent working woman. She worked for the USRC for 3 years, moving on into the banking world instead.

But two years after leaving her factory job with the USRC, she started losing her teeth. Her jaw became painful. She started developing cataracts. A doctor examined her and found serious bone decay in her mouth, but didn’t know what was causing it. Nowadays, it’s easier for doctors to be able to see trends in medical records, so it would be easier to catch on that all these women presenting with strange symptoms worked in the same environemnt - they did evventually figure it out, but it took a little while.

Now in 1925, five years after Grace left the USRC, a doctor started to piece together the idea that it was the radium that was causing the issues here. A Dr. Martland even developed some tests to test for radiation from the living; prior to this, it could only be done by using an electrogram on ground up bones. But it didn’t take long to discover that the girls who worked at hte factory and regularly used lip-pointing, ingesting radium in hte process, were all radioactive.

It took another two years, so until 1927, to find a lawyer who was willing to go up against USRC, but Grace found one. So Gracy Fryer joined up with four other dial painters to sue - Quinta McDonald and  Albina Larice, who were the sisters of poor Mollie Maggia, along with Edna Hussman and Katherine Schaub. And the press just ate it up. After all, they were the women who were doomed to die. And though the USRC’s lawyers did everything they could to discredit these women, their story turned the tide of public opinion against radium.

In 1928, the Woman’s Journal magazine wrote, quote,
“Seldom have we had so flagrant an instance of the heartlessness of a great corporation. It proves again that while ninety-nine employers may provide the best of care for those who labor for them, the public must safeguard the weak and helpless who are at the mercy of the hundredth master—not alone by wider education about industrial hazards, but by the most careful and stringent laws.”

Well, yes. I agree that companies should abide by laws to keep their employees safe. And that was a huge thing in the 1920s - this was the age of labor laws. And the radium girls were a huge part of that.

As word got out about the dangers of radium, the industry started to collapse. In the 1930s, the FDA came out and banned the commercial use of radium in products. In combination with other labor law movements, the legacy of the radium girls helped form labor safety laws and standards, more robust worker’s comp laws, and even OSHA - the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

For a while after this, radium-226, the most stable of the isotopes, was still used in medical procedures. Today, it is rarely used because of how radioactive it is. It is sometimes used in cases of inoperable prostate and breast cancers who have high risk factors for other treatments, but again, this isn’t common.

We know a lot more now about radioactivity and radiation. But for the radium girls who got jobs painting dials in WWI, ingesting radium not knowing how dangerous it was, they were unfortunate and unknowing victims of radiation sickness in the years before the atomic age. But as a result, workplaces and labor practices have become significantly safer.

Oh, and I hope you’re proud of me - there was absolutely no cannibalism in this one :) juuuuuust necrosis.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the radium girls. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen! If you liked the science in this one, go listen to episode 9 on the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster.

Be sure to follow my podcast, available wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned to get a popular history of unpopular things.