When radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, it seemed less like an element than a miracle. It glowed in the dark with an eerie blue-green light, apparently for free, and the age fell in love with it. There was radium toothpaste and radium water, radium face cream and radium chocolate. And there was radium paint — a luminous mixture that, brushed onto the numerals of a watch, let a soldier read the time in a darkened trench. When the United States entered the First World War, demand for glowing dials soared, and factories filled with young women to paint them.
At the United States Radium Corporation plant in Orange, New Jersey, and later at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, hundreds of women sat at long benches doing delicate work with fine camel-hair brushes. To keep a sharp point, they were taught to draw the bristles between their lips — "lip, dip, paint," the routine went. Dip the brush in the radium paint, point it with the tongue and lips, paint a figure, repeat. With every point of the brush, a trace of radium went down the throat. The women were told it was harmless. Some, delighted by the glow, painted their fingernails and teeth with it for a night out, and went home dusted in luminous powder that shone in their darkened bedrooms.
Bones that betrayed them
The trouble was that radium behaves chemically like calcium, and the body, unable to tell the difference, salted it away in the bones. There, radioactive atoms decayed for years, blasting the surrounding tissue from the inside. The first symptoms, appearing after 1922, were dental. Teeth loosened and fell out; the sockets refused to heal; the jawbone itself softened, crumbled and became infected. Dentists were baffled by a condition that came to be called "radium jaw." Some women had pieces of jaw removed by hand. Others developed anaemia, spontaneous fractures where a bone snapped under the weight of the body, and in time the bone cancers, sarcomas, that killed many of them.
The companies denied everything. When one early case threatened scrutiny, the industry pointed instead to syphilis as the supposed cause, smearing the dying women's reputations. A company-linked examination declared workers healthy who were already fatally ill. Executives, who handled radium with lead screens and tongs in their own offices, insisted the paint was safe for the girls who ate it.
The five who sued
In New Jersey, a former dial painter named Grace Fryer decided to fight. It took her two years simply to find a lawyer willing to take the case; the statute of limitations had nearly run out because the disease took so long to appear. In 1927 Fryer and four co-workers — remembered as the Radium Girls — sued the United States Radium Corporation. Too weak to raise their arms to take the oath, some of them, they became a newspaper sensation. In 1928 the company settled, agreeing to pay each woman a lump sum and a pension and to cover medical costs.
In Illinois the fight went further. Catherine Wolfe Donohue, dying and weighing barely more than a child, testified from her sickbed against the Radium Dial Company. Her case, pursued through the late 1930s, was upheld on appeal, establishing that a company could be held liable for occupational disease. She died shortly after her victory.
The Radium Girls did not win much for themselves — most of the money arrived too late, and many were already dead. But their cases helped transform the law. They established the principle that employers owe a duty of care for slow-developing occupational illnesses, strengthened the field of industrial medicine, and fed directly into the safety regulations and, eventually, the standards that would govern America's whole nuclear age. When physicists later needed data on how radium settles in the human skeleton, it was the bodies of these women — some studied for decades — that provided it.
There is a final, quiet horror to the story. The bones of the dial painters are still radioactive, and will remain so for centuries; radium's half-life is roughly sixteen hundred years. In graveyards in New Jersey and Illinois, if you passed a Geiger counter over certain plots, it would still click. The glow that once seemed magical never went out — it simply moved underground.
Quiz nuggets
- The Radium Girls painted luminous watch dials with radium paint, mainly at plants in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, from around 1917.
- They were taught to "lip-point" their brushes, ingesting radium, which the body deposits in bone because it mimics calcium.
- The characteristic illness became known as "radium jaw," alongside anaemia, fractures and bone cancers.
- Grace Fryer led five New Jersey workers in a 1927 lawsuit against the United States Radium Corporation, settled in 1928.
- The cases advanced occupational-safety and industrial-disease law; radium's half-life is about 1,600 years, so the victims' bones remain radioactive.