The Radium Girls

In a drafty shed in Paris, once used as a dissecting room, Marie and Pierre Curie huddled over a workbench late one night. They had already spent months in the makeshift laboratory, stirring and boiling large cauldrons of crushed pitch blend ore in search of a new element. The conditions were primitive, a leaky glass roof hung above them, while they used an old iron stove to fight off the cold. But no matter the conditions, the curies were dedicated. And at last, their labor paid off. Pierre closed the shutters and turned down the lantern. The workshop fell into darkness, and an unusual sight materialized. There, in Marie's hands, the substance gleamed with a glowing blue light all on its own. In that moment, it was just a two of them, and this ghostly luminescence. The curies realized they had, indeed, discovered a new element hidden within the pitch blend. They named it "radium" after the Latin word for "ray" in honor of the mysterious rays of energy it emitted. Here was matter that glowed of its own accord, a substance seemingly alive with light and the darkness. The sight of radium's eerie glow transformed their ramshackle lab into a scene from a dream. Night after night, exhausted but exhilarated, the couple stayed past midnight to marble at a tiny specks of light. The laboratory became their second home, even eating their meals amid their scientific and chemical equipment, rather than interrupt their thrilling work. In those early days, radium seemed a benevolent miracle. A scientific fairy tale come true, but every miracle has its shadow. At the turn of the 20th century, no one fully understood the peril hidden in radium's invisible rays. The curies themselves handled radium with bare hands and no precautions, blissfully unaware of any danger. So enchanted were they by its radiance that Marie even kept a tiny vial of radium salt in her desk drawer, marveling at the faint blue glow it gave off in the dark. For long, the world's fascination with radium grew. Scientists as well as public hailed it as a wondrous discovery, an element that shone on its own and seemingly brought life to the lifeless. A new industry sprang up around this miracle substance. Then was added to tonics, cosmetics and paints, advertised as a healthful, glowing cure-all. They had no idea that radium's soft blue or green shine was a deadly omen. As Marie and Pierre carried vast in the glow of their new element, they could not imagine the darkness that accompanied such light. They could not yet foresee the tragedies their discovery would soon bring. A nightmare, written in glow in the dark paint and measured in the lives it forever destroyed. This is the Strange and Unusual Podcast with Allison Horrocks. And welcome to this week's episode, The Radium Girls. Our story begins with radium, one of the most remarkable elements ever discovered. In 1898, scientists Marie and Pierre Kiri, isolated radium, finding that it glowed with a faint blue-green light and emitted powerful energy. In those early days, radium was unbelievably scarce and expensive, but it quickly gained a reputation as a miracle substance. It could destroy cancerous tumors when carefully applied, shrinking malignancies with its mysterious rays. To a world entering the 20th century, radium was a cutting edge of science, invisible rays that could seemingly heal or make things glow like magic. It was along before those who saw a way to make a quick buck, found ways to market radium to the public. By the 1910s and 1920s, you could buy radium-laced cosmetics, creams and tonics. Advertisements promised youthful skin and endless vigor thanks to radium's energy. High-end beauty brands like Radiar and ThoRadia added radioactive compounds to face creams and powders, claiming they could regenerate tissue and rejuvenate the user. Even toothpaste and butter were sold with radium in them, touted to improve health. One German maker sold "therium-laced toothpaste" that they claimed would whiten teeth and strengthen gums. They made its way into everyday luxury goods as well. There were radium chocolates, radium bath salts and radium water jugs that promised to infuse your drinking water with just the right amount of radon for vitality. Perhaps the most famous radium tonic was Ratathor, a patent medicine of distilled water with dissolved radium, 226 and 228. The maker guaranteed it was harmless in every respect, a claim that would prove tragically false. In the late 1920s, wealthy American Eben Byers began chugging Ratathor as an invigorating health drink. He averaged three bottles a day for two years, touting its benefits. Until his teeth started falling out, Byers' jaw disintegrated and holes formed in his skull from the radium eating away his bones. He died in 1932. And newspapers nationwide reported the ghastly details of the Ratathor-induced death, finally waking the public up to the dangers of mild radium therapy. Yet, even as cases like Eben Byers made headlines, many still believed in radium's magic. Radium was power, a scientific wonder, and one of the most widespread uses of that power was to create glow in a dark timepieces. On the time of the First World War, factories in the United States began producing luminous watch and clock dials painted with radium. The paint, usually a mixture of radium powder, zinc zulfide, gum airbic, and water, was branded under names like Undark. Undark paint absorbed energy from radiums decay and glowed constantly, so any surface painted with it would shine in the dark. This had obvious uses for military equipment, giving soldiers the ability to read watches or instrument gauges at night without light. As a US-entered World War I, demand for luminous dials exploded. The job itself had a literal shine. The women hired soon noticed that after a day's work, they themselves glowed. Radium dust from the paint would cling to their hair, hands, and clothes, making them glow in the dark, and they soon became known as the ghost girls. Many would wear their best party dresses to work, knowing the fabric would pick up the magical glow and shine when they went dancing after work. Some even applied a touch of the radium paint to their teeth like makeup. It was all in good fun, a perk of the job. The technique for painting was paintstaking. The women used extremely fine-tipped brushes to paint tiny numbers and markings on each dial, some of which were as small as a few centimeters across. The supervisors trained them in a method that would become infamous. Lip, tip, paint. They were instructed to twirl the tip of their brush between their lips to bring it to a sharp point, then dip it in the radium paint and then paint the dial repeatedly. Lip, dip, paint. Lip, dip, paint. With each dial they painted and the young woman ingested a little bit of radium. If a girl hesitated, questioning if the substance was safe, she was quickly reassured by her bosses, and so they continued obediently. When the young women saw the chemists and male scientists at the plant handling radium with serious precautions, using lead screens, masks, and ivory-tipped tongs, they were reassured that small doses of radium were actually beneficial to health and they were safe. The logic was that radium could kill cancer, so in tiny amounts it might stimulate the body. People were drinking radium water and spreading radium-laced face cream on their skin without apparent immediate harm. Newspapers even printed that radium would add years to our lives. So, why would anyone worry about a little bit of luminous paint? One supervisor told the women, "The radium paint would put roses in their cheeks." But in truth, from the very start, there were warnings. Warnings that the dial painting companies callously chose to ignore. As early as the 1910s, some researchers knew that radium, while therapeutic in certain controlled uses, was incredibly dangerous with prolonged exposure. Marie Curie herself, who carried test tubes of radium in her pockets, suffered radiation burns on her skin. By 1920, a few radium researchers and industrial hygienists knew that ingesting or inhaling radium could be catastrophic. The management at the United States radium corporation, USRC, even published scientific literature on radium's injurious effects for the medical community. The higher ups knew the risks. That's why the male lab workers took precautions and wore protective gear. And it's why no one in upper management ever sat at those long work tables doing the painting themselves. Yet, none of these warnings were passed on to the young women at the brushes. They were kept in the dark, so to speak, and completely exploited. In a time before OSHA, before labor rights were established, the assumption was that a company wouldn't knowingly poison its own employees. But even if it did, the workers had little power to demand safety information. But then, by the early 1920s, strange health problems began to surface for the women working at the radium dial factories. Dentists in New Jersey started seeing a perplexing pattern, young women with teeth literally falling apart. One such woman was Molly McGeea, a 24-year-old dial painter in Orange, New Jersey. Molly was lively and healthy until she wasn't. It started innocently with a tooth ache in 1922. Her dentist pulled the tooth, but then another tooth started aching. Then another. In the empty sockets where teeth had been removed, angry ulcers appeared. No matter what the dentist did, the ulcers would not heal, and her gum tissue just seemed to necrose, die off, leaving foul smelling infections. Soon, it was too painful for Molly to even be able to chew solid food. As the months went by, Molly McGeea's condition grew worse. The mysterious infection spread. Her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, even the bones of her ears, all began to abscess and break down. She started suffering severe pain in her legs and feet as well, to the point where walking became impossible. Doctors were baffled. One thought, perhaps it was rheumatism. Another wondered about phosphorus poisoning, which had caused fussy jaw and match factory workers decades earlier. No one suspected radium. In desperation, Molly went back to her dentist in mid-1922. By then, most of her teeth were gone and her jaw was in terrible shape. The dentist prodded at her lower jaw and it broke apart in his hand. Shocked, he removed bone fragments from her mouth with no surgery needed. The bone was so diseased, it could be lifted out, quote, merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting. In July of 1922, just a few days after her 24th birthday, Molly was bedridden. Her lower jaw entirely gone, her throat ravaged by infection. On October 12, 1922, the infection reached her jugular vein. Her throat hemorrhaged so rapidly that her nurse could not stop the blood. Molly bled to death in agony that evening. So what ended up being the official cause on her death certificate? Cipherless. It was a convenient lie. A sexually transmitted infection that carried a heavy stigma and which her former employer would later use to smear her reputation and dismiss her case. In truth, Molly McGeea was the first known victim of radium poisoning among the dial painters. But in 1922, no one recognized radium jaw for what it was. Molly's co-workers were horrified and frightened by her death. But they were told by the company that she and others who fell ill must have contracted syphilis or some other unfortunate malady unrelated to their work. Yet one by one, more women working in these factories began to get sick. Toothaches, gum infections, loose teeth, jaw pain, these were the earliest signs. Many women also developed severe anemia, losing color and energy as the red blood cell counts plummeted. Bones in their feet or arms would inexplicably fracture or weakened. Some young women stopped menstruating or became unable to have children. And always the jaw troubles, always the teeth and jaw rotting. It got so common that the mysterious ailment gained a nickname, radium jaw, much like façie jaw had been known among matchstick factory workers. The pattern was undeniable, at least to the dentists and local doctors of Orange, New Jersey. By 1924, just two years after Molly's death, at least a dozen dial painters had died, and more than 50 were gravely ill. At first, each case was handled in isolation. A doctor might suspect phosphorous exposure, another might blame arsenic. The radium companies took advantage of the confusion. They pressured doctors to stay quiet or attribute the deaths to other causes. The USRC, the New Jersey Company, denied responsibility for the growing sickness. In fact, in 1923, when another young dial painter died horribly, her jaw literally fell away from her skull before death. The company line was that her own reckless personal life was to blame, insinuating syphilis or some congenital defect. Behind the scenes though, the company man were getting nervous. They hired experts to study the situation, but only ones who would give them the answers they wanted. In 1924, dealing with increasing rumors, the USRC commissioned an independent study on the dial painter's illnesses. When the resulting report confirmed that, yes, the radium paint was causing the women's deaths. The company suppressed the findings. The president of USRC paid for new studies that miraculously concluded the opposite. He even lied to the US Department of Labor Investigators about the results of the first study, claiming it found no link when it fact it had. Obliquely, he and other officials denounced the victims, accusing the sick women of trying to "pom off" and "their illnesses on a company to get money". Privately, USRC's lawyers and execs were circling the wagons, bracing for a fight. The dial painters themselves, however, had little idea what to do. Many were too sick to work, drowning in medical bills, and now their employer, the only place that had paid well, abandoned them. Some women, desperate, asked USRC for help with their medical costs, or at least for guidance. They were denied and ridiculed. One company statement claimed the women were perhaps sick before they ever worked there, that in an act of charitable kindness, the firm had hired many girls who were already in poor health, and thus physically unfit for other jobs. This cruel lie only added insult to injury. By 1925, the afflictions of the radium girls was becoming harder to hide, and then a person became involved who would help crack the case. Dr. Harrison Martland, the county medical examiner of Newark, New Jersey. He was a brilliant, dedicated pathologist, and he had heard rumors of what was happening in Orange. It particularly caught his attention when the first male employee at USRC died, a laboratory chemist, because unlike the women, he had used protective gear, but still died from radium exposure. Dr. Martland decided to investigate these strange deaths scientifically. In 1925, Dr. Martland developed a series of tests that conclusively proved that radium had poisoned the dial painters. He measured radium levels in the women's bodies, with the exhaled breath of the living patients, which carried radium gas as a decay product, as well as in the bones of those who had died. The results were stunning. He found that the radium the women had ingested was lodged in their bones, continuously emitting radiation, and literally honeycombing those bones with decay. Under the microscope, their bone tissue looked as if it were full of tiny holes. Bones' alpha particles had blasted through, killing bone cells, and preventing healing. He also explained why the jaw was often hit first. It turned out that radium, being chemically similar to calcium, tends to concentrate in bones, especially in the jaw, teeth, and long bones. When the women pointed their brushes in their mouths, they had painted their teeth and gums with radium daily. From there, the radium seeped into their jaw bones. Once inside, even a microscopic speck of radium would keep radiating for years, destroying any bone it touched. The reason their wounds never healed was that radium had destroyed the very cells needed for repair. But perhaps, most chilling of all, Dr. Martland realized that there was no cure. Once radium was inside your body, there was no way to remove it or stop it. The only question was how long a person had before the damage killed them. And for these women, it was usually a matter of only a few years from the first symptoms. Dr. Martland published his research and, suddenly, the dial painter's condition had a name and a cause, radium poisoning. The companies, of course, tried to discredit him, but his evidence was rigorous, and other experts were beginning to back him up. Importantly, Dr. Martland's data gave the sick women something priceless. Proof. Now, they could definitively link their suffering to their work. Which meant they had a chance, however slim, of holding the company accountable. One eerie phenomenon was examined during Dr. Martland's work. When the bones of the deceased were removed from their coffins, Dr. Martland observed that they still emitted a faint blue glow. This was dubbed the light that does not lie. In fact, some women reportedly realized the truth about their condition while alive and saw themselves glowing in a mirror in the dark of night. By 1926, the evidence was overwhelming and the story was starting to break through to the public. It was no longer a few isolated unlucky girls. It was clear a scandal was underway, but this realization alone didn't pay Dr. Bills, and it didn't bring justice. For that, the radium girls themselves would have to fight. Leading the fight was a woman named Grace Freyer. Grace was a dial painter in Orange, New Jersey, hired in 1917 at age 18. By the mid-1920s, she was suffering from severe spine problems, which required her to wear a steel back brace, as well as teeth issues. Grace was determined to hold her employer accountable. Just for her sake, but for the sake of current and future dial painters who were still being sent to work with radium. Starting in 1925, Grace began searching for a lawyer willing to take on the powerful USRC. It wasn't easy. Many attorneys were skeptical of the claims at first, or didn't want to face a well-funded corporation in court. There was another problem as well. In New Jersey at that time, an occupational disease had to be reported within two years of the exposure to bring a claim. But most women didn't even show symptoms until five or more years after starting work. By the time they realized they were sick from their jobs, the statute of limitations had passed, companies like USRC hid behind these laws. But for two years, Grace Friar kept looking. In 1927, she finally found an attorney brave enough, Raymond Berry, a young lawyer who agreed to represent Grace and several of her colleagues. In addition to Grace, four other women, Edna Hussman, Catherine Shobb, Quentin McDonald, and Albina Lavras joined the case as plaintiffs. When the newspapers found out, they coined a nickname for the group, The Radium Girls. And time was running out for The Radium Girls. But the first court hearing in January 1928, some of the women were so sick, they couldn't even raise their arms to take the oath in court. Two were bedridden and couldn't attend at all. The women's lawyer made an impassioned plea, explaining their absence bluntly, "When you have heard that you are going to die, that there is no hope, and every newspaper you pick up prints what amounts to your obituary. There is nothing else." The public was stunned and sympathetic. Outrage grew as details of the company's deceit came out in testimony. USRC continued to deny wrongdoing. They used delay tactics and the strategy nearly succeeded. With the women given only months to live by their doctors, a prolonged trial was impossible. In the end, The Radium Girls agreed to an out-of-court settlement in June 1928. It was a bittersweet victory. The settlement for each woman was $10,000, equivalent to about $183,000 in today's dollars. Plus, a 600 per year annuity and full coverage of medical and legal expenses. USRC did not emit fault, but the payout said a lot. Importantly, the case and its publicity achieved Grace Fryer's goal. It raised the alarm about radium's dangers and it forced changes. Within a year of the settlement, the US radium dial companies put safety standards in place. No more lip painting and workers began using protective gear. Tragically, all five of those new Jersey radium girls died by the 1930s. But their ordeal had sent shockwaves across the country, especially to another radium dial town, Ottawa, Illinois. In Ottawa, Illinois, about 800 miles from New Jersey, a dial painting factory had been in operation since 1922, under the name radium dial company. Just like in Orange, New Jersey, the Ottawa plant hired many local young women to paint clock and watchdials using the same undark paint and the same lip dip paint routine. For a while, the Ottawa dial painters were blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that had be fallen their new Jersey counterparts. By the late 1920s, some Ottawa women started showing familiar symptoms, tooth aches, jaw problems, fatigue. When news of the New Jersey radium girls hit national papers, the Ottawa dial workers reacted with whore and fear. One painter, Catherine Wolf, called how the atmosphere at the Illinois plant changed. "There were meetings at our plant that bordered on riots. The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work." The bosses at radium dial company swiftly moved into damage control. They assured the Illinois women that their radium paint was safe and that the problems in New Jersey were just unfounded rumors, or viral infections unique to those workers. In fact, behind the scenes, radium dials leadership had conducted secret medical tests on the Ottawa painters, which clearly indicated radium poisoning. But they chose to lie about the results and hide them from employees. They even went so far as to take out a full-page advertisement in the local Ottawa newspaper claiming that their factory was absolutely safe. "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," the ad claimed. It was blatant propaganda, and it worked for a time. Many in the community sided with the company, not wanting to believe that the town's pride, one of the few businesses providing good jobs in a tough economy, was killing its daughters. Radium dials cover up in Illinois got even more sinister. As some Ottawa dial painters started to die in the early 1930s, company officials actually interfered with autopsies to obscure evidence of radium poisoning. In one horrifying macabre incident, they stole the radium riddled bones of a deceased worker to prevent scientists from studying them. Despite these efforts, the truth came out. Former radium dial employees in Ottawa began banding together by the mid-1930s, sharing their stories and seeking compensation for mounting medical bills. They found hope in a young attorney named Leonard Grossman, who agreed to take up their cause in 1937, pro bono. By 1937, the Great Depression had been ongoing for years, and Ottawa was struggling. Sowing one of the town's only major employers was not exactly a popular move, but they did. The case went before the Illinois Industrial Commission, and in the spring of 1938, they ruled in favor of the women. However, by that point, radium dial company had closed its factory in Illinois and relocated out of state to avoid paying out claims. But the state had required radium dial to put up a $10,000 deposit as a form of insurance for such claims. Still, it was a depressingly small sum to be divided among many victims, and some women saw nothing at all. Radium dial appealed the decision, dragging the case on, even taking it to the US Supreme Court. Finally, in October of 1939, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, letting the lower ruling stand. It was a final legal victory for the radium girls, though it came much too late for many. But the time the case was settled, Catherine Donahue herself had died in July of 1938. While alive, Catherine had insisted on giving testimony from her deathbed to weak to stand. She testified, lying down in her home, it crucifix in her hands, with a great fruit-sized tumor bulging on her hip, and her jawbone largely gone. She died at age 35, leaving behind a husband and two young children. The radium girls' fights in both New Jersey and Illinois made it painfully clear that occupational disease could be just as deadly as any industrial accident, and that laws needed to catch up to protect workers. In the years following, many states overhauled their statutes of limitations, and workers' compensation rules to better cover occupational diseases. Eventually, in 1949, the U.S. Congress passed a bill ensuring that all workers suffering from occupational diseases could receive compensation, which was a direct result of the awareness raised by the radium girls' case. In the end, the radium girls' struggle and fight helped advance science as well. Their bodies created data that scientists studied for decades to understand the effects of internal radioactivity. In 1933, researcher Rob Lee Evans at MIT measured exhaled radon from a former dial painter to quantify how much radium was in her body, which directly led to the first safety standard for radium intake. Later, the Center for Human Radio Biology at Argonne National Laboratory tracked surviving dial painters into the 20th century gathering valuable data on radium's long-term health impacts. On the labor front, the public outrage over the radium girls' suffering was a major factor in the establishment of the occupational safety and health administration, OSHA, many years later. OSHA, founded in 1971, enforces workplace safety standards nationwide. In the specific case of radium dial painting, standards changed quickly once the truth was out. The dial painting industry did itself continue, since luminous styles were still needed through World War II and into the Cold War. However, no more lip-dip paint was allowed after the early 1930s. Dial painters were given protective gear and instructed never to put the brushes in their mouths. Eventually, safer luminouset materials like tridium and phosphorescent paints replaced radium for most uses. Amazingly, radium paint was still used on some watchtiles as late as the 1960s and 1970s, though under much stricter controls. The very last U.S. factory making radium dials shut down in 1978. There is a haunting epilogue to the story of the radium girls. We find it in the quiet cemeteries of New Jersey and Illinois where the women were laid to rest. Decades after they were buried, some of their remains have been exhumed for study or rebarial, and to this day, if you bring a Geiger counter near their bones, it will click and crackle with radiation. In fact, with the lights off, those bones themselves will glow faintly in the dark. Radium 226, the isotope that poison them, has a half-life of 1600 years. These women will glow in their graves for centuries to come. This has been the strange and unusual podcast, the radium girls. Before I go, I want to let you know about a new podcast, The Fright Guest, that I created and co-host with my dear, dear friend, Jen Carrasco. It's a podcast where horror meets the zeitgeist. We discuss horror films and the time that they were made. We released one episode so far on the Omen. And next week, we get into the 2014 film It Follows. Please join me over there on that podcast, as well as the Fright Guest Instagram. Until next time, you can join the Strange and Unusual Podcast on Instagram at the Strange and Unusual Podcast. And remember, as Poe said, "There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion. So stay strange." [Music] [Music]