![]() ![]() In April 1924, a New Jersey Health Department officer who was incensed that the federal government hadn’t followed up on her recommendations contacted the head of the Consumer’s League, a national organization fighting for better working conditions for women. For over a decade, the causal relationship between ingested radium and toxic results remained undetermined. Federal occupational safety laws were virtually non-existent, and state law prevented the feds from stopping industrial processes, even if harmful. The Department of Labor investigated and, after a cursory investigation, found no cause that explained the girls’ varying symptoms - and gave the factory a clean bill of health.Īccording to author Kate Moore, this may have been a political decision by the notoriously pro-business Department of Labor. The practice continued, even as the girls visibly sickened.īy 1924, six years after the work began, the condition of the young women could not be ignored, even if doctors and dentists were baffled as to the cause. As fine as they were, the brushes were too thick to achieve the neat lines required on the delicate dials– and so, they were instructed to wet the brushes in their mouths to refine the tip each time they made a stroke - a technique called “lip-pointing.” “Lip, Dip, Paint” went the refrain - and each time, with every lick, they ingested the deadly substance. Initially, radium dial painting was part of the war effort for soldiers’ watches and defense department contracts, but the rage for those luminous dials continued even after the war ended.Īll the while, “the radium girls” applied radium paint (a powder decanted in small crucibles with water) to tiny watch dials with very fine camel-hair brushes. “The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes… the sand “the most hygienic’ for children to play in, ‘more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned chemical baths.” Some died from it, but the association of radium with disease and death was roundly denied or discounted. ![]() And that’s what ravaged the girls.Įven as scientific reports as early as 1906 reported that radium could cause physical harm, some procured and sold the stuff touting its safety, even claiming life-affirming qualities. A sheet of paper can protect us from short, alpha radiation, but these comparatively benign alpha waves can also be vicious – if ingested. Beta radiation of intermediate length can be shielded by a sheet of lead or aluminum. Our present concerns primarily focus on gamma radiation, the penetrating rays that can alternatively kill us or shrink tumors. Perhaps this is a pendulum swing, an over-reaction to the blind-eye turned to serious harms overtaking workers at the turn of the last century: asbestos, garment work, match factories, and maybe the most horrendous story of all: the radium dial painters. Today, we are bombarded with exaggerated claims of risks from chemicals, GMOs, and even UFOs and are tempted to look askance at warning cries of potential hazards. They denied culpability and continuously assured the women all was well, even as they continued exposing them to the harmful rays. ![]() The employers, who had some idea what was killing the women, kept it secret. Mostly, they worked in two factories, the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark (later the US Radium Corporation of Orange, New Jersey) and the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, near Chicago. ![]() The magic medium caused them to glow in the dark, the dust clinging to their clothes and hair. These were the women who painted watch dials beginning in 1916 with the “miracle” chemical – luminescent radium. ![]()
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