From 1917 to 1927, scores of workers, mostly women, hired by U.S. Radium Corporation in
Orange, New Jersey, are instructed to paint a mixture of gum, Arabic, water, and radium
powder under clock and watch dials, with fine-pointed chemical hair brushes, so American soldiers
at war in Europe can tell time at night.
This is their story.
According to that impeccable source of all human and earthly knowledge, Wikipedia, which
exists mainly for two reasons, one, to confuse you with facts, and two, to provoke your distrust
and disdain for American corporate motivation.
U.S. Radium, originally called Radium Luminous Materials Corp, extracts, purifies radium from
carnitite ore to produce luminous paints marketed under the brand name Undark.
U.S. Radium hires approximately 70 women to perform various tasks, including the handling
of radium, while owners, scientists familiar with the effects of radium, avoid any exposure
to it themselves.
Chemists, the plant, use lead screens, tongs.
Corp distributes literature to the medical community, describing the, quote, injurious
effects of radium.
The newspaper report, published in a Brooklyn, New York Daily Eagle, June 19, 1925, reports,
despite this knowledge, number of similar deaths occur in 1925, including the company's
chief chemist, Dr. Edwin E. Lehman, and several female workers.
The similar circumstances of their deaths prompt investigations to be undertaken by
Dr. Harrison Martland, county physician, Newark, New Jersey.
Rather than waste time using rags or water rins, workers encouraged by plant supervisors
use their lips to point up the brushes, ingesting small amounts of radium with each tongue
rolled tip-up.
For fun, radium girls paint their nails, teeth, face, with the mixture.
Some of the girls get sick, some disappear.
Women later suffer from anemia, necrosis of the jaw, so-called rather specifically, quote,
radium jaw.
Corp denies claims these illnesses are results of radium exposure.
In the early 1920s, U.S. Radium privately hires Harvard physiology researcher Cecil
Drinker to make a study of the plant work area.
From Drinker's report, quote, dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations
and from chairs not used by workers are all luminous in the dark room.
Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets
of the dial painters, are luminous.
One of the girls shows luminous spots on her legs and thighs.
The back of another is luminous, almost to the waist.
The factory workers join a class action against the company, January 1928.
Two of them, two in feeble, to raise an arm to take an oath to tell the truth.
Companies start smear campaigns saying the dead women perish from a deadly social disease.
Lawsuit settles in spring 1938.
Radium continues to be used on watch styles until 1960s.
Factory radium girls told to no longer shape up the brush tips with lips or mouth and no
tongue if you know what's good for you and wear a mask and gloves.
It is unknown how many workers at U.S. Radium and throughout America at other plants might
have developed serious illnesses or perished.
Radium is discovered by Marie Curie, played by Greer Garson, and her husband Pierre Curie,
Walter Pigeon, 1943 MGM.
July 4, 1934, she dies from massive exposure to radioactive materials throughout the years
of experimentation.
She carries test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pockets, keeps isotopes in
her desk drawers, remarking on the faint light they emit in the darkness, uses unshielded
equipment during field radiology work during World War I.
Madame Curie herself is set toward the end of her life to glow in the dark, rather spooky,
seeing walking through drizzly Parisian nights on the way to and from her laboratory.
Although she develops a variety of chronic illnesses as a result of her work, including
near blindness from cataracts, never acknowledges the danger of exposure to radioactive elements.
Her papers, I mean to say, are so radioactive they're kept stored in lead-lined boxes.
Even her cookbook is radioactive.
You have to wear a protective suit and gloves just to research her famous quiche Lorraine,
of which Nobel Committee makes special mention in her 1911 Prize for Chemistry, after isolating
Radium in 1910, her second Nobel Prize after the 1903 Prize she shares with her husband
and Henri Becquerel.
As a widow in her 40s, Curie comes under some criticism by the French for an affair she
carries on with fellow scientist Paul Langevin, who's married, separated from his wife.
These are French people you'd think she'd be celebrated for continuing her sex life
in the middle age.
The press depicts her as a, quote, Jewish homewrecker.
The problem being, one, she's not Jewish, although her Polish name is as unpronounceable
as or more than anything the Jews can come up with, and two, Langevin's home life pretty
well wrecked by all the outside carrying on his own wife has been managing to get away
with all these years while he's spending evenings in the laboratory isolating Radium.
October 5, 1934.
Melbourne Argus, front page story, Madame Joliot, daughter of Marie Curie, discoverer
of Radium, presents paper, International Conference on Physics, announcing, quote,
new types of atom, which, like Radium, are radioactive.
These new synthetic forms of radiation, unlike Radium, leave behind no radioactive residue
to cause harm if left behind in the body.
Irene Joliot-Curie dies March 17, 1956 of leukemia, contracted like her mother, after
years of exposure to radioactive materials.
In 1946, a sealed container of polonium explodes on her workbench, exposing her to a massive
and ultimately fatal dose.
Joliot-Curie and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, share the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
for their work on development of artificial radioactivity.
From Albuquerque, New Mexico, this is Richard Alcott speaking.
