There were many names given to the glow-in-the-dark product: Luma, Marvelite, Radiolite, and Ingersollite. The most memorable was probably “Undark,” sold by the Radium Luminous Material Corporation of New York City. By 1917 it was being used for doorknobs and keyholes, slippers, pistol sights, flashlights, light pulls, wall switches, telephone mouthpieces, watches, and house numbers. The advertising slogan, showing the address numbers on a darkened front door, was “I want that on mine.” With things self-illuminating, you would never have to light a match to find them in the dark. In Manhattan, “radioactive cocktails” were served in the best bars, and a musical named Piff! Paff! Pouff! celebrated the wonders of ionizing radiation with The Radium Dance, written by Jean Schwartz. Uranium mining was stepped up all over the world, in Portugal, Madagascar, Czechoslovakia, Canada, and even in Cornwall, England, as the demand outstripped supply.
Into this madness stepped the American entrepreneurial spirit, building factories from West Orange, New Jersey, to Athens, Georgia, to cover the numerals on watch dials with self-luminous paint. Young women were hired to do the meticulous manual work of applying the paint, as male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful. The workers were paid generously, at $20 to $25 per week, when office work was paying $15 a week at most. By 1925, there were about 120 radium-dial factories in the United States alone, employing more than 2,000 women.
Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.
The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day.
By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?
In 1925 Dr. Edward Lehman, the chief chemist at US Radium, died, and an autopsy showed that his bones, liver, and lungs were heavily damaged by radiation. His skeleton exposed an x-ray plate without the use of an x-ray machine, it was so radioactive. He hadn’t even picked up a paint brush. All he had done was to breathe the air in the factory. The Harvard University School of Public Health was brought in by US Radium to examine the factory and give it a clean bill of health. Far from it, the survey found not one worker in the plant with a normal blood count, and the radiation level on the floor was five times above background. The critical report was buried, and a press release issued on June 7, 1928, denied that the study had found any evidence of “so-called radium poisoning.”
Sabin A. von Sochocky, immigrated from Austria back in 1913, the inventor of Undark, and the man who started Radium Luminous Materials, was also beginning to feel the effects of occupational radiation. Back in his day, he had been so bold as to immerse his arm up to the elbow in radium paint. Now, his jaw disintegrated, and his hands were coming apart. It was clear that radium was a bone-seeker, leading to no good outcome. Sochocky reversed his attitude, becoming a spokesman against the use of industrial radium and a source of useful admissions. He made available to authorities the vast collection of his papers and company records, and the relationship between luminous paint and death began to clarify. He died at the age of 46 in November 1928 of aplastic anemia, having lost the use of the marrow in his bones.
Finally, a plant worker at US Radium in West Orange, Grace Fryer, decided to sue the company for having subjected her to known health hazards. Five women threw in with her, and the sympathetic press labeled them the “Legion of the Doomed,” the “Living Death Victims,” and the “Radium Girls,” the name that echoes today. They accused the company of subjecting them to illness that would end soon in extremely unpleasant death. Each demanded a quarter million dollars in compensation. The press went viral, and public sympathy surged.
US Radium, still denying everything, talked strategy with their legal team as they delayed the proceedings with everything that could be thrown in the way. They eventually settled out of court for a $10,000 lump sum to each woman plus a $600-a-year pension and coverage of all medical expenses. The plant closed. On August 14, 1929, another worker died just eight days after quitting the Radium Dial Co. in Ottawa, Illinois. Margaret “Peg” Looney, an Irish-Catholic redhead, all of 5 foot 2 inches tall and one of ten children, had worked as a dial painter since graduating from high school at 17. After painting for three years, she started developing trouble with her teeth and an overwhelming weakness. She kept going, needing the income, and her family watched in horror as she started pulling pieces of jaw out of her mouth. She died at age 24 of diphtheria, according to the death certificate, after seven years of radium absorption. She was buried in St. Columba Cemetery.[21] The Radium Dial plant closed shortly afterward, fearing a swell of litigation.[22]
Relentless journalism had made the public painfully aware of the dangers of the radium and its radiation output as no lecture, authoritative text, or a semester of study could. The accounts of horrible disfigurements and lingering deaths suffered by Eben Byers and the Radium Girls still reverberate and became the unfortunate benchmark for the effects of radiation exposure. The federal government became concerned with occupational safety, and labor laws were crafted in Congress resulting from the radium scandals. Radiation tolerance levels were established, and the concept of industrial hygiene for working with radioactive materials was born. The Food and Drug Administration found new powers of enforcement. A fascination with everything radium turned completely around.
21
In 1978 Argonne National Laboratory exhumed Peg Looney and measured the radiation content of her bones, finding 19,500 microcuries of radium-228 remaining after 49 years. That is 1,000 times the maximum allowed level, and, given the 5.75-year half-life of the isotope, it had been a great deal of ingested radium. It’s as if she had been drinking the paint. She was reburied in a coffin made of lead.
22
A new factory, renamed Luminous Process Co., opened six weeks later two blocks down the street. It was owned by the same guy, Joseph Kelly, who owned Radium Dial. It was finally closed in 1978 for continual breach of regulatory directives for the safe use of radioactive materials.