In 1925 Grace Fryer, one of the workers from the original New Jersey plant, decided to sue, but she would spend two years searching for a lawyer willing to help her. Radium Girls work in a factory of the United States Radium Corporation. Yet it would take another two years before the company that owned the factory, the United States Radium Corporation, took any action at all, through an independent investigation commissioned mostly to investigate the declining business rather than the health of the workers. “The radium was destroying the bone and literally drilling holes in the women’s jaws while they were still alive,” said Moore. Although her death certificate erroneously stated that she died of syphilis, she was actually suffering from a condition called “radium jaw.” Her entire lower jawbone had become so brittle that her doctor removed it by simply lifting it out. The first death occurred in 1922, when 22-year-old Mollie Maggia died after reportedly enduring a year of pain.
In the early 1920s, some of the Radium Girls started developing symptoms like fatigue and toothaches. One sinister side effect was that the shimmering radioactive dust would fill the air when the paint was mixed, ending up on the women’s hair and clothes.” And the girls at the time obviously loved it and talked abut wearing their good dresses to the plant, so that when they’d go out in speakeasies later they would be the ones shimmering and shining.” Since it was all so attractive, they even encouraged their sisters and friends to join them. Adding to the allure of the job, the girls were listed as ‘artists’ in their town directories. The Radium Girls actually believed they were getting healthier by working with the new wonder drug – the most expensive substance in the world at the time, costing the equivalent of $2.2 million per gram in today’s money. By putting the brushes in their mouths, the Radium Girls were especially at risk – so why did they do it? “Because it was the easiest way to get a fine point on the brush, to paint on numbers as small as a single millimeter in width,” said Moore.Ī 1924 ad for a radium hair treatment. The luminous paint, which worked by converting the radiation into light through a fluorescent chemical, was one of the most successful radium-based products.
How soon they develop depends upon the dose, but at the very high doses that the Radium Girls were exposed to, just a few years.” So the major health risk of ingesting radium is radiation-induced bone necrosis and bone cancers.
“Since the body uses calcium to make bone, ingested radium is mistaken for calcium and gets incorporated into bone. When ingested, radium is particularly dangerous: “Chemically, it behaves very much like calcium,” said Jorgensen. The headline of a Wall Street Journal story about his death reads, “The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off.” One user, American socialite and athlete Eben Byers, became notorious for drinking a bottle of Radithor every day for years – and then dying from it in 1932. “Radium products were used for any ailment where lack of energy was seen to be the root cause – from common fatigue to impotence,” Jorgensen said in an email.įar from being a panacea, radium was deadly. And they didn’t see how adding some energy to their bodies could possibly be harmful, said Timothy Jorgensen, a radiation expert at Georgetown University and author of “ Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation.” “People knew that radioactivity released energy.
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