Radium Girls

Beginning around 1917, the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) employed as many as 300 workers, mostly young women, at a factory in Orange, New Jersey, to hand-paint watch and instrument dials with self-luminous radium paint sold as "Undark." Similar operations followed at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, founded in 1922, and at an unaffiliated Connecticut plant supplying the Waterbury Clock Company. Told the paint was harmless, painters were instructed to shape their brushes to a fine point with their lips and tongues — "lip, dip, paint" — because rags or water rinses slowed production; some painters also applied the paint to their nails, teeth, and faces for fun.

USRC's own chemists used lead screens, tongs, and masks around radium, and the company had circulated medical literature on radium's "injurious effects" even as painters worked unprotected. Harvard researchers who examined the Orange plant in the early 1920s found it saturated with radioactive dust; the company's president disputed that radium caused workers' illness, and a researcher's report submitted to the New Jersey Department of Labor was later found to have been altered in the company's favor. The unaltered findings were published despite a threatened lawsuit, and the labor commissioner's safety order led the factory to close.

Painters developed dental pain, loose teeth, anemia, bone fractures, and jaw necrosis — now called radium jaw — along with sterility and suppressed menstruation. The first dial painter died in 1923, her jaw reported to have fallen away from her skull beforehand; by 1924, fifty New Jersey painters were ill and a dozen had died. A 1925 cluster of similar deaths, including USRC chief chemist Dr. Edwin E. Leman and several female workers, prompted a county physician's investigation, and by 1927 more than fifty female workers were reported dead from radium poisoning. Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky, the paint's inventor, died of radium poisoning in November 1928, described as its 16th known victim.

Five USRC workers — Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice — became known as the Radium Girls after suing the company; it took Fryer two years to find a lawyer willing to take the case. By their first court appearance in January 1928, two of the women were bedridden and none could raise an arm to take an oath. USRC denied wrongdoing but settled that autumn, before a jury could deliberate, paying each woman $10,000, a lifetime annuity, and medical and legal costs. All five were dead within the decade.

In Illinois, Radium Dial Company employees began showing poisoning symptoms in 1926 and 1927 but were told radium was safe and that the New Jersey cases involved viral infections. From 1937, five women — including Catherine Donahue, too ill to travel — pursued a claim before the Illinois Industrial Commission, which ruled in their favor in 1938; Radium Dial had since relocated to New York, and the commission would not enforce payment across state lines. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Radium Dial's appeal on October 23, 1939, upholding the ruling. Donahue had died by the time the matter was finally settled.

The litigation established injured workers' right to sue employers over labor abuse and helped build modern labor safety standards; in 1949, Congress passed a law compensating workers for occupational diseases. Radium-based paint was banned in the 1960s, though the last radium-paint factory did not close until 1978. A 1951 LIFE photo-essay, spotlighting the 1949 sinus-cancer death of Florence Kohler Casler, who had joined USRC in 1917, brought the dial painters' story to wide public attention.