The Radium Girls were told their glowing paint was harmless
In the 1910s and 1920s, young American women painted watch dials with glowing radium paint, shaping their brushes between their lips to keep a fine tip. Their employers insisted the paint was safe. When the women began falling ill and dying, their lawsuits helped reshape labour law in the United States and beyond.
The best-known factory belonged to the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, which sold its luminous paint as Undark and supplied glowing watches to the military. Painters mixed their own paint from powdered radium, zinc sulfide, gum arabic and water, then applied it with camel hair brushes. Supervisors taught the routine of lip, dip, paint, since rinsing brushes wasted time and material. Pay was around a penny and a half a dial, so a shift of 250 dials earned $3.75. Some women, never told the truth, even painted their nails and teeth for fun.
Meanwhile the owners and chemists protected themselves with lead screens, tongs and masks, and the company had circulated literature describing radium's harmful effects. When Harvard's Cecil and Katherine Drinker found the plant soaked in contaminated dust, company president Arthur Roeder blamed outside infection and threatened to sue. After their colleague Alice Hamilton discovered that the firm had doctored the report it sent to state officials, Drinker published the original anyway.
Worker Grace Fryer spent two years looking for a lawyer willing to take on the company. By the first hearing in January 1928, none of the five plaintiffs could raise an arm to swear the oath. The case settled that autumn, with each woman receiving $10,000, a yearly annuity and her medical costs. All five had died by the 1930s.
Similar harm followed at plants in Ottawa, Illinois, and Waterbury, Connecticut, where managers again assured staff that the radium was diluted and safe. Radium paint lingered on dials until the last factory making it closed in 1978.
Source: Radium Girls
