GLOWING RADIUM JAW FULL

GLOWING RADIUM JAW FULL

When Schaub suddenly broke out with a face full of pimples, she saw a doctor who asked whether she’d been working with phosphorous, a known toxic agent. Hotel postcard advertising radium baths, c.1940s. When demand skyrocketed after America’s entry into WWI, radium factories hired many more women, expanding into a larger studio and becoming the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. Though they were paid piecework, the girls could make a lot of money - “some even earned more than their fathers.” For working class young women in Newark like Katherine Schaub, it was exciting. Still, according to Moore, they felt incredibly lucky. After all, radium cost $120,000 a gram ($2.2 million today). To her astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam.” Before leaving the factory at night, some even painted their nails or teeth with Undark to wow dates or as a party trick.įor the dial painters, proximity to radium seemed like a dream, even though the work itself was taxing and the girls were pressured to be exacting in their application of the paint. Even as she watched, little puffs of it seemed to hover in the air before settling on the shoulders or hair of a dial-painter at work. When she arrived at the factory in February of 1917, “Katherine could see that the powder got everywhere,” writes Moore. It’s no wonder that radium seemed like magic.

Polish physicist and chemist Madame Marie Curie, left, in a laboratory, with her daughter Irene, in Paris France, April 20, 1927. It was breathlessly featured in cartoons and novels.”

“The element was dubbed ‘liquid sunshine,’” writes Moore in The Radium Girls, “and it lit up not just the hospitals and drawing rooms of America, but its theaters, music halls, grocery stores, and bookshelves. It was even used in jock straps, lingerie, suppositories, and in the treatment of impotence. It was soon being used in everything from toothpaste to eyeshadow, chocolate and toys. It was seen as lifesaving, thought to be able to restore vitality to the elderly and cure all manner of health problems, including, ironically, cancer. The substance, the progenitor of all things “glow in the dark,” literally gleamed with possibility. Along with another scientist, André-Louis Debierne, Marie isolated it as a pure metal in 1910. Radium was discovered by the Polish-French chemist and physicist Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie in 1898. In her new book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Kate Moore tells the story of young women who were drawn to glamorous work with radium in the 1910s and 20s, only to have their lives taken - painfully, horrendously, and very early - by the lethal substance. But in the early 20th century, the newly discovered chemical element radium seemed to hold the promise of modernity, and America went wild for it. Radioactivity is now known to be practically synonymous with death. What they didn’t know is that the work they were doing was killing them.

The girls were called dial painters, and they were told to hold the brushes in the mouths for increased precision. The combination made a luminescent green paste called Undark, which they used to painstakingly paint the numbers on the faces of watches. Beside each girl sat a small dish of radium powder, which she mixed with a few drops of water and adhesive. (Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images)Īt factories like the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation on Third Street in Newark, young women like 14-year-old Katherine Schaub passed their days with tiny paintbrushes in their mouths. Workers would often lick the paintbrush to achieve a finer point - directly ingesting the radium. Women painting alarm clock faces with radium in 1932, Ingersoll factory, January 1932.

Glowing radium jaw