A Glowing Legacy: The Radium Girls

By Celeste Beley

From population growth to the development of the automobile and increased factory outputs in the early 1900s, there were signs of progress in the United States. But sometimes, new ideas and innovations have consequences that stay hidden until it’s too late.

Radioactive items, for example, were trendy in the early 20th century as companies touted radium-laced toothpaste, hair cream, cosmetic spa treatments, and even water as a way of healing cells and tissues. Once the adverse health effects were discovered, those products quickly fell off the market.

For one group of young women, now referred to as the Radium Girls, uncovering the downsides of radium exposure came at the cost of their health.

Radium Explored

Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. Radium is the heaviest known alkaline earth metal and is the only radioactive member of its group.

Throughout the 1900s, radium was used in various cancer treatments. While successful at shrinking tumors, exposure led to harmful side effects such as anemia, new cancers, and genetic mutations. Research into using radium as a cancer treatment continued into the 1960s, but its use largely declined after 1935. Today, radium is still used in some treatments, but with safer and more available isotopes.

The Ghost Girls

In 1917, the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) became a major supplier of radio-luminescent watches for the military. USRC hired workers to paint watch faces with radium, primarily young women whose small hands were ideal for the tedious work. They would use camel-hair brushes to apply the paint to the watch face. The brushes would lose their shape after a few applications, so workers were instructed to use their lips or tongue to keep their brushes sharp, ingesting radium each time they performed this task.

Owners of the company and scientists who were familiar with radium avoided exposure in the laboratory, using lead screens, tongs, and masks to handle the material. That information was not shared with those working in the factory. The women used the paint on their own teeth, nails, and faces and dust would accumulate on their clothing. As a result, they would glow green at night, earning the nickname “ghost girls.”

Illness Revealed

It did not take long for these young watch painters to suffer serious symptoms. One of the first, Amelia Maggia, presented with a toothache, requiring an extraction. Soon, additional teeth needed to be pulled, but instead of healing, painful ulcers developed where the teeth were. Maggia’s symptoms continued to spread throughout her jaw, neck, and body. Her jaw had to be removed and she ultimately died from a massive hemorrhage on September 12, 1922. Doctors, still unaware of the side effects of radium exposure, incorrectly listed her cause of death as syphilis.

Other girls continued to become deathly ill, developing the same symptoms as Maggia. Despite this, USRC and other manufacturers continued to insist that the process was safe and denied responsibility for their deaths. When public pressure finally led to a downturn in sales, the company commissioned an independent study to determine any correlation between radium paint and the girls’ symptoms.

Dr. Harrison Martland conclusively found that their symptoms were indeed from radium poisoning—the ingested radium was emitting constant radiation that essentially destroyed their bones and tissues from the inside out. The company refused these results and completed additional studies that claimed the radium paint was safe. They leaned on health providers who claimed that the symptoms were instead a result of sexually transmitted diseases.

Fight for Justice with Science

Grace Fryer, a watch painter in Orange, New Jersey, decided to sue the company in 1925, but it took two years to find a lawyer willing to take the case. She was joined by Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice—the Radium Girls. The USRC used tactics to delay the trial, and since most of the girls had only months to live, they were forced to accept a settlement of $10,000, plus payments for doctors’ bills and a yearly pension of $600.

At the original Radium Girls trial, Raymond Berry, their attorney, enlisted the expertise of Elizabeth Hughes. At the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology), Hughes calibrated sealed radium sources using a gold-leaf electroscope. In a lead-lined chamber, gold leaf was suspended from a metal rod. When voltage was applied to the electroscope, the leaf accumulated charge and tilted relative to its original position. When a small amount of radium was placed at a fixed distance, gamma radiation would enter the chamber and ionize the air. The electroscope discharged and the leaf returned to its original position. The faster the leaf moved, the more radioactive the sample was.

Hughes had also worked at USRC where she measured the amount of radioactivity in paint samples. She used the same electroscope procedure to measure breath samples from the Radium Girls, determining that they had ingested enough radium to make their breath toxic. At the trial, she testified that all workers should be protected from radium exposure and that most research institutions had already implemented safety measures to protect workers.

Additional lawsuits continued to be filed against watch manufacturers in New Jersey, Illinois, and Canada. A significant number of these settled out of court.

A Glowing Legacy

The legacy of the Radium Girls is important because they filed one of the first lawsuits against an employer for health and safety reasons. The public outrage over the lawsuits led to proper safety precautions and safety gear use in the watch plants, where radium was still used into the 1970s. Additional occupational labor laws were enacted and eventually led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).