In the 1920s, hundreds of young women were hired to paint glowing numbers onto watch dials — and told the paint was harmless. It was radium. What they did next, dying, in courtrooms and newspapers, wrote the rules of modern workplace safety and left behind graves that are still radioactive today.
From 1917 through the 1920s, three factories in New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut hired young women to paint self-luminous 'Undark' onto watch and instrument dials. To keep a sharp point, they were taught to touch the brush to their lips between strokes.
A tight, grim short documentary walking through what the paint actually did — the jawbones that came apart in a dentist's hand, the anemia the company blamed on 'syphilis' to smear the victims.
Fryer decided to sue U.S. Radium. It took her two full years to find an attorney willing to take on the corporation. In May 1927 she and four others filed for $250,000 each — a media firestorm nicknamed them the Radium Girls.
A detailed HistoryNet account of the courtroom fight — the cover-ups, the doctors on the company's payroll, and how the settlement forced radium into the emerging list of legally recognized occupational diseases.
The clearest short technical explainer of what radium does inside a bone — why an element chemically similar to calcium gets filed into the skeleton and stays there for centuries.
Written up by the Association of Flight Attendants — a union — for a reason. Nearly every workplace radiation limit, and much of what we now call the 'right to a safe workplace,' traces back to what these women pried out of the courts.
The Illinois State Museum's field piece walking the actual streets and buildings of Ottawa — the Ottawa plant, the graves, the memorial that finally went up decades late.
Radium's half-life is 1,600 years. When one of the Illinois women was exhumed decades after her death, her remains were still hot enough that researchers were told to bring her back in a lead-lined coffin. She will still be radioactive when our civilization is a memory.