Book: The Radium Girls
Author: Kate Moore
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 411
Completion Date: 4/3/25
When the Curies’ discovered radium, it became a wonder drug shining bright in the years before WWI. As luminous guages were required for airplanes & cars, hundreds of young girls were hired to paint watch dials using the glowing radium dust. It appears as if some of the company management knew of the dangers with radium and hid it from its workers. As the girls began to become mysteriously ill & died, they eventually found some answers and became embroiled in legal challenges around one of the biggest scandals of the 20th century.
What I learned from this story:
The story revolves around two separate radium dial companies –
1) US Radium Corp (USRC) in Newark, NJ — there were 17 women listed in detail who worked at this company and discussed their journey from beginning to morbid end. At the height of WW1, there were 375 girls working there. They were prized for their ability to daintily paint the small watch dials and they were paid so that they were in the top 5% of all female wage earners. In 1918, 95% of all US radium was used for this purpose.
2) Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, I – there were 13 women whose lives were followed as they worked for RDC, including their death and lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
While the medical industry began to know of the dangers as early as 1903-06, this information was not widely disseminated. The company owners and upper management knew of its dangers as well. It was generally believed by the public, especially around 1914, as a wonder drug that glowed in the dark, restored vitality and was in general, a cure-all for everything, so there was initially no cause for concern from the workers. The girls used the dip-lip-paint method to paint the dials – dipping it in the paint, putting it in their mouth to make the brush tip form into a tight point and then painting the dials. At the end of each shift, the hands, arms, necks, hair, dresses & underclothes would be covered with radium dust. In one case, the sister of one of the workers shared a bed and became sick and died – all through exposure from the dust off her working sister.
In 1920-21, some girls started having health issues with teeth falling out and jaw pain. Later there were abcesses, mouth ulcers and their jawbones began breaking apart. The symptoms were similar to “phosphorus jaw,” something that people who worked in that industry could get, but no one could figure it out initially because none of the women worked in the phosphorus industry. Two different dentists, Dr. Barry and Dr. Knef, in the Newark area were the first to identify issues and connect it to USRC around 1923. In order to combat bad publicity, USRC hired some Harvard researchers (Drinker) to conduct a study on the girls. About the same time, George Willis, one of the original owners of USRC who got pushed out of the company earlier & ultimately had his thumb amputated due to radium poisoning, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in February 1923. Basically by the Spring of 1923, it was becoming more well-known that radium poisoning was not only real, but probably incurable. Even the Drinker report showed that it was poisonous, but USRC fraudulently changed the report to say that it wasn’t. It was about this time that Von Sochocky, another earlier owner of USRC that was ousted, began medically checking girls who had died and noted the vastly elevated radium readings. He was also an early pioneer of two different methods to gain radium readings in live patients.
In mid-1924, the following information was realized – there are three types of rays emitted from radium:
1) alpha – a very short ray that could be cut off by a sheet of paper.
2) beta – these rays could be stopped by a sheet of lead.
3) gamma – this is very penetrating and what was used to treat cancerous tumors.
Medical workers were always protected from the beta and gamma rays by their lead aprons. They were unconcerned about alpha rays, even though 95% of the rays emitted from radium were alpha rays and it was physiologically and biologically more intense, because they correctly believed it was unable to penetrate the skin. It was the NJ State Medical Examiner who realized that since they were directly licking the brushes, there was no shield against the alpha rays and they were constantly & directly exposing themselves 8 hours per day and 5-6 times per week.
In 1927, the first lawsuit was filed by five women against UCRC. They settled out of court in 1928, agreeing to pay $10,000 per victim plus all past & future medical treatments. A large group of women sued RDC from Ottawa, IL in 1934 – alleging that the company knew of their exposure, contamination and poisoning as early as 1925 – evidenced by tests they conducted every year or so. Fortunately, the women were well represented by a Chicago lawyer named Leonard Grossman. Over 5 years, there were eight legal battles, which the women won each time RDC was stalling as they waited for more of the women to die. The eighth battle was at the US Supreme Court and the women won that one – exhausting the legal maneuvering by RDC. While they did not get much in terms of monetary rewards, they were happy to have their stories vindicated by the law and some financial support finally came to help stave off financial ruin.
The girls did not die in vain. As a result of their exposure and deaths, the following occurred:
1) The Occupational Health & Safety Administration was formed.
2) The scientists working on the Manhattan Project had much greater knowledge about radium and could use this to project the effects of strontium-90, another isotope that was being released by more modern atomic weapons. This led to the signing in 1963 of the international Limited Test Ban Treating outlawing the testing of nuclear weapons above ground, in water or in space.
3) When some of the women’s bodies were exhumed, they were found to have 1,000 times the safe level of radium in their bodies.
4) The locations of the former factories were found to have 20 times the safe level of radium in the residual soil. Because radium has a half-life of 1600 years, this is a major concern. During the tear-down of some of these facilities, the excess dirt had been hauled to many locations all over the US, including playgrounds, school fields, near factories and homes as fill dirt, etc. – which was found to have caused cancer clusters in those areas.
5) There was a documentary called Radium City that came out in 1968 about this scandal. I intend to watch it when I get out of prison.
I learned the following that will help me increase my prospective for success after prison:
1) I was reading this book while I was sick in bed. It is not a good book to read while you are sick, especially when it talks about the bones of their jaws deteriorating and falling off their face. You should choose books to read while sick more carefully.
2) On a more serious note, it is interesting to learn the relationships between companies and their employees from 100 years ago. The level of disdain companies had for workers is shocking and contrary to how I ever felt as both an employee and employer.
