The Women Who Glowed in the Dark
The factory told them the paint was harmless, so they wet their lips with it to keep a fine point on their brushes. Years later, doctors would find their bones were still radioactive enough to expose film.
In 1917, the United States Radium Corporation opened a factory in Orange, New Jersey, to do something that sounds almost whimsical now: paint numbers on watch faces so they would glow in the dark. The company’s product was called Undark, a paint made by mixing powdered radium with zinc sulfide, and it really did glow — a faint, greenish light that made wristwatches readable at night without a bulb or a match. Soldiers in the First World War wanted it on their instrument panels. Civilians wanted it on their alarm clocks. It was, for a few years, one of the most desirable finishes a consumer product could have.
The work of actually painting the dials fell almost entirely to young women, some still in their teens. It was considered good, clean work by the standards of early-twentieth-century factory labor — better pay than a shop girl could expect, and a task delicate enough to feel almost genteel. Each worker sat at a bench with a tiny brush, a pot of luminous paint, and a stack of dials, and painted numerals small enough that the brush tip had to stay needle-fine. The company’s own instructors taught them a technique to keep that point: touch the bristles to the lips, draw them to a tip, dip, paint. Lip, dip, paint. Over and over, hundreds of times a shift.
Nobody told them this was dangerous, because for several years, the company insisted it wasn’t. Radium’s discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie, had already noted that the element caused burns on skin exposed to it directly. But the understanding of radioactivity in 1917 was thin, and the United States Radium Corporation was actively promoting radium as a tonic — “liquid sunshine,” they called one of their other products, sold as a drink believed to restore vitality. Workers were told the paint was safe enough that some of them, as a kind of joke or a flourish, used it to paint their nails and teeth glowing for parties, delighting in walking home lit up faintly in the dark. They called themselves, later, the “ghost girls,” for the pale shimmer that clung to their hair and clothes by the end of a shift.
Radium is not like a surface contaminant you can wash off. Chemically, it behaves in the body almost exactly like calcium, which means that once ingested, it is carried straight into the bones and incorporated into their structure, where it stays, emitting radiation continuously, for the rest of a person’s life. A dial painter drawing a brush to a point on her lips several hundred times a day was, each time, swallowing a measurable dose. Over months and years, it accumulated in the jaw, the spine, the long bones — concentrating exactly where the body builds and repairs itself fastest.
The first worker to die from it, in 1922, was a painter named Mollie Maggia. Her early symptoms looked unremarkable: an aching tooth, which a dentist pulled. Then the tooth next to it. Then the socket itself failed to heal, and the surrounding bone of her jaw began to die and crumble while still inside her mouth — a condition that would come to be known informally as “radium jaw.” Within months her entire lower jawbone had become so brittle and necrotic that her doctor was able to lift sections of it out, essentially intact, with his fingers. She died after a hemorrhage in her mouth so severe her doctor could not stop the bleeding. Her death certificate listed the cause as syphilis — a diagnosis that was both medically wrong and, for the unmarried young women dying similarly in the following years, a convenient way to discourage sympathy and suspicion alike. When her remains were exhumed decades later, they were found to still be radioactive; it hadn’t been syphilis at all.
Doctors at the time genuinely struggled to explain what they were seeing, and for a while they reached for the wrong historical precedent. Dentists were usually the first to notice the pattern — loose teeth, ulcerated gums, tooth sockets that wouldn’t heal after an extraction — and some suspected phosphorus poisoning, the cause of a disfiguring occupational disease called “phossy jaw” that had plagued match-factory workers for decades. It was a reasonable-sounding guess and a completely wrong one: there was no phosphorus anywhere in the dial-painting process. Radium was a new enough element, and internal radioactive contamination such an unfamiliar idea, that it did not occur to most physicians as a cause at all. One of Grace Fryer’s own doctors, examining her with a primitive X-ray machine, reported finding bone decay unlike anything he had seen before, with no name to put to it.
More dial painters began dying the same way, or developing anemia, spontaneous bone fractures, and tumors, years after leaving the job. The company’s position was consistent and, for a long time, legally effective: there was no scientific proof that the illnesses were connected to the work, and even if there were, the women had generally become sick well outside the two-year statute of limitations that would have let them sue over a workplace injury incurred on the job. An internal study commissioned by the company in 1924, conducted by a Harvard physiologist named Cecil Drinker, concluded that the dial-painting work was almost certainly the cause of the women’s illnesses and recommended changes to protect the remaining workers. The company suppressed the report and had an altered, more reassuring version submitted to the state of New Jersey instead, while continuing to deny publicly that any link existed.
What eventually broke the case open was not activism but physics. A New Jersey medical examiner named Harrison Martland developed a test to detect radioactivity in a living person’s exhaled breath and in their bones, and used it to demonstrate, directly and repeatably, that the sick and dead dial painters carried radium inside them in quantities that corresponded to their symptoms. Radium decays partly into radon, a radioactive gas, which meant a measurable trace of it was escaping with every breath a contaminated worker exhaled — something Martland could capture and quantify in an instrument. It was, in effect, the first time anyone had proven that a workplace substance could make a person radioactive for the rest of their life, with their own exhaled breath as evidence of it. His 1925 paper documenting anemia and jawbone necrosis among the dial painters gave the illness, for the first time, a cause that doctors could test for rather than guess at.
In May 1927, one of the surviving painters, Grace Fryer, filed suit against the United States Radium Corporation. She had tried for two years to find a lawyer willing to take the case against a well-funded company with a credible legal defense, and finally found one, a young attorney named Raymond Berry, willing to go forward on her behalf. Four other dial painters joined her: Quinta McDonald, Albina Larice, Edna Hussman, and Katherine Schaub, who had started at the factory in 1917 at age fourteen. The press, with a bluntness that stuck, began calling them the Radium Girls.
The company dragged the case out through delays, postponements, and procedural motions, a strategy that cost it nothing and cost the plaintiffs what little time they had left. By the time the case was finally set to go to trial in 1928, all five women were so physically deteriorated that they could not raise their arms to take the courtroom oath. Grace Fryer’s spine had partially collapsed; she stood roughly three inches shorter than before the illness began. Newspapers across the country ran photographs of the women in court, visibly dying, which did more to shift public opinion than any expert testimony could have. Facing a public-relations disaster on top of the medical evidence, the company settled out of court in 1928. Each woman received a lump payment and a small annual annuity for the rest of her life, along with coverage of medical and legal costs — but under the settlement’s terms, the company admitted no legal liability for what had happened to them. Within a few years, all five of the plaintiffs were dead. Katherine Schaub, the last, died of radium-induced cancer in 1933, having spent much of her remaining life writing and speaking about what had happened to her and her coworkers.
The story did not end with the New Jersey settlement, because the same company practices had already been exported. In September 1922, the Radium Dial Company had opened a second dial-painting plant, in Ottawa, Illinois, hiring largely the same way and teaching the same lip-dip-paint technique — seemingly undeterred, or perhaps simply unconcerned, by what was by then becoming known about the New Jersey cases. One of the first hires there was a nineteen-year-old named Catherine Wolfe, later Catherine Wolfe Donohue. By the mid-1930s, she too was dying, her jaw disintegrating the same way Mollie Maggia’s had thirteen years earlier, and the two-year statute of limitations had already closed on any lawsuit over her original exposure.
Donohue’s case eventually went forward anyway, under Illinois occupational-disease law rather than a standard injury claim, with an attorney named Leonard Grossman taking the case without payment. By the time she testified before the Illinois Industrial Commission, in a Chicago courtroom in 1938, she was so weak she had to be carried in and could barely lift her hand to be sworn. Her testimony — and company records produced during the proceedings showing that Radium Dial had been secretly testing its own workers for radioactivity for years, without telling them the results — became the basis for a landmark ruling establishing that the company was responsible for its workers’ illness. Donohue died less than three months later, on July 27, 1938, days after the ruling came down. Radium Dial closed its Ottawa plant amid the litigation — and its owner opened a new dial-painting company a block away under a different name, Luminous Processes, which continued operating into the 1970s, decades after the dangers of the work were a matter of settled law.
The scientific and legal fallout from the two cases was larger than either jury or settlement. Harrison Martland’s testing methods became the foundation for how radiation exposure in the body is measured to this day, and the sheer number of well-documented dial-painter deaths gave researchers one of the largest and most detailed datasets ever assembled on the long-term effects of internal radiation exposure in humans — data still cited in radiation-safety standards decades later, including the exposure limits eventually set for nuclear industry workers. The practice of lip-pointing brushes was banned industry-wide by 1930. The cases are widely credited, alongside other early-twentieth-century labor fights, with helping establish the basic legal principle that employers could be held accountable for occupational diseases that took years to manifest — not just sudden injuries on the factory floor. That principle, unremarkable now, did not really exist in American law before these women forced the question: that a company could be liable for an illness that showed up only after an employee had already quit, married, or moved on with her life, years removed from the workplace that caused it.
None of this helped the women who were already sick by the time it was settled. Of the original New Jersey plaintiffs, the longest survivor, Katherine Schaub, lived another five years after the 1928 settlement, spending much of that time writing about the case so that it would not be forgotten; the others died within a few years of signing. What the lawsuits bought, in the end, was not recovery for the people who brought them, but a legal and scientific record — depositions, X-rays, breath tests, bone assays — thorough enough that the companies that came after U.S. Radium and Radium Dial could no longer plausibly claim ignorance.
There is a coda that is less often told but just as strange: decades after the Orange, New Jersey plant closed, the radium contamination in its soil and surrounding buildings remained so persistent that the site needed a multi-decade federal Superfund cleanup, finally completed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 — nearly ninety years after the first dial painter touched a wet brush to her lips and nearly seventy years after Catherine Donohue’s case closed in Chicago. Some of the exhumed dial painters’ remains, tested generations later, could still be shown to be radioactive. The glow the “ghost girls” once thought was a charming party trick had never actually gone out; it had just stopped being visible.