The women walked home at night and glowed.
Radium dust settled in their hair and on their coats, so a dial painter leaving the plant in Orange, New Jersey, trailed a faint shimmer down the footpath. Plenty of them thought this was marvellous. They painted their fingernails with it and dabbed it on their teeth before a dance. Nobody in management suggested they stop.
The paint was branded Undark, a mix of radium and zinc sulfide developed by Dr Sabin von Sochocky. In its account of the digitised company files, the National Archives describes how the Radium Luminous Material Corporation opened its Orange factory in 1917, selling the glow to watchmakers and instrument firms. Radium dials were prized in the trenches of the First World War and fashionable everywhere else.
How the paint got into their bones
Brushes were the whole problem.
Camel-hair bristles lose their point after a few strokes, and the numerals on a wristwatch face are minute. So the painters were taught to roll the brush between their lips before each dip. Lip, dip, paint, several hundred times a shift. The Science Museum Group notes that the New Jersey women worked on paper dials with a water-based paint, applied with fine camelhair brushes rather than the metal stylus used elsewhere in the industry. A trace of radium went down the throat with every dial.
Radium behaves chemically like calcium, so the body lodges it in bone and leaves it there, decaying quietly, for a life that just got much shorter.
The doctor who worked it out
Dentists noticed first. From about 1922 they were pulling aching teeth from young women in Orange, finding that pieces of jawbone came away too. A dentist, Theodor Blum, described the condition in 1924 and named it radium jaw.
Harrison Martland, the Newark pathologist who became Essex County’s first medical examiner, took it further. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1925, he measured radioactivity in the tissue of dead dial painters and in the exhaled breath of living ones. A retrospective in Brain credits that work with pioneering the measurement of radioactivity inside contaminated human tissue.
U.S. Radium hired its own experts to challenge his findings. Reasonable enough in 1925, when one man’s diagnosis was still just one man’s diagnosis, though the company kept denying any link to radium for another decade.
Five women, one settlement, no admission
Grace Fryer needed two years to find a lawyer who would take her case. Katherine Schaub, Edna Hussman, Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice joined her, and by the first hearing in January 1928 none of the five could lift an arm to swear the oath.
They settled that June for $10,000 each, an annuity of $600 for life and their medical bills covered. The company admitted nothing, and most dial painters received no compensation at all, the National Archives notes. In 1936, a federal court in New Jersey ruled that U.S. Radium had not fraudulently hidden the danger, a decision that pushed surviving claims outside a two-year limitation period and effectively ended them.
What happened in Ottawa
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Illinois, the Radium Dial Company assured its painters that the Orange trouble had nothing to do with them, since the radium over there was impure. The firm had been medically screening its own workers since 1925 and keeping the results to itself. As History.com documents, Illinois workers lost in court through the mid-1930s, after which the state passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, effective 1936, requiring employers to carry cover for industrial poisoning.
Catherine Donohue led fifteen women in a fresh suit in 1937. By a hearing the following February she weighed around 32 kilograms and had to be carried into the room, and, as Northern Public Radio reported, she arrived with a box of what she said were pieces of her own jawbone. Local papers took to calling the group the society of the living dead, NPR Illinois reports, and their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, took the case for free because his clients had nothing to pay him. Later hearings moved to Donohue’s home, where she testified from a couch because she could no longer travel.
The Illinois Industrial Commission ruled for Donohue in April 1938 and confirmed the award that July. She died on 27 July, three weeks later. Radium Dial fought on regardless. The Illinois Supreme Court threw out the company’s petition to overturn the award in June 1939, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined a further appeal that October, more than a year after Donohue’s death.
That refusal to intervene left the award standing, and with it the principle that an employer could be held liable for a disease that surfaced years, sometimes a decade or more, after the job ended. Grossman’s son, three decades a Department of Labor lawyer, traces a line from those hearings to the federal OSHA Act, which he dates to 1971.
The measurements they left behind
Many surviving painters later volunteered their bodies to researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, whose review of the radium cases sets out how those measurements shaped radiation protection limits for the nuclear age.
Radium-226 has a half-life of roughly 1,600 years, so the women are still faintly radioactive in their graves and will be long after everyone reading this is gone. A surprising amount of modern workplace law rests on that fact. None of them were trying to found a legal doctrine. They wanted someone to pay the dentist.