Lick. Dip. Paint. Lick. Dip. Paint. The workers at the United States Radium Corporation’s factory in Orange, New Jersey, spent every day of their employment repeating the same tedious process with remarkable precision. Hunched over the table, the girls would dip fine paint brushes into glowing paint, and paint the numbers and hands on small watch faces. When the bristles started to fan out, the workers used their wet lips to bring the brush back to a fine point before dipping them back into the “beautiful radium”, as Marie Skłodowska-Curie called the ethereal element 88, which she’d discovered in 1898. This luminous paint, created by Sabin von Sochocky, made the watches easy to read in the dark, and made his US Radium Corporation very rich. The factory workers were highly paid and greatly admired
But radium is toxic. And eventually the extended internal exposure to small amounts of the paint resulted in many of the factory workers becoming sick. Among other painful, deadly symptoms, the radium caused extreme issues in the jaws and mouths of the workers, now known as the Radium Girls. Many of the workers individually went to medical professionals, and were each told the same thing: radium is known to be safe, no toxic phosphorus (what the doctors had suspected could be causing their issues) has been found in the paint, and they could offer no adequate diagnosis or cure.
And so a cycle ensued. More girls were becoming ill, mysteriously with many of the same symptoms as their former coworkers, so they visited doctors. Their doctors could not pinpoint the reason for their jaw conditions. On the occasions when their time at the factory was suggested as the reason for their illness, the US Radium Corporation promised that its radium paint was one hundred percent safe. Some workers sued, but faced many legal obstacles (in addition to the practical difficulty of suing a major corporation when taking care of an extremely ill family member). The first main obstacle? The workers had not been diagnosed with one of the few diseases explicitly listed as an industrial disease for which workers could sue. The other obstacle? There was a statute of limitations on even these diseases. Workers who had worked at the factory many years ago simply could not sue the US Radium Corporation. Too much time had passed since their alleged exposure.
Grace Fryer had been in severe pain for years due to her work at the factory. She refused to accept her poisoning when her former employer got rich from her suffering. On May 3rd, 1927, she entered the law firm of Raymond H. Berry.
Find out if Fryer’s story will end in justice or defeat on November 15th and 16th when you see Radium Girls. Buy tickets online.
Works Cited
Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls : The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Sourcebooks, 2017.
