The Radium Girls: History Told Like a Horror Story | The Blackmere Podcast Episode 18

The Radium Girls were young American women, many of them teenagers, who painted glowing radium dials onto watches and military instruments between 1917 and the late 1930s, in factories in Orange, New Jersey; Ottawa, Illinois; and Waterbury, Connecticut. Told the paint was harmless, they shaped their brushes with their lips and swallowed a trace of radium with every stroke. The radium settled in their bones, where it never stopped. As the women sickened and died, the companies that employed them hid what they already knew. The women sued while they were dying, and the cases they won helped build the foundation of modern workplace safety law.

• The Radium Girls were dial painters at three U.S. plants: the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, operating from 1917; the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois, from the early 1920s; and the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Connecticut.

• The luminous paint, sold under the brand name Undark, combined radium with zinc sulfide and glowed without any power source; demand for readable dials, compasses, and gauges in World War I scaled the workforce to hundreds of young women.

• Workers were instructed to point their camel-hair brushes between their lips, a technique called “lip, dip, paint,” swallowing a trace of radium hundreds of times a day while being told the paint was harmless.

• Radium behaves like calcium in the body, so it was stored in the skeleton, where it fired alpha radiation into living bone and caused “radium jaw,” severe anemia, spontaneous fractures, and bone cancers.

• Amelia “Mollie” Maggia died on September 12, 1922, at age 24; her jaw had to be removed before her death, and her cause of death was wrongly recorded as syphilis.

• Dr. Harrison Martland, the Essex County, New Jersey medical examiner, established the link to radium beginning around 1925, in part by laying the women’s own bones on photographic plates that the bones exposed by themselves.

• Sabin von Sochocky, the physician who invented the paint and co-founded U.S. Radium, died of radium poisoning in November 1928.

• In New Jersey, Grace Fryer and four coworkers, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice, settled with U.S. Radium in 1928, each receiving $10,000, a $600 annual pension for life, and coverage of medical and legal costs.

• In Illinois, Catherine Wolfe Donohue testified against the Radium Dial Company while dying and weighing under 70 pounds; the women called themselves the “Society of the Living Dead,” and the Illinois Industrial Commission ruled in their favor in 1938, the year Donohue died.

• Margaret “Peg” Looney died in 1929 at age 24; when Argonne National Laboratory exhumed her body in 1978, her bones held roughly 19,500 microcuries of radium, more than 1,000 times the amount considered safe.

• Long-term study of the dial painters at Argonne’s Center for Human Radiobiology helped set the maximum permissible body burden for radium and shaped radiation-safety limits used in the nuclear age.

• The Radium Girls cases helped establish employer liability for slow-developing occupational disease, part of the legal lineage that led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970.

• Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so the women remain radioactive in their graves, and the ground at the former Ottawa factories is still a federal Superfund cleanup site as of 2025.

It is a winter evening in Orange, New Jersey, sometime around 1922. A young woman walks home from the factory in the dark. And she is glowing.

Not a trick of the light. Her hair glows. The collar of her good dress glows. There is a fine dust on her skin that throws back a pale green light, soft as a candle behind frosted glass. She has spent the day painting numbers onto watch faces, and the paint has settled on her like snow.

Her neighbors have a name for the girls who do this work. They call them the ghost girls. The women wear it lightly. Some of them paint their fingernails with the stuff. Some paint their teeth before a dance, so their smiles will shine when the lamps go down.

She is twenty-something years old. She has a good job. She is, by the standards of her street, lucky.

What she does not know is that the glow is already inside her. It has passed her lips on the tip of a paintbrush, a thousand times a day, and it has gone where the body sends anything it mistakes for calcium. Into her bones. It is in her jaw right now, in her spine, in the long bones of her legs. And it will not leave. Not in her lifetime. Not in a thousand years.

This is the story of the women who were told that the poison was a gift. And of what it took, what it actually took, before anyone would believe them.

Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie at the very end of the nineteenth century. By the time these women were born, it was the most glamorous substance on earth.

It glowed in the dark with no flame and no battery. It seemed to give off energy from nothing, forever. And people decided, with almost no evidence, that a thing so powerful must be good for you. They put it in face cream. In toothpaste. In water you could drink. They sold it as health itself.

So when a factory opened that paid young women good money to paint watch dials with luminous radium paint, there was no fear attached to it. The fear came later. The fear came one tooth at a time.

This is an episode about a poison you cannot see, smell, or taste. It is about a company that knew, and protected its scientists with lead and its painters with a lie. And it is about a handful of dying women who decided, with what strength they had left, to drag that company into a courtroom.

There is a particular kind of horror in this story, and I want to name it before we start, because it is not the horror you expect. The horror is not the glow. The glow is almost beautiful. The horror is the silence that met them when they said something was wrong. The horror is that they had to be visibly dying, carried into court, too weak to raise a hand and swear an oath, before the world would stop and look.

They were told it was a gift.

They became the warning.

Start with the paint, because everything begins with the paint.

In 1902, an engineer found that if you mixed a speck of radium with zinc sulfide, the zinc would glow. The radium fired off tiny particles, the zinc lit up in response, and you got a steady, eerie green light that needed no power and never seemed to dim. A company in New Jersey turned this into a product. They called it Undark.

For a few years it was a novelty. Then came the First World War, and the novelty became a necessity. A soldier in a black trench needs to read his watch and his compass without striking a match, because a match is a target. Pilots needed glowing instrument panels. Gunners needed glowing sights. Suddenly the army wanted millions of luminous dials, and someone had to paint them.

The work was delicate. The numbers on a wristwatch are tiny, some of them barely a millimeter across. You needed a fine brush and a steady hand. And so the companies hired women. Young women. A lot of them teenagers, fresh out of school, many of them the daughters of immigrants.

Understand what this job meant to them. This was clean work. Respectable work. You sat at a long table in a bright room with other girls, and you talked and laughed while you painted, and at the end of the week you took home more money than almost any other woman in town. The fastest painters earned enough to put them in the top five percent of working women in the country. They felt lucky. They were the envy of their friends.

Here is how the work was done. You took a slim brush of camel hair. You dipped it in the radium paint. You painted the number. And after a stroke or two, the brush lost its point, because that is what brushes do.

So the women were taught a technique to fix it. They were told to draw the brush through their lips. To shape the bristles to a fine tip with their mouth. Then dip, and paint, and when the point softened again, back to the lips.

Lip. Dip. Paint.

Hundreds of times a day. Thousands. Every single time, a trace of radium went into the mouth and down. The women asked, more than once, whether this was safe. They were told it was. They were told the paint was harmless. One manager, by some accounts, was happy to swallow a little himself to prove the point. The girls were told it would put a rosy bloom in their cheeks.

It is worth stopping on how reasonable their trust was. Their whole world told them radium was medicine. The newspapers said so. The pharmacies sold it. Why would the paint on their brush be any different from the tonic in the shop window?

And the tonic was real. There was a product called Radithor, which was nothing but radium dissolved in water, sold by the bottle as a cure for the living dead. A wealthy industrialist named Eben Byers drank it by the case. Three bottles a day, for years, convinced it made him strong. It made him famous instead, in the worst possible way. By the end his upper jaw and most of his lower jaw had been cut away, and holes were opening in his skull. When he died, the radium in his bones was more than three times a fatal dose. That was a rich man, who could afford the best doctors in the country, killed by the same faith the girls were sold. Radium did not care what you earned. It only cared that you let it in.

So picture the room these women worked in. Long tables. Good light coming through the windows for the fine work. Rows of young women bent over watch faces, talking, teasing, the way people do when the work is steady and the company is good. A fine dust hanging in the air, settling on everything, soft and pale. On their break, some of them painted designs on their fingernails. Painted their teeth so they would grin in the dark. Wore their best dresses to the table so the dust would catch on the fabric and they would shimmer at the dance hall that night.

It was, for a few years, the best job they had ever had. That is the part that should make you cold. They were happiest in the years the poison was going in.

There was one man who knew exactly how different the paint was from the tonic. His name was Sabin von Sochocky. He had invented the paint. He had co-founded the company. And he, and the chemists who worked alongside him, did not put radium anywhere near their mouths. In the laboratory, they handled it with lead screens, with tongs, with masks. They knew. The protection existed. It simply did not travel the few yards from the lab to the studio where the women sat painting.

I want to be careful and fair here, because this is the hinge of the whole story. Some of what the companies did was ordinary ignorance. The science was young. But the gap, the gap between the lead screen in the laboratory and the brush in the girl’s mouth, that gap is not ignorance. That is two different standards of care, under one roof, for two different kinds of people.

Von Sochocky, the inventor, is worth remembering for one more reason. In time, the radium took him too. It destroyed his body’s ability to make blood. He died in 1928, poisoned by his own creation, one more name on a list that was getting longer than anyone wanted to admit.

But the first to die were not the chemists. They were the girls at the long table. And it started, almost always, with a tooth.

Her name was Amelia Maggia. Everyone called her Mollie. She was one of several sisters who worked at the plant in Orange.

It began as a toothache. The tooth was pulled. But the socket would not heal. It turned into an ulcer, raw and weeping. Then another tooth went, and another, and the sores spread through her mouth, and the pain moved into her jaw and would not stop. Her dentist kept working, trying to stay ahead of it. And then came a moment that should not be possible.

He reached into her mouth to treat her, and her jawbone came away in his fingers. Not a tooth. The bone itself. It had rotted from within until it had the structure of wet chalk.

Mollie Maggia died in September of 1922. She was twenty-four years old. The cause of death on the record was syphilis.

Hold onto that, because it matters. It was not true. But it was useful.

Across both factories, in New Jersey and later in Illinois, the women began falling ill with the same impossible symptoms. Jaws that crumbled. Anemia that left them grey and exhausted. Bones so brittle that a woman could break her own leg by standing on it, or lose inches of height as her spine quietly collapsed. Tumors swelling in their limbs. And no doctor could name it, because nothing like it had a name.

Into that silence, two explanations were offered. The women had their own, growing slowly as they talked to each other and noticed they were all sick in the same strange way, and they were all from the same long table.

And the companies had theirs. The companies reached for syphilis. A disease that carried enormous shame, especially for a young woman in the 1920s. It was a perfect tool. It explained the symptoms to a public that did not know better, and at the same time it ruined the women who were making the complaint. Who would believe a dying woman of loose reputation? That was the calculation. Poison the body, then poison the name.

What the companies did not count on was a doctor who would not let it go.

His name was Harrison Martland. He was the medical examiner for Essex County, in Newark. And starting around 1925, he did the patient, methodical work that the companies were counting on no one doing.

He performed autopsies. He developed new tests, tests no one had really tried before, to measure radioactivity in a living body, by catching the radon gas on a person’s breath. He took the bones of the dead women, and he laid them on photographic plates in a dark room. And the bones took their own picture. They were so radioactive that they exposed the film by themselves, burning a pale image of a jaw, a spine, a hand, out of the dark.

Think about what that means. The evidence was not in a document that could be burned. It was in the women themselves. In their skeletons. Glowing.

The bodies even gave testimony after burial. When Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927, five years dead, her remains still registered radioactivity in nearly every bone they tested. The syphilis story died in that grave. Mollie had been telling the truth the whole time. She had simply not been alive to be believed.

Let me tell you why the bones, and not some other part of her. It is a small piece of chemistry and it is the cruelest thing in the story.

Radium sits one row below calcium on the periodic table, and to the body the two look almost the same. So when the radium went down, the body did what it does with calcium. It filed it away in the skeleton. In the jaw. In the spine. In the long bones. It built the poison into the very frame that was supposed to hold the woman up.

And there it stayed, firing off particles at point-blank range into the living bone around it, day and night, for the rest of her life. There was no flushing it out. No treatment. No cure. The thing that was killing her was now part of her. She was not poisoned the way you are poisoned by something you can sweat out or vomit up. She was rebuilt around it. Her own bones became the weapon, and they would keep firing long after she was in the ground.

And the company knew. That is the part I need you to sit with. They did not merely fail to find the danger. They found it, and they hid it.

In 1924, under pressure, the United States Radium Corporation paid for an outside investigation by a Harvard physician. The investigation found exactly what you would expect. The illnesses were caused by the radium. The work was killing the women. And the company’s president rejected the findings, buried the report, and submitted a different account to the authorities, one that cleared the company. The truth existed, on paper, in their own files. They chose the lie.

And in Illinois, at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, they did something worse. They had the example of New Jersey in front of them. The scandal was in the papers. They knew where lip, dip, paint led. And they kept doing it. They kept telling their women the paint was safe. They kept handing them the brush.

There was a young woman in Ottawa named Margaret Looney. Peg, to her family. A soft-spoken redhead, straight out of high school and into the studio. Her health fell apart fast, and she died in 1929, twenty-four years old. Her family was told it was something else. A stubborn illness. Diphtheria, by some accounts. What they were not told was that the company’s own doctors had examined Peg, found the radium in her, and said nothing. They knew what was happening inside her, and they let her family bury her without the truth. Years later, when her body was finally examined properly, the radium in her bones was more than a thousand times what is considered safe. The company had the answer the whole time. They kept it the way you keep a secret you are ashamed of.

When the lawsuits finally came, the companies found one more weapon, and it is the coldest thing in this whole story. They delayed. They knew the women were dying. So they dragged the proceedings out, contested every point, asked for continuance after continuance, and waited. They were betting that the plaintiffs would be dead before any verdict could be reached. They were trying to run out the clock on women who had no time left.

It very nearly worked. But the women had decided something. If they were going to die anyway, they were going to die on the record.

In New Jersey, the woman who would not stop was named Grace Fryer.

Her father was a union man, and she had grown up with a certain idea of justice. She had started at the plant in 1917, at eighteen. By the mid-1920s her teeth were loosening and her bones were failing. And she decided to sue.

It took her two years just to find a lawyer willing to take the case. Two years, against a company with that much money and that much to lose. Part of the problem was the law itself. New Jersey gave you two years to bring a claim for a workplace injury. But radium does not work in two years. It hides. The women were getting sick long after the legal window had quietly closed, which meant that by the time they understood what was happening to them, the law said they were already too late. The poison was slow on purpose, and the slowness was almost a perfect defense.

Eventually she found a lawyer, and four other women joined her. Edna Hussman. Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice, two of Mollie Maggia’s own sisters. And Katherine Schaub, who had started at the factory at fourteen, and who had wanted, before any of this, to be a writer. She kept notes on her own dying. She titled the manuscript Gambling With Radium. Most of it was lost. The press gave the five of them a name that stuck. The Radium Girls.

Grace Fryer once described what it was like inside the plant as the truth began to spread among the women. Her words were plain.

[QUOTE]

There were meetings at our plant that bordered on riots. The chill of fear was so great.

By the time they reached a courtroom, in early 1928, the state they were in told the whole story without a word of argument. Some of them were bedridden. Not one of them could raise her arm high enough to take the oath. They had to be helped. Grace Fryer’s spine could no longer hold her upright on its own.

The public saw it. The newspapers carried it. And the delay tactics, the obvious strategy of waiting for the women to die, began to look like exactly what it was. A famous editor of the day, Walter Lippmann, wrote about the company’s requests for more time. He did not mince it.

[QUOTE]

This is a damnable travesty of justice. The women are dying.

That was the truth of it, in seven words. The women are dying. And the company’s plan was to use that as an advantage.

The pressure worked. In the autumn of 1928, before the case could go to a jury, the company settled. Each woman received ten thousand dollars, a yearly payment for life, and the cost of their medical care. No admission of guilt. Money is not justice, and it certainly is not a cure. But they had forced a powerful company to answer for what it did, and they had done it from their sickbeds.

The second fight happened in Illinois, and its face was a woman named Catherine Donohue.

By 1937 she was disappearing. She had lost half her body weight. Pieces of her jaw were coming away. There was a tumor on her hip. She could not travel, so when the hearing came, the hearing came to her. She gave her testimony from a chair in her own home, weighing less than seventy pounds, and she showed the commission how she had been taught to point the brush with her lips.

Her lawyer was a man named Leonard Grossman. He took the case for nothing, because the women had nothing, and he stood with them through appeal after appeal while the company tried to outlast them. There is a photograph from those hearings of Catherine Donohue in her chair, a small terrible figure, surrounded by people leaning in to hear a voice that was nearly gone. That image did work that no argument could.

The Illinois women had a name for themselves too. They called themselves the Society of the Living Dead. They chose that name. They understood precisely what had been done to them, and they used it, out loud, in the newspapers, as a weapon.

The commission ruled in their favor. The company appealed, and appealed again, and dragged it as far as it could. Catherine Donohue died in July of 1938, before she saw a cent of it. The final ruling, when it came, upheld the women. It came too late for her, and exactly on time for everyone who would come after.

I have moved quickly through the dying, and I want to slow down, because the women did not get to move quickly through it.

This was not a clean death. It went on for years. A tooth, then a jaw, then the slow understanding that your own skeleton has turned against you. Women lost so much bone that their spines folded and they grew shorter. A leg could snap under the simple weight of standing. The anemia left them grey and breathless, climbing stairs as if climbing a mountain. And the whole time, they knew. They were not confused about what was happening. They watched friends from the same long table go first, and they understood they were looking at their own future, and there was nothing to be done about it, because the thing killing them was already sealed inside their bones where no doctor could reach it. They lived for years inside a body that was quietly dismantling itself, and they kept fighting anyway. That is the part I cannot get past. Not that they suffered. That they suffered, and knew exactly why, and still walked into court.

Because this is what those women bought, with their teeth and their spines and their lives. They helped establish, in American law, that a company can be held responsible for a disease it gives you slowly. Not just a sudden injury. A slow one. The poison that takes years. That principle runs straight through the rest of the century, through workers’ compensation, through the whole idea that your employer owes you a safe place to stand. There is a line from that long table in Orange to the safety rules that protect people at work today. The women drew it themselves, while they were dying.

Please allow me a moment of self-promotion.

If you have stayed with me this far, then you already understand the thing that keeps me up at night about this story. It is not the radium. It is the records. It is a true thing, written down, and then buried on purpose. A report in a drawer. A cause of death that everyone knew was a lie. A name quietly erased so that a system could keep its balance and call itself clean.

I wrote a novel about exactly that. It is called The Defixio.

A defixio is a real object from the ancient world. A curse tablet. A thin sheet of lead, scratched with a name and a wish for harm, pierced through with an iron nail, and buried where no one would find it. You bound a person by writing them down and putting them in the ground.

My novel is set on the cold northern frontier of Roman Britain, at a fort along the wall. The man at its center is a physician named Zoilos, trained in the Greek city of Pergamon, a careful man who reads bodies the way Harrison Martland read them. Beneath the floor of one of the barracks blocks, he finds the bones of a child, packed in lime, meant to be forgotten. And next to the bones, a lead scroll pierced with a nail. A defixio.

What he uncovers is not a monster. It is a ledger. A quiet conspiracy of altered records and missing names, an institution protecting itself by deciding which deaths get written down and which ones disappear. One doctor, with his notes and his conscience, against a system that survives by forgetting. If that tension sounds familiar tonight, that is not an accident. It is why I had to make this episode.

If you love the learned, slow-burning mysteries of Umberto Eco, the layered historical investigations of Iain Pears, the Roman world of Lindsey Davis and Robert Harris, or the physician’s eye of Noah Gordon’s The Physician, I think The Defixio will feel like home to you. The Name of the Rose, with a forensic mind and a body under the floor.

The Defixio is available now. A link is in the show notes. Thank you for letting me set this beside a story it belongs next to.

Get the Book Here!

I want to go back to the young woman from the beginning. The one walking home in the dark, glowing.

We can place her at a dance now, in her good dress, her skin throwing back that soft green light, her painted smile shining when the lamps go down. She thinks the glow is the best thing that ever happened to her. It is clean, modern, lucky work. She has no way of knowing that the light on her skin is the same light that is already in her jaw.

Here is the detail I cannot put down. Those women are still radioactive. Radium has a half-life of sixteen hundred years, which means it barely fades inside a single human lifetime, or a dozen of them. When researchers exhumed one of the Illinois women, decades after her death, they were told her remains had to be returned in lead, because she was still dangerous to the living. The women who were told the glow was harmless will go on glowing, faintly, in their graves, for longer than the language we are speaking will exist.

And their bones did one last thing. The careful, terrible study of those skeletons, of how much radium it took and what it did, became the data that taught the world how much radiation a human body can hold before it kills you. The safety limits of the nuclear age were written, in part, out of these women. The ones who were told radium was safe became the measurement of how it is not.

And here is why I cannot leave it as a story about one strange poison from a hundred years ago. The thing the radium companies did has a shape, and once you have seen the shape, you see it everywhere. Deny the danger. Pay for the science, then bury the science when it says the wrong thing. Blame the workers. Stigmatize the sick. Delay, and delay, and wait for the people complaining to die. That same shape turns up a few years later with asbestos, whose makers knew it scarred the lungs and kept that knowledge in internal memos for decades. It turns up with leaded gasoline, sold for a century after the hazard was plain. The radium girls were early. They were not the last. They were the first clear photograph of a pattern that the twentieth century would print again and again.

So here is the question I am left with, and I do not have a clean answer for it. We did not learn the danger and then protect the women. We sacrificed the women, and called the knowledge their legacy. I am not sure those are the same thing. I am not sure we have stopped doing it.

They were told it was a gift.

They became the warning.

I’m A.M. Blackmere. Thank you for listening.