Radium Corporation, despite the odds not being in their favor. In 1927, five dial painters filed a lawsuit against the U.S. | Photo: Alexandra CharitanĪlthough the glow would last far longer than anyone expected, the excitement of working with radium did not.
They would intentionally paint parts of themselves so they glowed, or wear their best dresses to work in hopes that they would shimmer all night long.Īmelia ‘Mollie’ Maggia’s grave in section 8 of Rosedale Cemetery. The dial painters were grateful for their well-paying jobs and took pride in working with an exciting new substance. After Marie Curie and her husband discovered radium in 1898, it had been heralded as the new cure-all and was added to toothpaste, water, food, and cosmetics-with little regulation sometimes it was enough just to say your product contained radium, which was costly to obtain. Radium Corporation had insisted that its product was safe. “Yet when presented with these women in dire pain, aspirin was initially deemed an appropriate analgesic.”Ī glowing clock face. “Later studies showed that the radium had actually bored holes in the women’s bones while they were alive-a horrifying and agonizing reality,” says Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. By 1927, more than 50 other women had suffered similar fates-in addition to crumbling teeth, collapsed spines, foul breath, pregnancy complications, aching joints, unexplained weight loss, extreme exhaustion, and brutal hemorrhaging-all of which were eventually determined to be caused by the women’s repeated exposure to, and ingestion of, radium. But in the year prior, Mollie’s jaw had been removed after it began to break apart, she developed anemia, and her mouth would not stop bleeding. When Mollie died in 1922, at just 24 years old, several causes of death were blamed, including ulcerative stomachitis and syphilis. As one of more than a hundred-mostly women-workers at the factory, Mollie was encouraged to shape her fine brushes into a point with her mouth after dipping them into the luminous paint, to better render the fine details on the watch faces.ġ921 magazine advertisement for Undark.| Photo: Wikimedia Commons The paints, sold under the brand name Undark, were used for numbers on the dials of military watches. Radium Corporation extracted and purified radium, a chemical element found in the alkaline earth metals section of the periodic table, and used the resulting product to manufacture phosphorescent paints. Radium Corporation factory, located at the intersection of High and Alden Streets in Orange, New Jersey. Four of the seven sisters worked at the U.S. “Are they popular here?”Īmelia “Mollie” Maggia was born on December 21, 1897, smack dab in the middle of the Maggia sisters: Louise, Clara, and Albina were older Quinta, Irma, and Josephine were younger. “What are their names?”Īs I spell out the names of three sisters, the woman looks up from her desk, squints her eyes, and says, “Now, why do those names sound so familiar?” “Sure,” one of the women replies, grabbing a pen and a scrap of paper. “I’m looking for three specific graves, and I was hoping that you could help me find them?” I ask. I’m greeted immediately by two very friendly women, and their welcoming faces set me at ease. There’s snow on the ground, but inside the tiny office it feels tropical. I feel a little bit nervous walking into the office at Rosedale Cemetery on a Friday afternoon in March.
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