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History See other History Articles Title: Undark and the Radium Girls In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer became concerned when her teeth began to loosen and fall out for no discernible reason. Her troubles were compounded when her jaw became swollen and inflamed, so she sought the assistance of a doctor in diagnosing the inexplicable symptoms. Using a primitive X-ray machine, the physician discovered serious bone decay, the likes of which he had never seen. Her jawbone was honeycombed with small holes, in a random pattern reminiscent of moth-eaten fabric. As a series of doctors attempted to solve Grace's mysterious ailment, similar cases began to appear throughout her hometown of New Jersey. One dentist in particular took notice of the unusually high number of deteriorated jawbones among local women, and it took very little investigation to discover a common thread; all of the women had been employed by the same watch-painting factory at one time or another. In 1902, twenty years prior to Grace's mysterious ailment, inventor William J. Hammer left Paris with a curious souvenir. The famous scientists Pierre and Marie Curie had provided him with some samples of their radium salt crystals. Radioactivity was somewhat new to science, so its properties and dangers were not well understood; but the radium's slight blue-green glow and natural warmth indicated that it was clearly a fascinating material. Hammer went on to combine his radium salt with glue and a compound called zinc sulfide which glowed in the presence of radiation. The result was glow-in-the-dark paint. Hammer's recipe was used by the US Radium Corporation during the First World War to produce Undark, a high-tech paint which allowed America's infantrymen to read their wristwatches and instrument panels at night. They also marketed the pigment for non-military products such as house numbers, pistol sights, light switch plates, and glowing eyes for toy dolls. By this time the dangers of radium were better understood, but US Radium assured the public that their paint used the radioactive element in "such minute quantities that it is absolutely harmless." While this was true of the products themselves, the amount of radium present in the dial-painting factory was much more dangerous, unbeknownst to the workers there. US Radium employed hundreds of women at their factory in Orange, New Jersey, including Grace Fryer. Few companies at that time were willing to employ women, and the pay was much higher than most alternatives, so the company had little trouble finding employees to occupy the rows and rows of desks. They were required to paint delicate lines with fine-tipped brushes, applying the Undark to the tiny numbers and indicator hands of wristwatches. After a few strokes a brush tended to lose its shape, so the women's managers encouraged them to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes sharp and clean. The glowing paint was completely flavorless, and the supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment. Cause for concern was further reduced by the fact that radium was being marketed as a medical elixir for treating all manner of ailments. A US Radium dial painting factoryA US Radium dial painting factoryThe owners and scientists at US Radium, familiar with the real hazards of radioactivity, naturally took extensive precautions to protect themselves. They knew that Undark's key ingredient was approximately one million times more active than uranium, so company chemists often used lead screens, masks, and tongs when working with the paint. US Radium had even distributed literature to the medical community describing the "injurious effects" of radium. But inside the factory, where nearly every surface sparkled with radioluminescence, these dangers were unknown. For a lark, some of the women even painted their fingernails and teeth with radium paint on occasion, to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. In 1925, three years after Grace's health problems began, a doctor suggested that her jaw problems may have had something to do with her former job at US Radium. As she began to explore the possibility, a specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn asked to examine her. Flynn declared her to be in fine health. It would be some time before anyone discovered that Flynn was not a doctor, nor was he licensed to practice medicine, rather he was a toxicologist on the US Radium payroll. A "colleague" who had been present during the examination– and who had confirmed the healthy diagnosis– turned out to be one of the vice-presidents of US Radium. Many of the Undark painters had been developing serious bone-related problems, particularly in the jaw, and the company had begun a concerted effort to conceal the cause of the disease. The mysterious deaths were often blamed on syphilis to undermine the womens' reputations, and many doctors and dentists inexplicably cooperated with the powerful company's disinformation campaign. In the early 1920s, US Radium hired the Harvard physiology professor Cecil Drinker to study the working conditions in the factory. Drinker's report was grave, indicating a heavily contaminated work force, and unusual blood conditions in virtually everyone who worked there. The report which the company provided to the New Jersey Department of Labor credited Cecil Drinker as the author, however the ominous descriptions of unhealthy conditions were replaced with glowing praise, stating that "every girl is in perfect condition." Even worse, US Radium's president disregarded all of the advice in Drinker's original report, making none of the recommended changes to protect the workers. The fraudulent report was discovered by a colleague of Drinker's named Alice Hamilton in 1925. Her letter prompted Drinker to make the information public by publishing his original report in a scientific journal. US Radium executives were furious, and threatened legal action, but Drinker published his findings nonetheless. Among other things, his report stated: "Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room. Their hair, faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous almost to the waist…." US Radium was a defense contractor with deep pockets and influential contacts, so it took Grace Fryer two years to find a lawyer willing to take on her former employer. A young attorney from Newark named Raymond Berry filed the suit in 1927, and four other radium-injured dial painters soon joined in. They sought $250,000 each in damages. A severe instance of "Radium jaw" from 1924A severe instance of "Radium jaw" from 1924As the legal battle ensued, New York dentist Joseph P. Knef examined the jawbone from one of the deceased dial painters named Amelia Maggia. In the last few months of her life the bone had become so decayed that Dr. Knef had been forced to remove it from his patient. Her official cause of death had been listed as syphilis, but Knef suspected otherwise. He exposed the bone to dental film for a time, and then developed it. Patterns on the film indicated an absurd level of radiation, and he confirmed the findings with an electroscope. As the weeks and months were consumed by the slow-moving court system, the women's health rapidly deteriorated. At their first appearance in court in January 1928, two were bedridden, and none could raise their arms to take the oath. Grace Fryer, still described by reporters as "pretty," was unable to walk, required a back brace to sit up, and had lost all of her teeth. The "Radium Girls" began appearing in headlines nationwide, and the grim descriptions of their hopeless condition reached Marie Curie in Paris. "I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could," she said, adding, "there is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body." The women proved too ill to attend the following hearing, which occurred in April. Despite strenuous objections from the women's lawyer, the judge adjourned the case until September because several US Radium witnesses were summering in Europe, and would consequently be unavailable. Walter Lippmann, the editor of the influential New York World newspaper, wrote of the judge's decision, calling it a "damnable travesty of justice… There is no possible excuse for such a delay. The women are dying. If ever a case called for prompt adjudication, it is the case of five crippled women who are fighting for a few miserable dollars to ease their last days on earth." In a later editorial, he wrote, "This is a heartless proceeding. It is unmanly, unjust and cruel. This is a case which calls not for fine-spun litigation but for simple, quick, direct justice." The national outrage over the delay prompted the courts to reschedule the hearing for early June, but days before the trial, Raymond Berry and US Radium agreed to allow U.S. District Court Judge William Clark to mediate an out-of-court settlement. Berry and the Radium Girls accepted their opponent's offer reluctantly, despite learning that their mediator was a US Radium Corporation stockholder. Their situation was too desperate to refuse; the women were not expected to live much longer. Each woman would receive $10,000– equivalent to about $100,000 today– and have all of their medical and legal expenses paid. They would also receive a $600 per year annuity for as long as they lived. Unsurprisingly, few of the annuity payments were collected. A US Radium ad for "Undark" paintA US Radium ad for "Undark" paint (click for larger view)The last of the famous Radium Girls died in the 1930s, and many other former factory workers died of radium poisoning without finding justice. Later medical research would determine that radium behaves much like calcium inside the body, causing it to concentrate in the teeth and bones. By shaping their brushes with their lips as instructed by their knowledgeable supervisors, the dial painters had ingested anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand microcuries of radium per year. One tenth of a microcurie is now considered to be the maximum safe exposure. Marie Curie herself died of radiation-related ailments in 1934. Because radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, her lab notebooks are said to be too highly contaminated to be safely handled even today. Radium continued to be used to illuminate watches until about 1968, but under much safer conditions. It is uncertain how many people were sickened or killed by Undark and similar radioactive pigments over the years, but US Radium alone employed an estimated 4,000 radium dial painters. Though they were not the only radium-painting business in the US, they were arguably the most evil. However one positive development did appear in the wake of the women's legal struggle and subsequent media attention; In 1949 the US Congress passed a bill making all occupational diseases compensable, and extended the time during which workers could discover illnesses and make a claim. Thanks to the Radium Girls and their success in bringing attention to the deplorable conditions in US factories, industrial safety standards in the US were significantly tightened over the following years, an improvement which definitely spared countless others from similar fates.
Poster Comment: Click on source for disturbing photos.
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#1. To: Indrid Cold (#0)
Even worse, US Radium's president disregarded all of the advice in Drinker's original report, making none of the recommended changes to protect the workers. The fraudulent report was discovered by a colleague of Drinker's named Alice Hamilton in 1925. And it continues... "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." Thanks, but no. Horrible information.
That isn't the half of it. The owners closed the New Jersey factory, changed the company name and relocated to Ottawa, Ill as The Radium Dial Company. They paid what were then very high wages and virtually every new woman graduate from the local high school went to work there. They were also encouraged to point the brushes with their mouths, and they too died in numbers. To this day a Geiger counter will reach maximum deflection when standing over the graves of those poor women. The factory was torn down and the rubble was buried in various spots around town, except for some bricks which were recycled and are still hot today. The 1987 film RADIUM CITY shows interviews with survivors, old pictures and videos of the girls horse playing in a darkened room after painting their faces with radium paint. And, a local deer hunter bagged a buck covered with tumors and lesions indicating that the buried rubble is still affecting the environment, not to mention the contamination of ground water. Here's a review of the film by an Ill nurse: "Radium City" is about the way corporate entities have and still do destroy rural areas to fatten their pocketbooks. After living and working in the town on which this documentary is based, it was a terrifying jolt of reality to watch this movie. As a nurse in the town's hospital, I every day take part in the standard jokes about the copious amounts of radium in the soil and water; as well as the disturbing number of illnesses that are "rare" that happen to pop up on a daily basis. Multiple sclerosis, rare cancerous tumors and legions of leukemias. The scariest part of all is that the town has been trying to crush the legacy of both Radium Dial and this movie into the background for years. The local video stores "aren't allowed" to carry this movie, I've been told (I guess they worry about local government) so you can obtain a bootleg copy of this if you promise to return it and keep your mouth shut about where you got it. How scary is that? By the way, in the past year it has come to light that there are huge amounts of arsenic in the neighboring town's soil, left over from a careless glass factory. Oh, and I'm moving away in 2 months- thank God. Hopefully I wont have to repeat this story to an oncologist in the future." Even this compelling article about victims in New Jersey makes no reference to the fact that the same people simply relocated and started over, and that the primary beneficiary, the federal govt has never heard of US RADIUM or RADIUM DIAL. And even now the whole story is never told, but instead is fragmented into "separate, isolated tragedies". These evil acts and the successful suppression of related stories and litigation are reasons why the govt refuses to acknowledge the dangers of depleted uranium to our troops and to the world as our armed forces sprinkle it about like fairie dust. There are still many alarm clocks and wrist watches around that were hand painted by the women of Ottawa. The company actually rewarded the girls with the finest eyes and ability to paint tiny detailed numbers and nomenclature. Many of you will no doubt remember the BABY BEN alarm clock, a cute, wind up clock with glowing numbers. There were millions of them manufactured and sold. I have a military issue compass from World War One that is painted with radium. To fully appreciate the public ignorance and govt negligence you should consider that up until the 1950's it was not unusual for shoe stores to have a fluoroscope in their stores so customers could view the fit of the shoes through x rays. Those Shoe Fitting X-Ray Devices leaked radiation well above known safe exposure limits today, and yet there was never a federal legislation regulating or banning their use. http://www.mtn.org/quack/devices/shoexray.htm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284691/ I have a VHS tape of RADIUM CITY but it's over 20 years old and I don't know if it will still play. When my brother (who died from Agent Orange related illness) came her about 15 years ago, we watched it together. It helped him understand why the truth about DIOXEN (the primary nasty in Agent Orange, which is among the most toxic substances known to man) was used so carelessly. The govt knew the truth during the Vietnam War but the ground and air crews that laced Southeast Asia with it were not issued even the most rudimentary protective clothing or equipment, nor were they told what they were dealing with. So, our govt has been poisoning us and the world and turning blind eyes to corporations that are killing us since the early 20th century. And, yet there is no shortage of flag waving morons who will believe whatever Karl, Rush and Sean tell them to believe, and who call me "Islamolover" for daring to mention that our troops are at risk. And, if I want to play country music (I do) I have to tiptoe gently around others who play it because Darryl Worley and Toby Keith may write songs about me and get me beaten up or even killed by "patriots".
"When the going gets tough, the tough make coffee!"
OMG ..how horrible.. You know what totally pisses me off are those to act as if those who are concerned about DU are loons.. morons that they are.. either theyre part of the gov or employed in the industry IMO.
The factory was torn down and the rubble was buried in various spots around town, except for some bricks which were recycled and are still hot today. Wow. Thanks for the links. Radium City is new to me. Re: agent orange: A previous coworker who served in Nam said they slept under the trees in the rain and the stuff dripped all over them. He laughs at people who try to eat right. He shouldn't have been in the jungle at all, he had lost his spleen in a sled accident as a child. This made him vulnerable to malaria, which he did indeed get. Nevertheless, the govt kept him there 13 months.
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true... |
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