1917.

In 1917, the United States entered the First World War. Among the items the military needed in large quantity were watches and instrument dials that could be read in the dark. The technology already existed. A company in Orange, New Jersey, called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation manufactured a luminous paint sold under the brand name Undark. The paint contained radium mixed with zinc sulfide and a binding compound. A thin coat of it would glow for years without batteries or external light. Undark went onto wristwatch faces, aircraft instruments, gunsights, and ship compasses. With the country at war, orders surged, and the company needed workers to keep up with production.

It hired young women. They came from the working towns of Essex County and northern New Jersey, most of them teenagers or in their early twenties. Many were daughters of immigrants. The job paid well for the era, the work was clean, and it was indoors, a step above most factory positions open to women at the time. Each worker reported to a studio on the upper floors of the factory building, where long rows of wooden benches held trays of blank watch dials, small pots of luminous paint, and sets of fine camel-hair brushes. The women worked in close quarters. They talked while they painted. Friendships formed at those benches. Some brought their sisters along to apply for positions of their own.

A watch dial is a small object. The numerals and tick marks on it are smaller still. Painting them required a brush so finely pointed that each stroke could fit inside a space barely wider than a pinhead. The company taught its workers a technique to achieve that point: place the brush between the lips, roll the bristles to a tip with the tongue, dip the brush in the paint, and apply. Dip, lip, paint. Over and over, hundreds of times a day. A practiced worker could finish more than two hundred dials in a single shift. The women were paid by the piece, which meant speed mattered more than anything else on the floor.

The paint had a faint, gritty sweetness on the tongue. It clung to everything. After a day in the studio, the women's hands, faces, and hair carried a soft glow visible in a dark room. Some of them, delighted by the effect, painted Undark on their fingernails before going out for the evening. Some brushed it onto their teeth to surprise their dates. The luminescence was a novelty, a bit of fun. They had been assured the paint was safe. In the wider commercial market of the era, radium was advertised as a health tonic. It appeared in patent medicines, face creams, and drinking water supplements. It was the wonder element of the age, and the company had no reason to tell its workers otherwise.

In another part of the same building, the company's chemists and laboratory workers handled radium with lead-lined containers, protective screens, and tongs. They wore gloves. They did not touch the substance with bare hands. They did not bring it near their mouths. The dial painters were given no such precautions. Nobody told them why the chemists needed them.

The first troubles surfaced around 1920. Several dial painters began reporting complaints that did not match their age or history. Teeth that loosened without cause. Jaw pain that worsened after dental work. A fatigue so heavy that sleep did not touch it. One of the women, Mollie Maggia, had been painting dials since approximately 1917. In 1921, a persistent toothache brought her to a dentist. He pulled the tooth. The socket did not heal. He extracted another, then another. The jawbone around the empty sockets had begun to soften. At one appointment, her dentist took hold of a section of her lower jaw and it broke away in his fingers. There was no resistance. The bone was decaying from the inside.

Maggia's deterioration continued through 1922. Her skeleton was failing in ways her doctors could not explain. She bled easily and often. Her blood counts dropped. In September 1922, she died. She was twenty-four years old. The cause of death was recorded as syphilis. The diagnosis carried enough social stigma to quiet her family and enough clinical distance from the factory to protect the company. A laboratory finding had supported it. Syphilis went onto the record, and the record closed. It would be years before anyone proved what had actually killed Mollie Maggia.

Other former dial painters started appearing at doctors' offices with the same cluster of symptoms. Jawbones that fractured during routine dental procedures. Teeth falling out in groups. Limbs breaking under ordinary strain. Several women developed severe anemia. A few developed tumors in their jaws or legs. Physicians in the region had no name for what they were seeing and no explanation for it. The patients were young women, many still in their twenties. Their bones were disintegrating.

In 1924, the company hired Cecil Drinker, a Harvard physiologist, to examine conditions in the dial-painting studio. Drinker and his team tested the workers. Virtually every dial painter they examined showed unusual blood conditions. Drinker prepared a report documenting the hazard and recommending immediate changes to protect the workers. US Radium took his report, altered the conclusions to minimize the findings, and circulated the modified version as if it were Drinker's own. When Drinker discovered what had been done to his work, he protested directly to the company. His unaltered findings eventually reached the New Jersey Department of Labor through other channels, but the company had bought itself time and a cleaner public record.

That same year, a New York dentist named Theodore Blum published a paper describing a condition he called "radium jaw" in a patient who had been a dial painter. The term gave a clinical name to a pattern that had been building across northern New Jersey for years without one.

The following year, Harrison Martland, the chief medical examiner of Essex County, opened a formal investigation. Martland had instruments capable of detecting radioactive emissions from outside the body. When he tested former dial painters, the readings were conclusive. Their bones were radioactive. Radium, once ingested, behaves in the body like calcium. It is absorbed into bone tissue, where it stays. Once lodged, the element decays, emitting alpha particles that destroy surrounding cells from the inside out. Every time a dial painter had lipped her brush, she had swallowed a trace amount of a radioactive isotope with a half-life of sixteen hundred years. A single dose was immeasurably small. Thousands of doses, taken day after day across months or years of steady work, were not.

Martland published his conclusions. US Radium Corporation denied that its product had caused the illnesses.

The company had not been ignorant of the risk. Radium injuries had appeared in the medical literature since at least 1906. The protective measures the company enforced for its own chemists acknowledged the danger in plain terms. The company's founder, Sabin von Sochocky, had himself developed chronic radium poisoning from years of direct contact with the material. He would die of aplastic anemia in 1928. None of this had been shared with the women at the painting benches. The lip-pointing technique had never been revised or discontinued. No protective equipment had ever been issued to the workers who used it every day.

Grace Fryer, a former dial painter, decided to sue. She had started at the Orange factory around 1917, at the age of eighteen. By her mid-twenties, her spine had begun to deteriorate. She wore a steel brace on her back. Walking was slow and painful. For two years she searched for an attorney willing to take on US Radium Corporation. Every firm she approached in northern New Jersey declined the case. The company was wealthy and well-connected. The science was unfamiliar to courts. The legal theory had never been tested. In 1927, a young lawyer named Raymond Berry agreed to represent her.

Berry filed suit on behalf of Fryer and four additional plaintiffs: Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, Quinta McDonald, and Albina Larice. McDonald and Larice were sisters of Mollie Maggia. The newspapers called them the Radium Girls.

The case drew national coverage. Several of the women had to be carried into the courtroom or helped to their seats. At least one could no longer hold a pen to sign her own name. US Radium's defense team filed motion after motion seeking continuances and procedural delays. The strategy was plain. The longer the proceedings took, the fewer plaintiffs would be alive to see them resolved. Every postponement bought the company another month. The women were dying.

In June 1928, under heavy public pressure, US Radium agreed to settle before trial. Each of the five women received ten thousand dollars in a lump sum, an annual pension of six hundred dollars for the rest of her life, and payment of all medical and legal expenses. The company admitted no fault.

The pensions would not run long.

Grace Fryer died in 1933. She was thirty-four years old. Others among the five followed within years of the settlement. The pensions, six hundred dollars a year, had been calculated against lifetimes that were already ending.

During the pretrial investigation in 1927, Mollie Maggia's body had been exhumed. Her remains, five years in the ground, were still measurably radioactive. The syphilis diagnosis collapsed. The cause of her death was established as radium poisoning.

No criminal charges were filed against US Radium Corporation or any of its officers.

The case helped reshape American labor law. It established precedent that corporations could be held liable for occupational diseases, and it contributed to the adoption of workplace safety statutes in New Jersey and other states. The lip-pointing method was discontinued. Standards for handling radioactive materials followed in subsequent decades.

The US Radium factory site in Orange, New Jersey, was designated a federal Superfund site. Contaminated soil was excavated and removed over the course of years. The site has since been cleaned up.

Across the full span of the radium dial industry, the number of women sickened was never precisely established. Many developed cancers, anemias, and bone deterioration that shortened their lives by decades. Most never received a settlement or an acknowledgment from the companies that employed them.

Mollie Maggia was twenty-four when she died. Five years later, they opened her coffin, and her bones were still radioactive.