The Radium Girls’ Glowing Bones

In the factories of the 1910s and 1920s, young women sat in long rows painting luminous numerals onto watch and instrument dials with a radium compound that glowed a soft, otherworldly green in the dark. The work paid well and seemed almost magical. To keep a fine point on their brushes, the painters were taught to shape the bristles between their lips, a practice known as lip-pointing. With each stroke they swallowed a little of the radium.

Radium behaves in the body like calcium, and the body files it away where it stores calcium: in the bones. There it remained, emitting radiation year after year into the living tissue that surrounded it. The women began to sicken in ways their doctors could not at first explain. Their jaws ached, their teeth loosened and fell out, and the jawbone itself began to crumble and rot, a condition that came to be called radium jaw. Some suffered fractures from the smallest movements as their skeletons quietly disintegrated.

The companies denied any link, at one point suggesting the ailing women were suffering from syphilis, and continued to insist the paint was harmless even as it killed. A group of dying dial painters, some too weak to raise their arms in the courtroom, brought suit and won a landmark settlement that helped establish the right of workers to sue for occupational disease.

The radium in their bones did not stop with death. Decades later, when researchers exhumed some of the women for study, their remains were still measurably radioactive, the skeletons faintly registering on instruments as though the fatal glow had never entirely gone out.

Provenance: dial-painting factories of New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut, United States, circa 1917 to 1930s.