Although 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. In an era and region with few economic prospects for young women, the dial painters were grateful for their jobs (taking home an average of 1.5 cents per watch dial) and took pride in working with an exciting new substance. After its discovery, radium was heralded as the new cure-all and added to toothpaste, water, food, and cosmetics-with little regulation sometimes it was enough just to say your product contained the radioactive element, which was costly to obtain. Radium Corporation insisted that its eponymous product was safe. “Yet when presented with these women in dire pain, aspirin was initially deemed an appropriate analgesic.” An exciting new substance “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. All of which were eventually determined to be caused by the women’s repeated exposure to, and ingestion of, radium. 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. 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 stomatitis 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 fine details on the watch faces. 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 discovered by Marie Curie and her husband in 1898-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. | Photo: Alexandra Charitan Mollie’s gruesome fateĪmelia “Mollie” Maggia was born on December 21, 1897, smack dab in the middle of seven Maggia sisters: Louise, Clara, and Albina were older Quinta, Irma, and Josephine were younger.
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