(timer ticking) - [Narrator] When radium
was discovered in 1898, it seemed a lot like a miracle. The new element was found by scientist and future Nobel Prize
winner, Marie Curie, and her husband, Pierre. The breakthrough was revolutionary. Curie herself was in-off the element. She often referred to the
substance as beautiful radium. Beautiful as it seemed. However, the discovery was also dangerous. Cu knew the harm radium could cause. 20 or so years later, hundreds of women in the
U.S. would work closely with the element, unaware that it was slowly devouring them from the inside out. This is the story of the radium girls. (dramatic music) Not long after Curie's discovery, American inventor, William J. Hammer, traveled to Paris where he obtained a small
amount of radium salt crystals from the couple. He found that by mixing it with glue and zinc sulfide, he could produce a glow-in-the-dark paint which became wildly popular. The U.S. Radium Corporation
bought Hammer's invention, using it to manufacture wristwatches with dials that glowed in the dark. Not only did the wristwatches become a wildly popular fashion accessory, U.S. Radium also received
government contracts at the start of World War I, to produce glowing watches
and airplane instruments for U.S. soldiers. The corporation set up
factories in New Jersey and recruited young women to work in their factories to paint the clock dials. U.S. Radium Corps was
one of the leading users of the substance. Although other companies opened factories around the U.S. and Canada, and soon hundreds of women
were hired as dial painters. Women and teenage girls
were recruited for the job due to their smaller and
nimble hands being ideal for the detailed work of painting wristwatch dials. The occupation was popular among American and Canadian women, beginning around 1916. The job was artistic and well-paid compared to the other jobs
for women, at the time, with employees earning up to three times the amount they'd be
paid at other factories. Women were also given
a sense of usefulness in the war efforts, as many of the products were produced for military use. The job was referred to as, "The elite job for the
poor working girls," at the time, and allowed women to
find financial freedom. But despite their new found independence, these women and girls
would soon themselves bound to one particularly sinister and noxious master; that beautiful lord, radium. The element was marketed as a sort of marvelous cure-all for disease, illness,
old age, and ugliness. Some salesmen promoted
radium as a substance which could extend people's lives, boost sex drives, and make women more beautiful. Folks drank radium water as a tonic, wore radium cosmetics, and products such as butter,
milk, and toothpaste, laced with small amounts of radium, were all common at the time. After it was discovered that radium could treat cancer, many mistakenly believed
that it could also be used to treat other conditions. It was promptly sold in pharmacies to treat all kinds of ailments. Ads purported that radium was magic. News reports claimed that
it could even add years to our lives. These beliefs were largely promoted by radium firms such as U.S. Radium, which had built profitable
and lucrative businesses, riding on this idea. Shamefully, these companies
were also slowly, neglectfully, poisoning their employees with the very element
they promoted as magical. Researchers for these
firms largely ignored any signs of danger from the element. Managers reportedly told the women working in their factories that radium would put
roses in their cheeks. Because the dials they
would paint were so small, workers were instructed to use a technique called the lip dip or lip pointing. This involved workers
slipping their paintbrush between their lips to make a fine point between each of the numbers they painted. Employees would paint up
to 200 watches per day, ingesting a small amount of radium with every number they painted. One U.S. Radium employee, Mae Cubberley, who worked at the Orange,
New Jersey factory, later remembered: "The first thing we asked was, "does this stuff hurt you? "Naturally, you don't wanna
put anything in your mouth "that's gonna hurt you. "The manager said that it wasn't dangerous "and that we didn't need to be afraid." As more and more women
labored in the factories, they would become referred
to as the ghost girls. By the time they would
finish their shifts, the women themselves
would glow in the dark due to the luminosity of radium, which was also part of the allure of the job. Many women would wear their
nicest dresses to work and take advantage of the
trendy glow of radium, painting it onto their
outfits, nails, or teeth. Cecil Drinker, a Harvard physiologist who later investigated the factories, reported that 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. They would glow like phantoms on their walks home after work, oblivious to their bodies
slowly deteriorating from the very thing that made them glimmer. Since its discovery, even Marie Curie knew
about radium's ability to cause harm. Curie herself suffered
from radiation burns as a result of handling the element. And her husband noted that he would not want to be in a room with the kilo worth of pure radium in it, believing that it could
burn the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and probably kill him. People had already died
of radium poisoning, well before any of the watch
factories were up and running. Scientists knew of the hazardous
effects of the substance, but companies like U.S.
Radium Corps insisted the benefits outweighed the risks. Factories would even
supply their male employees with lead aprons and ivory tip tongs while working with radium in labs. But sadly, women working
at these factories were not provided the same protections and were told that they
were not in danger. According to Kate Moore, author of the book, "Radium Girls," "Manufacturers funded research "that supported their claims "and ignored independent studies "that proved the opposite." The female factory workers
began experiencing horrific and harmful symptoms. And by the mid 1920s, dozens of women who
worked in the factories began showing signs of illness. The ingested radium
had started eating away at the workers' bones, emitting a constant and
destructive radiation. One of the first radium girls to experience physical
damage by the radiation was Amelia Mollie Maggia, who worked at the U.S,
Radium factory in New Jersey. After experiencing a toothache, Maggia went to have the tooth removed. Soon after, a neighboring
tooth had to be extracted, which led to painful bleeding ulcers that would fill with pus
in place of the teeth. The illness spread throughout
the rest of Maggia's mouth and other parts of her body, causing her aches and pains. Eventually, leaving her unable to walk. The doctor dismissed
her pain as rheumatism and prescribed her aspirin. By May, 1922, her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and a portion her ear bones, were said to be one large abscess. At this point, when a dentist gently prodded her jaw bone inside her mouth, the jaw broke against his fingers. Her jaw was then removed by the dentist, not by an operation, but merely by putting his
fingers inside her mouth and lifting it out. The rest of her lower jaw
bone was removed the same way, just days later. And four months after, Maggia died at the age of 24 due to a massive hemorrhage, on September 12th, 1922. At this point, no one had
linked Maggia's illness with her work at U.S Radium. In fact, as doctors could
not determine the cause of her death, they recorded it as syphilis, an inaccuracy later used
against her case in court. Maggia would not be the only radium girl to experience such a gruesome death. By 1927, more than 50 women who had worked in the factories, had died. In the meantime, these
employees would suffer from the nightmarish
consequences of radium poisoning; experiencing terrible symptoms
including bones breaking, teeth falling out, and their spines collapsing. Many women's legs shortened and spontaneously fractured. Some developed enormous sarcomas or cancerous bone tumors which grew anywhere on their bodies. Their bones also began emitting light, causing the women to glow from the inside. After Maggia's death in 1922, and following the deadly illnesses of other radium girls, their employer continued to dismiss any connection
between the deaths and the women's jobs. For two years after Maggia's death, U.S. Radium considered
the whole ordeal gossip from their employees which wouldn't go away, and led to a downturn in business. After the death of a
male employee in 1925, pathologist, Dr. Harrison Martland, was hired to investigate
the link between deaths and the dial painting occupation. Martland discovered that
the radium had deposited in the women's bones, and proved that the radium was responsible for poisoning the factory workers, albeit too late for many. Martland's study showed
that the ingested radium would settle in the employees' bodies and emit radiation which would honeycomb their bones, boring holes inside of their bodies while they were still alive. Without a shadow of a doubt, radium was causing the deaths of dozens of innocent laborers. This enraged the president of U.S. Radium who denied the findings of the study, and even commissioned new studies which published the opposite conclusion. Additionally, he lied about
the original studies findings to the Department of Labor, which at that point had
begun investigating the firm and their increasingly ill employees. U.S. Radium's president
publicly denounced the employees as trying to palm off
their melodies on the firm, claiming that the women
were simply attempting to gain financial assistance for their medical bills. The prosperous radium industry was adamant about discrediting any
connection between the work and the illnesses of these women. And workers were forced to band together to fight against the
injustices brought upon them. At the time, dial painters
were still being hired all over the country, and women were continuing to be exposed to the dangerous work. One driving force in the
fight against U.S. Radium was a New Jersey woman named Grace Fryer, who commented that, "It's
not for myself I care, "I'm thinking more of
the hundreds of girls "to whom this may serve as an example. Fryer herself had suffered a crust spine due to radium poisoning, which forced her to
wear a steel back brace. Searching for a lawyer, Fryer was turned down by several attorneys who either didn't believe in the claims, were worried about fighting
a powerful corporation, or were not prepared for
a legal battle which dealt with overturning existing legislation. The case was also complicated by the statute of
limitations, at the time, which ruled that victims
of occupational poisoning only had two years to present their cases. Often, the effects of radium
could take up to five years to appear. (gentle music) Finally, in 1927, attorney Raymond Berry took on the case. And five women, including Grace Fryer, became the center of the
fight against U.S. Radium. The New Jersey case
became front page news, all across the country, reaching women facing similar situations with companies and other states. Tragically, by the time Fryer and the rest of the radium
girls case hit the courts, the women were given a prognosis of only four months to live due to their poisoning. With the help of Berry, they filed a lawsuit
for damages of $250,000. Though eventually, settled out of court for $10,000 each, at a $600 annual payment. None of these women survived
longer than two years following settlement, but their legal action
helped raise awareness about the effects of radium poisoning, a goal of Fryer's, which inspired workers everywhere to fight for justice. (dramatic music) As the news reached Illinois, female workers there became concerned about their work conditions, and the connection
between their occupation and the illness. According to one worker, Catherine Wolfe, "There were meetings at our plant "that bordered on riots. "The chill of fear was so depressing "that we could scarcely work." The firm they worked for, Radium Dial, acted similarly as U.S.
Radium did in New Jersey. Denying responsibility, Radium
Dial lied about the results of their company's medical tests, which proved that their
employees were showing undeniable symptoms of radium poisoning. The measures Radium Dial
took to hide the evidence were astounding. Company officials went
as far as to interfere with their employees' autopsies, stealing their radium afflicted bones in an attempt to cover up the truth. The women in Illinois started fighting for their case in the mid 1930s, at the peak of the Great Depression. Many shun the women for suing
one of the remaining firms of the state. By this time, Catherine Wolfe Donohue, after marriage, had developed a grapefruit
size tumor on her hip. On top of losing her teeth, while also picking out
pieces of her jaw bone from her mouth. She had witnessed several
of her friends' deaths, stealing her up for the legal battle ahead of her. Her case went to court in 1938. After collapsing at an
earlier court hearing, Donohue was forced to give
her evidence on her death bed. She was represented by
lawyer Leonard Grossman who worked pro bono. And the case won after Donohue's evidence as well as other testimonies, before the Illinois Industrial Commission. The Radium Dial Company
filed multiple appeals, and Donohue lived long enough to hear that the first appeal
before the commission was unanimously denied. She died on July 27th, 1938, a day after the company's
second appeal was filed. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the company's final appeal and upheld the lower court's ruling. Finally, some justice had been gained for the radium girls. As the second World War approached, women from the clock factories who were still alive, more or less became test subjects for researching the
repercussions of radium exposure. According to the U.S.
Atomic Bomb Commission, "If it hadn't been for
those dial painters, "thousands of workers
might well have been, "and might still be, "in great danger." The production of radium watches continued until 1968. Though safety regulations
were vastly improved, thanks to the New Jersey
and Illinois cases. The legacy of those
women's work and fight led to new safety standards being
introduced in the workplace to protect future dial painters and employees working with plutonium while making atomic bombs. The case was one of the
first in the country wherein an employer was made responsible for the health of the company's employees. And in 1949, U.S. Congress passed the law which granted workers, rights to compensation for
occupational illnesses. Additionally, the case
of the radium girls, ultimately led to the establishment of the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration, or OSHA, which today operates
nationally throughout the U.S. Before OSHA, 14,000 people
died at work each year. Now, it's just over 4,500. In the first half of the 20th century, troves of innocent girls
and women lost their lives and suffered nightmares ailments because of poor employment practices, a general dismissal of female workers, and corporate politics. In 2014, one of the last
living radium girls, Mae Keane, died at age 107. Hired at a Waterbury,
Connecticut factory in 1924, Keane disliked the gritty taste of radium and refused to put the brush
in her mouth while working. She was asked to leave as she was clearly not enjoying the job. And she readily agreed. She later recalled, "I often wish I had met
my boss after to thank him "because I would have been
like the rest of them." Likely due to her early resignation, Keane was able to live a long life, but many other painters were not so lucky. The story of the radium
girl should not only serve as a historical anecdote about the rise of workers' rights, but also as a cautionary tale for societies and corporations that value money over human lives. In the case of U.S. Radium Corps and dozens of firms like it, women were disposable if
there was money to be made. In response, these women paved the way for improved labor standards. And thanks to their resilience and vehement call for justice, the radium girls changed the way that workers would be treated, for generations to come. (gentle music)