Frances’s job was to paint the numbers on watch dials with a fluorescent paint that contained radium. This paint had been formulated in 1915 by an Austrian immigrant Sabin von Sochocky (1883–1928), and the active ingredients in the formula were radium and the fluorescent compound zinc sulfide.12 The radium emitted radiation that made the fluorescent paint glow in the dark and allowed the watch wearer to tell the time even in total darkness. Quite a novelty indeed!
At the time, wristwatches themselves were actually novelties for men. They were originally invented by the Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe & Company in the late 1800s, and were designed specifically for women. Men typically used the larger, more masculine pocket watches. Nevertheless, wristwatches proved to be highly practical for soldiers waging war in the trenches during World War I. Coupled with a glow-in-the-dark dial, they were extremely valuable for night maneuvers. Since there was nothing effeminate about a trench soldier, wristwatches with glowing dials suddenly became associated with machismo.
By 1921, the war was over and everyone wanted to own this new high-tech time device that was so popular among the soldiers. The watches were in great demand, and Frances and her coworkers were kept very busy. They were paid by the dial. The faster they painted, the more money they made. Good workers could paint as many as 300 dials a day, making $24 per week ($317 per week in 2015 dollars)—an excellent daily wage for women in 1921. (The average wage for women at this time was about $15 per week.13)
The radium dial watches were profitable for the Waterbury company, but they faced stiff competition from other radium watch companies in Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois.14 The demand for the watches was high and growing. While fewer than 10 thousand radium watches were purchased in 1913, by 1919, over 2 million were sold. One year later, Americans purchased 4 million radium dial watches, an astounding number considering that the population of the United States in 1920 was just a little over 100 million. It seemed as if soon every American would be wearing a radium watch.
Then, in January 1925, the good times came to an abrupt end for Frances. She became weak and anemic. Her face became painful to the touch, and her teeth began to hurt. She saw a dentist who pulled a suspect tooth. A piece of her jaw came out with the tooth. Soon the soft tissues of her mouth began to deteriorate, and she ended up with a hole in her cheek. By February, she was dead.
What few in Waterbury knew at the time was that Frances’s counterparts in watch factories in New Jersey and Illinois were also suffering the same symptoms. In New Jersey, four dial painters had died, and eight were ill with symptoms similar to Frances’s. Shortly after Frances died, one of her coworkers, Elizabeth Dunn, broke her leg for no apparent reason while dancing. She then developed mouth symptoms similar to Frances’s and ultimately died in 1927. After her, coworker Helen Wall contracted similar symptoms and died.
FIGURE 5.1. RADIUM DIAL PAINTERS AT WORK. Young middle-class women found good-paying jobs painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint. But the painting procedure they used led to inadvertent ingestion of small amounts of the paint. Since the paint contained radium, ingestion resulted in large radiation doses to the women’s bones. They suffered bone diseases and cancer, and many died. This was the first time that the general public became aware that ingesting radioactivity could be hazardous.
One by one, more and more dial painters were falling sick in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois. It is estimated that, at its peak, the industry employed over 2,000 radium dial painters, most of them centered in northern New Jersey; a good number of them fell ill. Dentists in New Jersey saw so many dial painters with bone necrosis that they dubbed the condition radium jaw, thus defining a new occupational disease. And the popular press tagged these women dial painters with the unflattering name radium girls, a term by which they became commonly known to the public.
The major nuisance of painting watch dials by hand was that the paintbrush tip often became blunted, making fine and detailed painting of numbers difficult. For this reason, the women often restored their brush’s point by twisting the bristles in the corner of their lips. In fact, they actually received company training in how to do this properly. Each time they “lip pointed,” they ingested a small amount of paint. Over time they ingested large amounts of paint, all of which contained radium. It has been estimated that a typical worker might have lip pointed her brush four times per dial, consuming about 0.001 grams of paint each time. At 300 dials per day for a five-day week, this could have resulted in about six grams (about one teaspoon) of paint being consumed each week. Over a year’s time the worker would have consumed 300 grams of paint (about one coffee cup).15 Although radium concentrations varied between companies and exact paint formulas were proprietary, it is estimated that this amount of paint would have contained about 375 micrograms of radium (about the same mass as a mosquito’s head). It’s a very small amount in terms of its mass, but a very large amount to have ingested because the radioactivity had been highly concentrated during purification from its natural state in mineral ore.
Radium is relatively insoluble, and most of it would have passed through the dial painter’s gut without being absorbed. Nonetheless, approximately 20% would have been absorbed, and that would be enough to cause trouble. It would accumulate in bones and remain there. Day after day, year after year, the radium would continuously irradiate bones.16 Because bones are lined with living tissue and filled with blood-producing bone marrow, irradiation from radium permanently lodged within bone can have serious health consequences. All this happened to bones because of a very unfortunate chemical property of radium. Radium is a bone seeker.
What exactly is a bone seeker? Apart from their physical properties, radioisotopes are still chemical elements and retain their distinct chemical properties. As we have previously seen, an element’s chemical identity is determined by its number of protons.17 Thus, the proton number determines not only the name of the chemical but also its reactions. It was radium’s special chemistry that was responsible for the dial painters’ unique health problems. Radium belongs to the chemical family of alkaline earth metals (column 2 in the periodic table of elements). This family of elements includes calcium, the major mineral constituent of bone.
Unfortunately for the radium girls, elements within the same family often mimic each other’s chemistries. Radium mimics calcium. So, when radium enters the body, it goes to bone, the same place calcium normally goes. The radium gets incorporated into the mineral component of the bone and becomes a permanent constituent. Though the radium itself doesn’t hurt the mineral component of bone directly, the entire skeleton becomes radioactive, and the living tissues lining the mineral component of the bone are thus continuously exposed to radiation at high levels. This was the cause of the workers’ health ailments.
Although lung cancer was not involved, the radium girls’ ailments had a cause that was closely linked to the Schneeberg miners’ sickness. The women’s problems, however, were not due to radon. The radium paint couldn’t have released enough radon gas to be a health problem. The radium girls’ problem was the radium itself, which they were ingesting.
FIGURE 5.2. INGERSOLL RADIOLITE WATCH ADVERTISEMENT. Men and boys were the primary target market for radium watch sales. This advertisement appeared in the October 7, 1920, issue of The Youth’s Companion, a very popular boys’ magazine at the time. It includes a brief description of the entire radium refining process.
Radium and radon are both alpha-particle emitters and thus produce the same types of damage to cells. So why were the health ailments so different? Simply because different tissues were exposed to the radiation. The tissue that is exposed is determined by both the chemistry of the element (radium vs. radon) as well as the route of exposure (ingestion vs. breathing). The miners suffered lung ailments because the radioisotope was in the air, thereby exposing their lungs but not their other tissues. The dial painters mostly experienced bone problems—bone cancers and blood disorders—because the
ingested radium ended up in bone. We will see later that when the alpha emitter strontium was found to be a hazardous byproduct of nuclear fission reactions, it was possible to accurately predict its effects on health, because strontium’s atomic number placed it in the exact same family on the periodic table as radium, making it another bone seeker.18
After much denial and resistance, but under pressure from the courts, the watch companies finally accepted the blame for the radium workers’ ailments. From 1926 to 1936, Waterbury Clock Company paid out $90,000 ($1.5 million in 2015 dollars) in settlements to 16 women who had taken ill and put aside a reserve of $10,000 ($170,000 in 2015 dollars) to cover any future claims.19 New Jersey and Illinois watch companies made similar settlements.
Radium dial painting continued, but by 1927, the painters were working in fume hoods, and wore hairnets and rubber gloves. Lip pointing of brushes wasn’t permitted any longer. No cancers or other health effects were detected in workers hired after these precautions were implemented, although they continued to accumulate radium in their bodies at a rate of approximately one quarter of a microgram per year.20 It seemed that in the case of radium, like x-rays, the body could tolerate a certain level of ingestion before health effects would become apparent. But what exactly was that tolerance level? More studies would be needed.
Frances died on February 21, 1925. Her funeral was held at the Church of St. Stanislaus in Waterbury and her body interred at Calvary Cemetery. By now, all that is left of her remains are her bones. Being that the half-life of radium is 1,600 years, they still contain nearly the same amount of radium as they did on the day that she died.
Marie Curie learned about the health afflictions of the radium girls in June of 1925 when her friend Marie “Missy” Mattingly Meloney (1878–1943)—a feminist, Washington Post editor, and strong supporter of Curie’s scientific work—wrote to her from America.21 Although Curie was concerned for others, she did not think that she herself had incurred any significant risk since she had not actually ingested any radium. Also, her laboratory had taken some precautions to limit contamination. Curie was more concerned that she had overexposed herself during the x-ray work she had done during World War I. Shortly after Roentgen had discovered x-rays, Curie had developed a portable x-ray machine that she helped deploy to field hospitals on the war front. During that time, she learned of radiologists and x-ray technicians who had suffered severe damage from overexposure to x-rays. They had lost limbs and eyesight as a consequence and likely faced more long-term health problems. In fact, in her book Radiology and the War Curie had railed against overexposure to x-rays, writing that “a person who receives the rays feels no pain to warn that he has been exposed to a noxious dose.”22 No, Curie was not worried about internal contamination from radium so much as external exposures from gamma and x-rays, which she saw as a bigger threat.
RADIOACTIVE SNAKE OIL
Although the radium girls’ story was publicized in American newspapers as early as 1925 and protective standards for workers were put in place by 1927, at least one person seems to have missed the memo. Eben McBurney Byers (1880–1932) was a prominent industrialist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but he was even more famous for his golfing prowess. He competed in many amateur tournaments and was the US Amateur Golf Champion of 1906. While returning to Pittsburgh after attending a Harvard-Yale football game in the fall of 1927, he fell from his train berth and broke his arm. A doctor prescribed Radithor to aid healing. Radithor was a popular radium-containing patent medicine sold by William J. A. Bailey (1884–1949), a Harvard dropout who falsely claimed to be a medical doctor.23
Radithor was simply radium dissolved in distilled water. It was sold by the case in one-ounce bottles.24 Radithor sales and Bailey’s profits were huge. Each case of 30 bottles contained about $3.60 worth of radium, and the cases sold for $30.00 each, an 800% markup.25
Apparently, Mr. Byers really liked the stuff. He estimated that over the next three years he drank about 1,400 bottles of Radithor, and he even shared his supply with his friend, Mary Hill, who also became a devotee of the drink.26 By 1930, Byers had lost most of his jaw and had holes in his skull. He died a gruesome death on March 31, 1932. Six months later, Mary Hill was also dead from similar causes. Byers’s body now rests in a mausoleum in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, in a coffin lined with lead to protect cemetery visitors from radiation exposure.
The shame of all this was that radium had been known to be a bone seeker since 1913, when British scientist Walter Sydney Lazarus-Barlow (1865–1950) published a research paper that clearly demonstrated ingested radium ends up in bone.27 Paradoxically, far from drawing concern, it was widely interpreted to be beneficial, due to the popular assumption that radioactivity fostered a variety of health benefits by providing the body with added energy. Why would people think otherwise when charlatans were claiming that science had shown that radium water could enhance the sexual passion of water newts?28 Why should newts have all the fun?
Nonetheless, in 1914 Professor Ernst Zueblin of the University of Maryland Medical School published a review of more than 700 scientific publications in the international literature that reported on the internal use of radioactivity for therapeutic purposes.29 Although he concluded that there should be guarded enthusiasm regarding the therapeutic potential of radium, he also cautioned that ingested and injected radium could result in problems with necrosis and ulcerations. Unfortunately, his advice went unheeded.
Thomas Edison had even made public warnings about the health risks of radium as early as 1903. Edison had received a sample of radium from France by way of a former employee, William J. Hammer (1858–1934), who had visited the Curies while traveling in Europe in 1902. Wary because of his prior bad experience with eye injuries from x-rays, Edison kept his distance while experimenting with radium and even attempted to test its biological effects on insects.30 Despite his precautions, one time he inadvertently put a vial of radium in his vest pocket and carried it for days, alarming both his staff and his family but apparently suffering no ill consequences. When interviewed about radium he urged people to exercise caution: “It took centuries to develop electricity upon its present scale, and it may take years for us to get any definitive ideas about radium.” Another time he publicly remarked, “There may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results, and everyone handling it should take care.”31 Unfortunately, by this time, the public had likely tuned out all health warnings coming from Edison, due to his incessant harangue about the dangers of AC electricity during the prior decade. Sadly, this time he was correct.
Luckily, there were two factors that kept radium health potions from ever becoming a major public health epidemic. First, most products were absolute frauds. It has been estimated that 95% of all radium solutions on the market at the time contained no radium at all.32 They were a total scam and had no health effect, good or bad. Second, the potions that actually did contain radium, like Radithor, were too expensive for people of average means to use as a daily elixir. Only the wealthy could afford this indulgence. Although the actual body count was low in terms of a public health problem,33 radium poisoning had struck near both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum–young working-class women and middle-aged, aristocratic men. Such a demographically broad scourge on society could not be allowed to stand for long.
At the time, the US Food and Drug Administration was in its infancy and lacked the regulatory teeth it has today. Even so, the Federal Trade Commission was able to close shady businesses. Following Byers’s death and the publicity it generated, the Federal Trade Commission came down on “Doctor” Bailey, and he was forced to close up shop and stop producing Radithor. Still, Bailey remained resourceful. Shortly afterward, he started a new enterprise, the Adrenoray Company, which marketed a belt that held radium sources over the adrenal glands—the hormone-producing organs located on top of the kidneys—to increase vitality and “treat sexual strength.”34
Remarkably, Bail
ey’s supplier of radium was United States Radium (US Radium) in Orange, New Jersey; this was the same supplier that the watchmakers used for their paint. Bailey began selling his Radithor in 1925, the same year as the peak of the radium girls’ health problems. By this time, both US Radium and Bailey well knew of the radium workers’ plight, but they denied that the health problems were due to radium ingestion. Bailey claimed he would even be willing to swallow in one single dose the equivalent of all the radium that was used in a watch dial factory over an entire month of production. It is not clear that Bailey ever made good on this offer. It’s unlikely, since such a dose would probably have been lethal, and Bailey lived another 24 years, dying in 1949 at the age of 64, and outliving poor Mr. Byers by 17 years.
Von Sochocky, the producer of the radium paint, did not fare as well as Bailey did. His body contained enough radium to interfere with his laboratory radioactivity measurements, and his fingers were badly damaged. It was too late for Von Sochocky to benefit from the workplace radium protections instituted in 1927. By then, Von Sochocky and his laboratory assistant Victor Roth were suffering from chronic anemia that had begun around 1924. In 1927, just as workplace radium standards came into effect, Von Sochocky and Roth both died within a few months of each other.35
The legacy of the radium dial painting and Radithor lasted for years. In the 1980s, some homes around Orange and Montclair, New Jersey—the center of US Radium activities—were found to have elevated levels of radon. Radon can be detected only by measuring radioactivity levels in the air. Widespread testing has shown that radon contamination in homes typically results from radon gas emanating naturally from radium decay in the soil, just as in the Schneeberg mines, and such radon contamination is not uncommon in New Jersey. The source of radon in these particular homes, however, turned out to be sand fill used at the housing sites, indicating that the sand used in construction was contaminated with radium. The sand’s source was traced to the byproduct residue from the old radium extraction processing facility of US Radium in Orange. The homeowners filed suit against the successor company, Safety Light Corporation. In the end, the courts ruled that Safety Light executives should have known the dangers of radium contamination and their failure to disclose the presence of radium to the homeowners constituted negligence. The New Jersey Supreme Court held the company liable since “radium has always been and continues to be an extraordinarily dangerous substance.”36
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