There was radium dust all over the studio. (At the time radium was the most valuable substance on Earth, selling for $120,000 for a single gram-$2.2 million at today's value.) Each painter mixed her own paint, dabbling a little radium powder into a small white crucible, and added a dash of water and a gum arabic adhesive, a combination that created a greenish-white luminous paint, called “undark.” The fine yellow powder contained only a minuscule amount of radium mixed with zinc sulfide, with which the radium reacted to give a brilliant glow. Each girl had a flat wooden tray of dials beside her. The girls sat in rows dressed in their ordinary clothes and painted dials at top speed because they were paid by the number of dials they painted. The women for the most part were very pleased to have the jobs. Some started working at the plant immediately after finishing grammar school. The watch dial painters at the RLMC plant were all women, mainly teenagers, who were recent immigrants to the USA. That is what was reported in magazines and newspapers around the country. Most people believed the effects of radium were all positive. Information on the side effects of radium, however, was unavailable to the public. Von Sochocky himself had experienced the wrath of radium that had infiltrated his left index finger, and he hacked it off.
#RADIUM PAINT SKIN#
The time he studied with the Curies, Pierre was heard to remark that “he would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him.” By that time the Curies were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Sochocky had studied under the Curies and understood that radium carried great dangers. Sochocky had invented the “paint” they used to paint watch dial numerals and hands with the luminous substance that made them visible in the dark. In 1913, Sabin von Sochocky and George Willis, both physicians, founded in Newark, New Jersey, the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation (RLMC).
It was so difficult to extract from its source that only a few grams were available anywhere in the world. Marie and Pierre Curie, in 1898, discovered radium. Kate Moore's purpose was to put the radium girls center stage and tell the story from their perspective. Although two previous books ( 2, 3) had been written on the radium girls' stories, they focused entirely on the legal and scientific aspects. She walked in the women's footsteps, met their families, and visited their homes and graves and the sites of the dial-painting “studios.” The result is a magnificent but sad book. Her research took her to New York, Washington, DC, Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and Chicago and Ottawa, Illinois. In 2015, she directed a production of These Shining Lights, a play about the radium girls, and found the dial painters' stories so powerful that she was inspired to write the above-titled book. Kate Moore is a Sunday Times (London, UK) best-selling author, book editor, and ghostwriter. It describes the consequences of that radium poisoning. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is a shocking, heartbreaking, and tragic story involving a number of mainly teenage immigrant girls in Newark and Orange, New Jersey, and in Ottawa, Illinois, who painted watch dials containing radium ( 1).
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