Radium paint made watch dials glow in the dark, and the First World War made glowing dials a boom industry. At the United States Radium Corporation plant in Orange, New Jersey — and later at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois — the painters were young women, some as young as 14. It was elite work: clean, well paid, and glamorous. The girls painted their buttons and teeth with the leftover paint for fun.
To keep a fine point on their camel-hair brushes, they were taught to lip-point: brush between the lips, dip in radium paint, paint a numeral. Repeat, hundreds of dials a day. Each pass delivered a trace of radium — chemically similar to calcium — straight to their bones.
The company chemists worked behind lead screens and handled radium with forceps.
Radium jaw
The first deaths began around 1922. Dentists in Orange saw a new horror: teeth that fell out leaving sockets that never healed, then jawbones that splintered and came away in fragments — “radium jaw.” Other women developed crushing anaemia, spontaneous fractures, and huge bone sarcomas. Amelia Maggia, one of the first to die, had her death certificate marked syphilis — a stigma the company let stand.
US Radium commissioned a Harvard study in 1924; when it confirmed the link, the company suppressed it and published denials. It took the Consumers’ League’s Katherine Wiley and pathologist Harrison Martland — whose 1925 breath test proved the women were exhaling radon from their own decaying bones — to establish the truth: the painters were radioactive, incurably, from the inside.
Five women against US Radium
Grace Fryer spent two years finding a lawyer willing to fight the statute of limitations — she had left the plant years before falling ill. In 1927 she and four other dying women sued. Press coverage was worldwide; the women testified from beds, some unable to raise their arms to take the oath. In June 1928 the company settled: $10,000 each, a $600 annual pension, and medical costs — while never admitting liability.
In Illinois, Radium Dial kept lip-pointing going for years afterwards; Catherine Wolfe Donohue’s group won their case in 1938, with Donohue testifying from a stretcher months before her death.
The cases helped establish the principle that workers with slow-developing occupational disease could sue, fed directly into later US occupational safety standards, and gave science a grim gift: the dial painters’ bodies became the foundational dataset for radium exposure limits used into the atomic age. Some of the women’s remains are still measurably radioactive today.