The Radium Girls.

Radium is the substance that killed a generation of woman. Not through accident, but careful, precise work. Each does of luminous compound containing one of the most radioactive elements on the planet. In the early 1920s, radium was the one element of the age. Scientists had only recently discovered its eerie green glow and mysterious warming properties. 

Radium was added to everything form toothpaste to chocolate, marketed as a health tonic in factories across america young women were hired to paint watch dials with radium paint, creating timepieces that glowed in the dark, perfect for soldiers in the trenchs of World War I. 

They were taught a technique called lip pointing, using their lips to shape the brushes into a fine point after each stroke, each time ingesting a small amount of radium paint. Their employers assured them that it was perfectly safe. In fact, it would improve their complexion. 

Their employers were wrong. Radium has a half-life of 1600 years. WHen ingested, because it has two free electrons. Just like calcium, the body mistakes it for calcium and deposits it directly into the skeleton. Once there continuously bombards the surrounding tissue with a shower of alpha radiation crashing thorught the DNA of nearby cells and irradiating the body from the inside out. Workers complained of aching jaws, a sore tooth, or general discomfort in the mouth as teeth began to loosen form the jawbone, then fall out entirely, were missing teeth, left some bone visible. 

Some doctors described the jaws as looking like they had been eaten by moths, like a crumbling patelwork of bones, and as the symptoms intensified during examination, portion of the jawbone would come away without sugical tools literally crumbling in a doctor’s hand. A phenomenon that became known as Radium Jaw. 

Their bones became so fragile that walking would cause spontaneous fractures, their femurs snapping under their own weight. There are even reports that the glow of some women’s skeleton were visible through their skin, from the radium embedded in their bones. Perhaps most cruelly, many of these women were pregnant when symptoms began appearing, the radium crossing placenta barrier causing miscarriages, still-births and infants born with severe deformitites. 

An estimated 4000 women were employed across the united states as dial painters during the height of this radium industry, and of those several hundred are known to have suffered these severe health complications, with thousands living with long term effects of radium use. When these women sought out help, the companies launched many campaigns to discredit them. 

Medical records were falsified, death certificates were altered to list syphilis as a cause of death, and attempt to blame the women’s loose morals rather than workplace poisoning. This tragedy sparked landmark legal battles that fundamentally changed united states labor laws and reformed occupational safety standards.