Factory managers told young women to lick their radium paintbrushes to get a fine tip — knowing radium was deadly — and watched them glow in the dark as their jaws crumbled.
Starting around 1917, hundreds of young women in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut were hired to paint luminous watch dials with radium-based paint. To keep their brushes fine-tipped, supervisors instructed them to 'lip-point' — putting the brush in their mouth between each stroke. The women swallowed tiny amounts of radium with every dip. They were told it was completely safe.
It was not safe. The company's own chemists worked behind lead screens, wore protective gear, and used tongs to handle radium. They knew. The workers were simply not told. Some women, charmed by the novelty, painted their nails, teeth, and faces with the luminous paint to glow at dances. Their clothes and hair shone in the dark. Within a few years, they began to die.
The symptoms were horrific. Workers developed severe anemia, spontaneous bone fractures, and a condition called 'radium jaw' — their jawbones literally disintegrated and had to be removed. Teeth fell out. Holes formed in skulls. The radium had incorporated itself into their bones, irradiating them from within. By 1927, over fifty factory workers had died.
Five of the dying women — Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and two others — decided to sue the United States Radium Corporation despite being too ill to raise their own arms. The case became a national sensation. Newspapers called them the 'Radium Girls.' The company tried every legal tactic to delay, including arguing the women were dying of syphilis.
The 1928 settlement awarded each woman $10,000 plus a $600 annual annuity — and agreement that the company would pay their medical bills for life. All five were dead within a few years. But the case established the landmark legal principle that workers have the right to sue employers for labor-related health damage, reshaping occupational safety law in America.
The Radium Girls' bodies continued to matter after their deaths. Researchers measured radium excretion from dial painters for decades, directly contributing to the establishment of radiation safety standards. Their cases influenced how the nuclear industry was regulated. The last radium dial factory in the United States didn't close until 1978 — sixty years after the first women began painting.