The Messed Up Truth About The Radium Girls

The story of the Radium Girls is one of the most horrifying in recent history, yet it has been nearly forgotten today. What started as a fairly good job for a group of poor women, though, soon turned into a nightmare. This is the messed up truth about the Radium Girls.

Radium was discovered in 1898, and it didn't take long for entrepreneurs to see the potential value in its luminescent properties. A few years after it was discovered, William J. Hammer mixed it with zinc sulfide and created a paint. While he didn't patent the invention, Tiffany & Company did. The new paint was wildly popular in Europe first, and the people who worked with it would glow as they walked through the streets at night.

It wasn't until 1914 that radium-based luminescent paint started to be produced in the United States. By 1921, the main manufacturer had already expanded a few times and moved, changing their name to the United States Radium Corporation and patenting the name "Undark" for their paint. Other companies started popping up as well, using named like "Luna" and "Marvelite" for their paints.

They weren't just making paints, they were using those paints too. US Radium hired scores of girls and young women, some as young as just 11-years-old, to paint watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. To make sure the dials got a good coating, the girls were encouraged to put the paintbrush brush between their lips and twirl it into a point. It was the best way to get truly precise numbers and brush strokes, but with each lick of the brush, they were swallowing radium — which we now know is radioactive.

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The birth of radium paint | 0:14
Painting bodies with radium | 1:21
Originally marketed as a cure-all | 2:02
The sickness started slowly | 3:12
From bad to worse | 3:51
Companies covered up the controversy | 4:44
Fighting for compensation | 5:25
Abandoned and ignored | 6:24
Long-term health effects | 6:57
Justice for the Radium Girls... eventually | 7:34
Buried in lead-lined coffins | 8:23
The building remained poisonous | 9:32

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