Radium Girls

After being told that the paint was harmless, the women in each facility ingested deadly amounts of radium after being instructed to "point" their brushes on their lips in order to give them a fine tip.

Their plant in Orange, New Jersey, employed as many as 300 workers, mainly women, to paint radium-lit watch faces and instruments, misleading them that it was safe.

Despite this knowledge, a number of similar deaths had occurred by 1925, including USRC's chief chemist, Dr. Edwin E. Leman[6] and several female workers.

Dental pain, loose teeth, lesions, and ulcers, and the failure of tooth extractions to heal were some of these conditions.

Columbia University specialist Frederick Flynn was an industrial toxicologist in contract with the U.S. Radium Corporation.

[13] USRC and other watch-dial companies rejected claims that the affected workers were suffering from exposure to radium.

Syphilis, a notorious sexually transmitted infection at the time, was often cited in attempts to smear the reputations of the women.

[19] In Orange, New Jersey, the story of the abuse perpetrated against the workers is distinguished from most such cases by the fact that the ensuing litigation was covered widely by the media.

Plant worker Grace Fryer decided to sue, but it took two years for her to find a lawyer willing to take on USRC.

The five factory workers involved in the suit were dubbed "the radium girls"– Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice.

The demand for money by sick and dying former employees continued into the mid-1930s before a suit was brought before the Illinois Industrial Commission (IIC).

Some of the women received no payout and by the time the matter was officially settled by the supreme court, Catherine Donahue was dead.

Industrial standards for safety improved as a result, and in 1949 congress passed a bill that decreed compensation for all workers suffering from occupational diseases.

[28] Robley D. Evans made the first measurements of exhaled radon and radium excretion from a former dial painter in 1933.

This information was used in 1941 by the National Bureau of Standards to establish a tolerance level for radium at 0.1 μCi (3.7 kBq).

The project also focused on the collection of information and, in some cases, tissue samples from the radium dial painters.

It also considers the induction of several forms of cancer caused by internal exposure to radium and its daughter nuclides.