the true story about the watch factories of death
The United States Radium Corporation
Previously named the 'Radium Luminous Material Corporation', the USRC opened its door for the first time in New Jersey, 1914. Their product? Undark: a radioactive paint made of radium salts and zinc sulfide. It was this chemical combination that caused the paint to glow iridescent green in the absence of light.
The war demanded this fluorescent substance and the women who were left at home while their husbands and sons trekked to Europe filed into factories such as these to paint watches, compasses, and aircraft equipment for the effort.
Others followed suit even after the war was over. The Radium Dial Company opened its doors next to a clock company in Ottawa, Illinois in 1920 and another partnered with the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut soon after.
Paint application room in the United States Radium Corporation; 422 Alden St, Orange, New Jersey
The women who worked in these factories spent hours fastidiously painting in numbers on clock faces. In order to achieve clean, accurate strokes, they were encouraged to lick the paintbrushes in-between applications (a technique called 'lip pointing') to achieve the finest point possible (8).
Now, these women weren't dumb.
They asked questions: "Was it safe?" "Would it be harmful?" And the answer came from the company, "Of course it is!" After all, the company was selling the waste of its radium extraction to schools to dump in the childrens' playground.
Dr. Arnold von Sochocky (the inventor of Undark himself) said it was "most hygenic...more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths". Meanwhile, worker complaints of fatigue, sickness, and loose teeth went dismissed and unattended.
Dr. Arnold von Sochocky (1883-1928)
Cause of death: aplastic anemia brought on by radium poisoning
The women spent so much around this radium paint that their equipment, their clothes, and their skin constantly glowed green, earning them the nickname "the ghost girls".
And still the radium craze continued.
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The Horror Begins
In September 1922, 24-year-old
Mollie Maggia who worked at the radium plant in New Jersey, died after her
entire bottom jaw fell out of her mouth.
What began as a tooth complaint a year before devolved into joint pain, rheumatism, arthritis, and eventually a fatal hemorrhage. By the following year, another dozen young women barely in their twenties would suffer similar fates.
This scandal threatened to undermine the radium industry. So, the USCR decided to publicize that the women were
dying of syphilis, after living filthy and disreputable lives.
The initial diagnosis, a phenomena called "radium jaw", soon became an insufficient explanation for the other physical ailments that plagued the ghost girls. When tests were done on one Sarah Maillefer, her entire body was found to be radioactive--her bones, her organs, even her blood. Death was slow, agonizing, and inevitable, for her and so many others.
"There is nothing known to science that will eliminate, change, or neutralize these [radium] deposits."
- Raymond H. Barry, attorney
Even as dozens more women came forward and showed signs of radium poisoning, the United States Radium Corporation continued to deny responsibility or offer compensation. Something had to be done. And so, in 1927, five women, though their lives were already forfeit, mustered the strength and the courage to stand up to the giant conglomerate and initiated a lawsuit.