Their attorney, Raymond Berry, hired 30-year-old physicist Elizabeth Hughes who used an electroscope to measure radioactivity in the breath of the five dial painters. Newspaper headlines dubbed them the Living Dead and the Radium Girls. It took Fryer two years to find an attorney to take the case, but once she did, four other women - Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice - joined.

'Studies by officials in New Jersey proved that the women were suffering from radiation poisoning, and that it had come from the radium they were exposed to in their workplace.'īy the late 1920s, five women sued USRC in Orange, New Jersey, starting with Grace Fryer. 'When one of USRC's senior chemists died of aplastic anemia in 1925, it became obvious that there was a connection,' Stemm says. submitted a falsified version of the report to New Jersey officials and suppressed its findings, continuing to refute the idea that its radium dial paint was making anyone sick. 'Radium poisoning caused the victims' jaws to disintegrate over time, eventually killing them.'īy the time the first dial painter died in 1923, the medical community had begun to suspect that radium exposure was the cause. 'This extremely painful and disfiguring condition was the most common of the diseases suffered by the ,' Stemm says. The women's employers at Radium Corporation assured them the paint was harmless, but many of the women soon fell ill, some severely with necrosis of the jaw. 'To ensure a sufficiently sharp point, the women were told to use their lips and tongue to shape the brush.' They had to do this repeatedly throughout the day to keep that fine point, which meant the women ingested radioactive paint constantly. 'Once the paint was mixed, the extremely fine detail painting required very sharply pointed paint brushes,' says Stemm. Some of the women even used radium paint on their teeth to brighten their smiles. They were soon known as ' ghost girls,' because the radium dust made their skin, hair and clothes glow. The women would mix their own paint from radium dust and other ingredients.

'Estimates of the total number of women employed in the industry between 19 vary, but a number approaching 10,000 is not unreasonable.' 'At the height of the industry in the early 1920s, about 2,000 women were employed,' says Stemm. Their small hands were suited to the detailed work, and the jobs paid well. A few months later, on September 12, 1922, at the age of 25, she died. She had gradually contracted symptoms such as anemia, joint pains, and weight loss. She worked at the factory for four years before she had to quit, due to health problems. USRC hired young women to paint these instruments with radium paint. Amelia Maggia was 21 when she went to work at the U.S Radium Corporation factory.

Amelia maggia jaw and radium poisoning