Zhang: You’ve said you first came across this story through These Shining Lives, a play about the dial painters, of which you ended up directing a production. The thing that got me was when Arthur Roeder, the president of the United States Radium Corporation, was on the stand, he was asked, “What was the first case that you knew of?” He says, “I don't remember the name.” Essentially, you've killed these people and you can't remember their name. I think they did think the girls were expendable and disposable. Was there a gender or class division at play? Zhang: But not everyone thought that radium was harmless, right? The dial painters were taught to lick their brushes, but the male lab technicians working for the very same company took precautions around radium. He writes about seeing her smock from work hanging up in the bedroom and and it gives him the feeling of “a ghost bouncing around on the wall.” It's haunting that they were later nicknamed the “ghost girls” because of what happened.Ĭharlotte Purcell, one of the painters, demonstrates the lip-pointing technique that they used to get the brushes to a fine point. In the book, I quote the husband of one of the girls who was a dial painter. Kate Moore: They were just entranced by it! It was luminous. You write about these women coming home from the factory, covered in radium and glowing in the dark. Sarah Zhang: Even a century later, reading about how radium glows in the dark sounds kind of magical. Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. I spoke to Moore about her book and the legacy of the dial painters.
#RADIUM DIALS FREE#
A free ebook excerpt is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Google Play, and the book comes out in the U.S.
With their cautionary tales in mind, scientists on the Manhattan Project learned to protect themselves from radiation. Their lawsuits were key to reinforcing the U.S.’s nascent workplace safety standards.
In the a new book titled The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, Kate Moore tells the story of how these dial painters took on the radium companies that made them sick-as they were dying of radium poisoning. Their radium-filled bones were being bombarded with radiation from the inside. So all that radium the women licked off of their paintbrushes actually ended up in their bones, like calcium would have. The human body, it turns out, easily mistakes radium for calcium. Their jaw bones-brittle and degraded-broke at a light touch. Then years later, after they stopped working the factories, the women started getting mysteriously ill. These products didn’t actually all contain the expensive and precious element, but the evocation of radium gave them a healthful glow. You could buy radium water, radium face cream, radium toothpaste, and even Radium Brand Creamery Butter. Plus, radium was supposed to be good for you. They were even taught to paint tiny numbers on the dials by licking their paintbrushes to a fine point. The young women had no reason to worry about radium then. The paint got onto their hands, into their hair, and settled on their clothes. During World War I and the years thereafter, dozens of teenage girls and young women worked in radium-dial factories, painting glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches and airplane instruments.
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