They sat in rows, dipping fine camelhair brushes into a radium solution, then ‘pointed’ them between moistened lips before painting the numbers on the dials. But when radium-dial-painting ‘studios’ were set up in Newark, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, hordes of working-class girls, some as young as 14, applied for jobs painting luminous numerals on watchfaces. These treatments were strictly for the rich - gram for gram, radium was the most expensive substance on earth. Others took to drinking radium water, or visiting radium clinics and spas. Some claimed it could restore vitality in the elderly. As she shared her discovery with scientists, and radium was found to be capable of destroying human tissue, it was enlisted in the battle against cancer - and not just cancer but fever, gout and constipation. She was in thrall to it: it stirred her, she wrote, with ‘ever-new emotion and enchantment’. ‘My beautiful radium’, Marie Curie called the element she discovered in 1898. To the dismay of her friends and family the cause of death had been recorded as syphilis, but, as her coffin was exhumed and its lid levered open, Mollie’s corpse was seen to be aglow with a ‘soft luminescence’. An employee of the United States Radium Corporation (USRC), she had died five years earlier, aged 24. On the morning of 15 October 1927, a dim, autumn day, a group of men foregathered at the Rosedale cemetery in New Jersey and picked their way through the headstones to the grave of one Amelia - ‘Mollie’ - Maggia. Photos of victims at the bottom of this page.warning: some photos are graphic.Įxcerpt from Kate Moore's book, THE RADIUM GIRLS
The young ladies who were not told that radium was dangerous to work with and the horrible results between the years 19 On this month's Morbidly Fascinating Page: HOME ABOUT FICTION POETRY ART SUBMIT NEWS PUBLISHERS OTHER.MAGAZINES CONTACT SCARY GHOSTS REVIEWS
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