![]() The History behind Luminous: The Story of a Radium.Shining Light on a Dark Past: BOLDR Venture Un.Dark.Catherine and her friends never wanted to be the center of attention. At first that made me a bit sad, but later I found it fitting. It isn't centrally located like the Lincoln-Douglas statue but sits on a quiet corner a bit away from the busier part of the historic downtown district. Today, Ottawa has a memorial to the dial painters who suffered and died due to the negligence of the radium industry. I was also able to climb Starved Rock and drive by the house she inherited from her aunt and uncle. This was an important place to include in her story and it made me feel closer to her to be there. However, I was able to attend church at St Columba, where Catherine had been baptized and married. ![]() The old schoolhouse that was home to Radium Dial was long gone - the material from its destruction having been spread around town and used for land fill, exacerbating the radiation problem that continues to plague the area. Hughes testified that all five women had ingested so much radium that their breath was toxic.My next step was visiting Ottawa, Illinois, where Catherine lived her short life and worked at Radium Dial. 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. On Labor Day, 2011, a statue was unveiled in their memory in Ottawa IL, one of several locations where radium watch dial painters worked. "Estimates of the total number of women employed in the industry between 19 vary, but a number approaching 10,000 is not unreasonable." Note: By the 2010s, the radium girl were finally getting some overdue recognition. "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. USRC hired young women to paint these instruments with radium paint. ![]()
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