THE RADIUM (GHOST) GIRLS

History 6 Minutes

On the 20th of April, 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated a brand new element: radium, after years of hard work. At the time, it was believed that this new material might have all kinds of beneficial properties. So radium was swiftly incorporated into many products, ranging from makeup to ceramics to health tonics and jewelry. What wasn’t understood at this time was that radium was, in fact, quite deadly. A year before the publishing of her book “Radioactivity,” Marie died. Before her death, she had become aware of the great perils of radiation, which is also what took her life.

By the time Marie died, radium had taken the globe by storm. Radiation was something that wasn’t well understood at the time but had positive associations. It was branded under names such as “cure for the living dead” and “perpetual sushine. And perpetual is exactly what it turned out to be!

As the world descended into World War One, another use for radium came to the forefront: when infused into paint, it would make that paint glow in the dark. This made it an ideal material for coating watch faces, control panels, and instrument dials. Radium provided much-needed illumination for soldiers in the field without relying on other bulky equipment. From 1917 the demand for radium-coated dials skyrocketed, which was good news for the United States Radium Corporation. The company had been in the business of extracting and processing uranium for a few years. Now it expanded to mixing and applying radium-infused paint, a substance which they called“undark.”

Women using radium paint on alarm clock at a factory in 1932 | Picture Credits: Daily Herald Archive

It was no surprise that many local people were employed as dial painters. The dial painters would be supplied with radium paint and freshly stamped dials and had to use paintbrushes to strategically apply radium to the dial parts that needed to glow. Precision was required, so workers were instructed to lick the tips of their brushes in between each application to bring the bristles to a fine point.

For precision, the girls would soften the brush between their lips, thereby ingesting radium in the process | Photo Credits: Nontoxic Prints

The United States Radium Corporation workers had access to radium for free. They used it to paint their teeth and nails to give them a pleasant glow before heading out to dances in the evenings. Years passed. Hundreds of thousands of dials were painted and shipped out. The war eventually came to an end, much to the relief of the general population. But all was not well for the ex-workers of the United States Radium Corporation.

The original site of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, NJ Richard Harbus

Slowly, one by one, dial painters were falling ill. As the 1910s became the 1920s, hundreds of women who had worked as dial painters started noticing pain in their teeth and jaws. Many were having to visit their dentists regularly and were losing teeth with every visit. They were constantly exhausted, and in some cases, it was found that their jawbones were riddled with holes, reduced to a brittle hollow honeycomb. Despite this alarming wave of sickness, few were able to persuade anyone to take their ailments seriously. These female workers came to be known as the ‘Radium Girls.’

Radium Jaw, a certain sign of death in victims | Photo Credits: All That Is Interesting

When 22-year-old Molly Maggia passed away after experiencing years of pain in her jaw and teeth, her condition was described as syphilis. The complaints of many other women were glossed over with the same explanation, despite symptoms that pointed towards something more sinister. It was 1925 before any of the workers came to understand the devastating effect radium had on their bodies.

The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was lucrative — plus painting glow-in-the-dark radium on soldiers’ wristwatch faces meant she and her young female co-workers were helping in the war effort.

Grace Fryer had once been a dial painter. Now her body was quite literally falling apart. The bones of her spine crumbled and required a metal brace. Tumors and abscesses sprouted in her jaw, and she was in constant pain. The radium she had ingested while working had riddled her with cancer and weakened her bones. It would soon end her life.

Furious, Grace and four of her colleagues moved to sue their ex-employer. For two years, however, no lawyer would take them seriously, despite their steadily worsening conditions. In 1928, the suit was finally filed. By this time, the demand for radium was declining, as people woke up to the dangers of radiation. Sales of radium-infused products fell further when newspapers around the world printed details of Grace’s story.

Grace Fryer, the first victim to take the radium industry to court | Photo Credits: Buzzfeed

The Radium Girls weren’t just sick; they were literally radioactive. The body of Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927 in the hope that her bones would give the remaining victims the evidence they needed to win their cases. Reportedly, when her coffin was lifted off the ground, her body glowed because of radiation. It wasn’t entirely surprising, considering her bones were found to be highly radioactive.

By the end of 1928, the case had been settled in favor of the female workers. They were awarded some compensation, although it was only a fraction of what they had initially demanded. Their medical bills were covered, and they were able to live out their final days with some measure of dignity. Many more suits followed from workers not just at the United States Radium Corporation but at several companies that had handled radium in the years after its discovery. Workers came to testify on their death beds. While Grace Fryer and her colleagues are remembered for leading the fight against injustice, there were thousands of more workers whose fates varied enormously.

Bedside Hearings of radium girls were common since they were too ill to come to the court. | Photo Credits: RSNA

Though many of the radium girls suffered greatly and died before their time, their deaths were not in vain. Many of these victims volunteered for tests and medical examinations, allowing us to understand for the first time how radiation affects the human body. This persuaded scientists to take extraordinary precautions in later experiments with nuclear weapons, potentially saving thousands of lives.

In addition to this enormous service to later generations, the case pushed forward by the radium girls was the first incident in which an employer was forced to take responsibility for the health and safety of its employees. This was a revolutionary concept in 1928.

The sacrifice and courage of the Radium Girls deserve to be applauded. Their case led to the introduction of life-saving regulations for workers all over the world and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States. The fearless champions continue to shine through history.

Few if any residents in Orange, NJ today know the history of the former plant site. Quietly tucked into a tree-lined residential neighborhood, it has been renamed High & Alden Street Park and features a playground — perhaps a fitting tribute to the young lives lost.

“I think it’s a good idea they [made it a park],’’ resident Robin Laurent, 40, recently told The Post after learning of its past. “It’s good for the people in the neighborhood and the people of Orange.’’

The playground that now stands on the site


References: https://nypost.com/2017/03/22/skin-glowing-from-radium-ghost-girls-died-for-a-greater-cause/

View at Medium.com

https://agnostic.com/post/620923/the-radium-girls-the-dark-story-of-americas-shining-women-in-the-1920s-a-group-of-factory-wor

Unknown's avatar

Published by NebraskaFilly

Army veteran (1976-1979), retired with entirely too much time on my hands

Published

126 thoughts on “THE RADIUM (GHOST) GIRLS”

  1. reading that the satanists declare abortion to be their religious ritual and want to be able to have access in those states that are banning it. i cannot believe any sane person would consider another person’s murder a religious ritual–because at what age does it stop? if they can argue that an unborn child is a ritual…won’t they later argue a 5 year old is their ritual? a 25 year old? at what point does it end? it doesn’t…so it must NOT start.

    next they will claim pedophilia is their ritual, cannibalism is their ritual, bestiality…they will never give up. do not give an inch on this!

    Liked by 1 person

  2. I did my civic duty and voted. Forgot my reading glasses, tho, and I could hardly read the names!!! LOL – ahhhhh….coffee again. I was out of creamer so I’ve been drinking hot tea.

    The Orioles are trying to figure out how to get inside the cage to the jelly. It always takes them a while every spring to figure it out.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. IIRC, they played a recording on the news of him talking to his Father on the phone, telling him they weren’t doing anything to him and he didn’t even have to register as a sex offender!!!

    EXCERPT: “Convicted transgender child sex molester James “Hannah” Tubbs, who was given a light juvenile sentence by George Soros-backed Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, has been booked for murder in Kern County to the north.

    Tubbs pleaded guilty to choking and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom stall in 2014, a crime that shocked Los Angeles at the time. Gascón declined to prosecute Tubbs as an adult because the crime took place just before Tubbs’s 18th birthday. The juvenile sentence meant Tubbs would not have to register as a sex offender. One of Gascón’s criminal justice “reforms” was to stop prosecuting juvenile offenders as adults — a policy he revised somewhat after the Tubbs case.

    Separately, Bill Melugin of Fox News reported Tuesday that Tubbs was charged with murder, linked to a 2019 robbery:

    ‘Hannah Tubbs, a transgender California inmate convicted of molesting a child, has been charged with murder. The first-degree murder charge out of Kern County on Tuesday comes after authorities recently charged Tubbs in connection to a 2019 robbery.

    The suspect is being held on $1 million bond and is set to appear in court for an arraignment hearing on Tuesday afternoon, according to Kern County documents.’

    Tubbs was in juvenile custody before being transferred to Kern County, but could have been released as soon as next month, Melugin noted. He noted Tubbs could, if convicted, face a life sentence for his “4th strike” under the state’s three-strikes law.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2022/05/10/convicted-transgender-child-molester-given-light-sentence-by-soros-backed-d-a-gascon-booked-for-murder/

    Liked by 1 person

  4. EXCERPT: “A report issued by a team of researchers from institutions including Harvard University found that economic and racial learning gaps in states such as Texas and Florida did not widen due to schools largely maintaining in-person classes during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Harvard Professor Thomas Kane explains: “Where schools remained in-person, gaps did not widen. Where schools shifted to remote learning, gaps widened sharply. Shifting to remote instruction was like turning a switch on a critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”

    In November 2020, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced that schools were required to remain open for in-person learning in the spring as the state continued to battle the coronavirus. As a result of maintaining in-person classes, schools lost little ground academically, according to the study, which also noted that high-poverty schools in America held many fewer in-person classes, and suffered large losses in achievement due to the increase in remote learning.

    Now, experts are predicting that these results will foreshadow a widening of the racial and economic achievement gap in the United States. The report was a joint effort of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, an educational research nonprofit.

    “We found that districts that spent more weeks in remote instruction lost more ground than districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner,” Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told the Gazette.

    “Anyone who has been teaching by Zoom would not be surprised by that,” Kane continued. “The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so.”

    “To give you a sense of the magnitude: In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth,” the professor added.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/05/10/study-red-states-were-right-schools-that-stayed-in-person-didnt-lose-academic-ground/

    Liked by 1 person

  5. ROFLMAO

    EXCERPT: “The largest tech firms in the world have reportedly lost over $1 trillion in value over just three trading days. Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, and Google all lost more than $100 billion in a few days, while Facebook lost $70 billion.

    CNBC reports that the largest tech firms in the world including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon have lost over $1 trillion in combined value in just three trading sessions. Stocks have had a large sell-off overall since the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday, but tech firms seem to be hit the hardest by the change.

    Investors are reportedly less interested in the tech firms that largely drove business during a bull market in recent years and are instead focusing on safer bets, including companies like Campbell Soup, General Mills, and J.M. Smucker.

    Apple, which is the world’s most valuable public company, shed $220 billion in value since the close of trading on Wednesday. This was shortly after Fed Chair Jerome Powell declared that inflation was too high and there were no plans for a rate hike by more than half of a percentage point.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2022/05/10/silicon-valley-underwater-tech-giants-lose-1-trillion-in-value-in-3-days/

    Liked by 1 person

  7. People saying it has never happened before that the Queen Mother didn’t give the speech to open Parliament? Wrong!

    EXCERPT: “While this is not the first time the Queen has missed the opening of parliament and her speech, it is certainly the first in a long time, having sat out the event in 1959 and 1963, both times due to her being pregnant.

    Several changes were seen in today’s opening distinguishing it from others in the past. Normally the Queen would walk alone into the House of Lords to give the address to members, but last year she was accompanied by Prince Charles who led her by the hand to provide physical support and balance to the then 95-year-old. This year the 96-year-old Queen was of course absent and Prince Charles walked alone in the state procession, taking a seat upon the throne on the dais at the head of the chamber.

    In the past, the Queen has sat either alongside her consort the Duke of Edinburgh in front of the great screen or alone, in the centre of the space there. Today, Prince Charles’ throne was notably offset to one side, leaving a clear visual space alongside him empty for the Queen. Afore that space sat the Imperial state crown, the ultimate symbol of Royal authority and properly representing the Queen in the chamber.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/05/10/pomp-and-circumstance-pics-prince-charles-delivers-queens-speech/

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Liked by 1 person

  13. ….sigh…I ended up voting for Herbster after all…..found out some BS about Pillen that bumped him out.

    EXCERPT: “A hotly contested gubernatorial primary happening in Nebraska on Tuesday could put an end to former President Donald Trump’s current primary winning streak.

    The primary will follow Trump seeing sweeping victories for his endorsed candidates in Texas, Ohio, and Indiana. Trump went 33 for 33 in Texas as his endorsees there all won or advanced to runoffs, and last week, 22 out of 22 of his candidates won their races in Ohio and Indiana.

    But Nebraska’s gubernatorial race shows signs of uncertainty for the former president.

    Two wealthy agriculture businessmen stand out as frontrunners in the primary: the Trump-endorsed candidate, Charles Herbster, and Jim Pillen, who is backed by Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) and the powerful Ricketts family. Ricketts is term-limited this year and unable to seek reelection.
    ————–
    Herbster’s campaign took a hit in April after allegations that he inappropriately touched multiple women surfaced in the Nebraska Examiner. Herbster’s campaign “unequivocally” denied the allegations, calling them “a political hit-piece built on 100% false and baseless claims.”

    Trump, undeterred, doubled down on his support for Herbster, holding a rally in Greenwood for him on May 1 and a tele-rally last week.

    The Greenwood rally, which took place about two weeks after the misconduct allegations broke, “drew thousands” of Trump supporters, according to local outlet WOWT. Trump said at the event, “I think Charles is going to do very well, and if he [wins], you’ll be very happy and you’re gonna have an even more prosperous state. We’ve made it very prosperous, and I really think he’s going to do just a fantastic job, and if I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t be here.”

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/10/nebraska-governors-primary-test-trump-endorsement/

    Like

  15. Just popping in late to say hi. Such a wonderful day. So much sun. Hotter then we’re supposed to have but wonderful just wonderful

    Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.