by Harper Smith
The year is 1898. Two scientists find themselves in the midst of making history–they have discovered a new element. Marie and Pierre Curie, in their study of radioactivity, found traces of something they had never seen before in a sample of uraninite ore. They named this element “radium,” and spent the next three years attempting to further prove its existence to the scientific community. It’s possible that you are aware of how this story ends. 36 years later, at age 66, Marie passes away due to aplastic anaemia, a disease of the blood cells. The cause? The chemist was known to have carried bottles of both polonium and radium, two extremely radioactive chemicals, in the pockets of her coat. The toxins caused her blood cells to be literally eaten away, bit by bit, until her body could no longer continue to function. The severity of the poison was so drastic that her remains have to be sealed in lead, along with nearly everything the scientist touched. Her notes are kept in a lead lined box and anyone who wishes to study them is required to wear protective suits–even her cookbooks are radioactive! After this, the element of radium was universally recognized as hazardous and kept locked away for only trained professionals to handle, and everyone lived happily ever after.
At least, that’s what should have happened.
Let us jump forward in time. It’s the early twentieth century, and everything is radium. There is radium in razor blades, toothpaste, cosmetics–even chocolate is being made with the toxic element! Radium is hailed as a miraculous cure-all due to its role in early forms of chemotherapy and spread wide in high-end stores across the country. And the business at the forefront of this craze is watches. “Liquid sunshine,” as the element was dubbed by some advertisers, had the ability to glow in the dark–bright and luminous and perfect for alarms and clock faces and most of all, watches. After all, who wouldn’t want to tell the time even amidst pitch-black darkness? Factories popped up everywhere, churning out a huge supply of the radium-coated time-tellers. Inside these factories were girls–the usual age being early twenties or late teens, with some as young as 13–and these girls had a very important job to do. They were known as the dial-painters and their role was simple: paint the clock faces with the radioactive paint. This alone may not have been deadly, if it weren’t for one factor. Lip, dip, paint. The girls, you see, were on a very strict schedule, and each watch had to be perfect. There was only one way they knew of to get their brushes to have that precise, fine tip, and that was by using their mouths to point the bristles. They would dip the brush into the radium-infused paint, then between their lips, then onto the dial, filling it in with the bright glow. The girls were told that this was healthy, that it was good for them, and each day they went home glowing like the very watches they painted. The radium powder coated their clothes, their skin, the tips of their tongues–America’s “shining girls,” they were called, floating through their towns like luminescent ghosts. It was a glamorous job, it paid well, it was so easy; what else could these women possibly need?
In October 1921, twenty-four year old Mollie Maggia, a dial painter of several years, made an appointment with a dentist named Joseph Knef. A few weeks prior, she had discovered a terrible ache in her mouth and had her tooth surgically removed. But the pain hadn’t left. Knef diagnosed her with pyorrhea, a common tissue disease, and operated on her to remove more teeth. But it didn’t help. The infection spread, ulcers grew in her gums, her teeth began to fall out all on their own, and on top of that she started experiencing seemingly unrelated aches in her leg and hip, so painful that she could barely walk. Knef attempted to operate on her jaw, only to find it literally disintegrated in his hands. He was mystified–Mollie was young, healthy, and on top of that she had worked with radium, the wonder element, for years. Why was this happening?
A few weeks later, Mollie died. It was, as her sister Quinta put it, a “painful and terrible death,” caused when her mystery infection spread to her throat and caused her mouth to fill rapidly with blood, suffocating her. She left her friends, family members, and doctors all heartbroken and bewildered. The term “radium poisoning” would not be coined to describe her illness for many more years, and as far as they knew, there was no reason for any of this to have happened. Her death, painful and terrible as it was, had been completely and utterly unpredictable.
Mollie Maggia was the first of the radium girls to succumb to this grisly fate. She would not, as the years went on, end up being the last.
-To be continued-
The Lighthouse 