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• #Radium poisoning from their watches full

The truth eventually leaked out, but it was too late to save anyone. Rather than admit their mistake, they continued production and made every effort to hide any hint of their wrongdoing. The watch companies, however, had begun to understand what their wonder substance actually did to the human body. So the women suffered as their bodies failed, and no one could tell them why. The health risks of what later came to be known as radium poisoning had not yet made their way into the medial literature. But even as the women’s jaws and other bones began to decay, their doctors were at a loss as to why. The radium had settled into their bones and flesh, causing debilitating exhaustion, rotting necrosis and crippling bone fractures. The neighborhood called them the “ghost girls.” 24, 1916Īt the end of each day, the girls - their clothes and hair covered in tiny bits of radium dust - would walk home, glowing in the dark. Radium watch ad from the Granby Leader newspaper, Nov. To produce the watches, the girls would put fine-haired paintbrushes into their mouths to form a precise tip and then dip them into the radium paint, a process they repeated for hours on end. Thousands of them shipped from the Newark factory. The watches, though, were something less trivial, intended for soldiers fighting in World War I.

#Radium poisoning from their watches full

In the Newark factory, and others like it, women hunched over trays full of wristwatches, upon which they meticulously painted glow-in-the-dark numbers with a proprietary concoction containing something they were told was perfectly safe: radium.ĭiscovered less than two decades earlier, radium was considered something of a wonder material at the time, used on everything from toothpaste to furniture cleaner to purported medicines. Schaub, and hundreds of other young women just like her, found themselves employed thanks to the radium craze of the early decades of the 20th century. 1, 1917 - Katherine Schaub reported for the first day of her new job at Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, not knowing the job would eventually kill her.