Using Radium powder dabbed with water and gum arabic a greenish white luminous paint could be created ,which went under the name Undark, and was declared the “Greatest find of history”. Radium as Moore notes was a luxury item sold by the gram for $120,000 then or $2.2 Million in modern currency. With his co-founder George Willis he later used the new element to create Radium paint. Around this time a young doctor spent time learning within their laboratory by the name of Sabin Von Sochocky. Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 before being isolated in 1910. Instead they should be viewed as being a bright green as a new element on the block was colouring the world. The 1910s-1930s were not black and white or sepia wholly. In it she has helped give the women she discusses peace by acknowledging not just their lasting impact on science, our knowledge of radioactivity and occupational hazards ,but the lives they lived before they were let down by companies more concerned with the biggest profits possible from the new wonder material Radium. Kate Moore’s book Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women is an essential read. Marie and Pierre Curie, Discoverers of Radium.

They were the Radium Girls and they were doomed. Painting the dials of watches so they would glow in the dark for soldiers during the war then after for consumers. As working class girls and women during the 1910s and 1920s they joined a new bustling form of work, fashionable and better paid than anything else. The women above worked in the first case for a company called the United States Radium Corporation and in the second case at Radium Dial. Catherine Wolfe Donohue, Charlotte Nevins Purcell, sisters Frances Glacinski O’Connell and Marguerite Glacinski, Helen Munch, Inez Corcoran Vallat, Margaret Peg Looney, Marie Becker Rossiter, Mary Duffy Robinson, Mary Ellen Ella Cruse, Mary Vicini Tonielli, Olive West Witt and Pearl Payne in Ottawa, Illinois, USA. Sisters Albina Maggia Larice, Amelie Mollie Maggia and Quinta Maggia Mcdonald, Edna Bolz Hussman, Eleanor Ella Eckert, Genevieve Smith and her sister Josephine Smith, Grace Fryer, Hazel Vincent Kuser, Helen Quinlan, Irene Corby la Porte, Irene Rudolph, Jane Jennie Stocker, Katherine Schaub, Mae Cubberley Canfield, Marguerite Carlough and her sister Sarah Carlough Maillefer in Newark and Orange, New Jersey, USA. Workers would often lick the paintbrush to achieve a finer point - directly ingesting the Radium. Women painting alarm clock faces with Radium in 1932, Ingersoll factory, January 1932.

Radium girls book