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Overview

Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1901. They understood that it’s a miracle element with both positive and negative effects on the world. Radium became popular, but not all of its dangers were known to people at the time, so radium products caused many deaths.

This passage will explore why young female workers were drawn to the radium industry, how it affected their lives, and how they fought for themselves.

The Age of Radium

During the early 20th century, radium was very popular. Scientists discovered that it could destroy human tissue and used it to treat cancerous tumors. Because of its life-saving power, radium gained a reputation as a cure for any ailment.

When radium was discovered, it became a craze because of its supposed health benefits. Medical charlatans and others took advantage of this new phenomenon by creating products that claimed to cure illnesses or make you look younger. Radium spas were created, along with pills, butter, lingerie and toothpaste. Some entrepreneurs even used radium in their furniture-polishing spray. With so many products promising youthfulness and beauty, radium quickly became popular among the public.

Radium was expensive in the early 1900s. A single gram cost $120,000; that’s about $2.2 million today. This made it unaffordable for most people to use radium products, which were often just water bottles with a radium label on them anyway.

Radium was used during World War I for military purposes. It helped produce radium-painted products that were popular due to their medicinal properties and high price. This increased the demand for radium, so the United States started a big industry in producing these types of products.

Once the United States entered World War I, the demand for radium dials increased. To meet this financial opportunity, companies hired women to paint these dials. These working-class women were drawn to this industry because they wanted to do their part in supporting American military forces and creating necessary instruments felt like a meaningful contribution. Other women liked working with radium because it was so exotic and expensive; even though they couldn’t afford it themselves, they could work with something that many other people could not. Finally, most of these women joined this industry because of how well compensated it was; since female workers were paid less than men at that time, being ranked in the top 5% made them feel like they had made a good decision.

Katherine Schaub was a teenager who wanted to make money. She heard that the United States Radium Company paid well, so she went to work there. The company made dials for watches and clocks, and it had an image of glamour because radium glows in the dark. It was Schaub’s job as an inspector to look at all the dials carefully and correct any mistakes on them.

Each dial painter worked independently, mixing water and adhesive with a bit of radium powder to create glowing paint. Then they used extremely fine brushes to paint the tiny dials that were as thin as a single millimeter in width. The painters were reprimanded if they painted outside those parameters, so they tried their best to make their brushes extra tiny and dexterous.

The solution was to put the bristles in your mouth and use your lips to make it thin. This is called lip-pointing. While other bristle rinsing strategies exist, none were as efficient for creating a fine brush. Lip-pointing became an industry norm because of its efficiency.

Mae Cubberley, a painter who was trained by Schaub, had been initially skeptical about the lip-pointing technique. She wondered if there were adverse effects of ingesting radium paint. However, one of her supervisors told her that it would be good for her health and well being because radium was known to have amazing curative powers. With this reassurance, she carried on with the practice along with other painters in the company.