“You always knew who the dial painters were,” Vaan Hogue says, “because their hair and shoes glowed as they walked home in the dark.”ĭial painting required a steady hand and a fine-tipped brush. Radium Corporation employed more than 4,000 dial painters. The industry continued to prosper when luminous watches became a fashion fad. The dial painting industry got its start during World War I, filling a military demand for watch faces that glow in the dark. “But these factory workers knew nothing they were innocent victims.” “We tend to view Marie Curie as a martyr to science, because she was to some extent aware of the dangers of radium,” says Vaan Hogue. After Curie’s death, her daughter and son-in-law continued her work both died from diseases caused by radium exposure. The two-time Nobel Prize winner died in 1934, at age 67, from leukemia. “Even today,” Vaan Hogue says, “you can’t handle Marie Curie’s notebooks without wearing protective clothing.”ĭecades of radiation exposure left Curie ill and nearly blind. Discovered by chemist Marie Curie in 1898, the substance has a half-life of 1,602 years. Radium, an alkaline earth metal found in trace amounts in uranium ore, is highly radioactive. The litigation and media sensation helped establish legal precedents and triggered the enactment of regulations governing labor safety standards. “Their case launched the modern-day labor movement, yet it’s not something widely known.”įollowing her diagnosis, Fryer and four other factory workers, dubbed the Radium Girls, sued the U.S. “Grace Fryer and the Radium Girls are on the periphery of American history,” says director Elaine Vaan Hogue, an assistant professor in the CFA school of theatre. Gregory’s Radium Girls, the current College of Fine Arts theatrical production. Radium Corporation factory, and the radioactive material she worked with was slowly poisoning her. Six years earlier, she’d worked as a clock-dial painter at the U.S. It was 1923, and the bank teller from New Jersey was dying, her bones riddled with cancer. A visit to the dentist confirmed a gruesome fact: Fryer’s jaw was decaying.
The pain intensified, and one by one, Grace Fryer lost her teeth. In the slide show above, Elaine Vaan Hogue discusses Radium Girls.