The Dial Painters

0:28Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. It starts really innocently. In Molly's case, it's in her teeth. She has an aching tooth.

1:13And as you would, she goes to the dentist. She has the tooth pulled and hopes that that will be the end of it. Molly Maggia was in her mid-20s. But then she finds that the next tooth starts to hurt. And she finds that where the original tooth was extracted, it's not healing. And so she goes to the dentist again. She has another tooth pulled. Then another tooth started hurting. And then another. Her dentist pulled those out too. He thought it might be gum disease and started treatment, but it didn't get any better. Her doctor tested her for syphilis. The test came back negative. And eventually, Molly doesn't have to keep going back to the dentist because her teeth are literally falling out on their own.

2:03And the holes that are left behind have become these agonizing mouth ulcers. Molly Maggia lived in Orange, New Jersey. Her parents immigrated from Italy, and she was one of seven girls. But unlike her older sisters, she didn't get married or have children. Molly left home and moved into a woman's boarding house. At night, she went out dancing. And during the day, she worked at a watch dial factory. It produced glow-in-the-dark watches, mostly for soldiers. Glow-in-the-dark paint then became hugely in demand because you wanted soldiers' watches to glow in the dark when they're in the trenches. You wanted glow-in-the-dark instruments, you know, in aeroplanes, on the dashboards of, you know, automobiles.

2:56It was just hugely in demand once the war began. We're hearing from author Kate Moore. So you'd have whole factories with people making these glow-in-the-dark watch faces. How were they actually created? A cohort of young women, mostly teenagers, would paint the numerals and the hands of the glow-in-the-dark watches and clocks and instruments. They would dip their brushes in these little crucibles and then they would suck on the brush. It was a technique called lip pointing and they were instructed by the company to do that because it put a really fine point on the brush. so when they then painted the watches and the clock faces, the glow-in-the-dark paint would go on, you know, onto these tiny, tiny surfaces that the girls had been employed to paint.

3:49Was this a good job to have? Oh, the best. It was an incredibly lucrative profession. The girls were paid by the number of watch faces they painted in a day, and they painted a lot of them. They were some of the highest-paid women in the country, They liked the work, and they liked each other. They used to eat ice creams on their breaks. You know, there was a little brook that ran behind one of the dial painting studios, and there were photographs of the girls sitting on this sort of makeshift wooden bridge that ran across the water, dipping their toes in the water and eating ice cream cones. Molly Maggio was one of the fastest dial painters at the factory.

4:34But as the pain in her mouth got worse and more of her teeth began to fall out, it was hard for her to work. She slowed down and her friends noticed she was in pain. Her mouth eventually got so bad she could barely eat or talk. One day she goes to the dentist again to try and get some relief from her aching jaw. And he reaches into her mouth and just probes in the painful place where Molly says the pain is worse. and he finds that her jawbone literally breaks against his fingers at his gentle touch and he's able to lift her jawbone out of her mouth not by an operation but simply by lifting it out because her mouth has been so destroyed and disintegrated by this mysterious attacking power.

5:29I'm Phoebe Church. This is Criminal.

5:37And it's not just in her mouth anymore. She has aching feet, she has aching limbs, and no one seems able to help her. No matter what dentist or doctor she goes to, no one can understand why this young woman, who is in her early 20s, has these symptoms and is suffering in this way. And the more they try and help her, the faster the disease, this mysterious disease, seems to attack her body. She'd been tested for syphilis before by her doctor. At this point, her dentist tried testing her for syphilis and the test came back positive. Three months later, in September of 1922, Molly died. The dentist told her family he believed the cause of death was syphilis.

6:29Her family tried to keep that a secret. But then one of Molly's friends, Irene, started having pain in her mouth. And then her friend Hazel did too. And so they start talking to each other about their aching teeth, their aching legs, their aching backs. The women began seeing doctors and dentists all over New Jersey and New York. They tried the same thing that Molly's doctors and dentists had tried. They pulled out the women's teeth, operated on their mouths, but none of the women seemed to be getting better. Irene died, and then Hazel died, and even more of their friends were getting sick. As more women start to sicken, they have a meeting, and they say they realize there is something going on about this thing, that there must be a connection between their different ailments, between all of them starting to sicken in this way.

7:27They had all worked at the same company, doing the same job, painting watchdials. One of the women went to the Department of Health and told them what was happening. The Department of Health went to the factory and asked the foreman what was going on. He denied that there was any problem. But more women were getting sick. And the girls are sort of trapped in this nightmare where none of the dentists or doctors they're going to for help can help them. The company is not doing anything to assist and they don't know what's going on. One dentist even told the head of operations at the factory to stop production.

8:12But the factory didn't listen. They stayed open. By this point, many of the women who hadn't already stopped work because they were too sick, quit The mother of a woman who was sick announced she would be filing a workers' compensation claim After that, the head of the factory finally decided to launch an investigation But only in private They brought in public health experts to do it So the company go for professionals at the top of their game. They consult Dr. Cecil Drinker, who is the professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. And they ask him and his equally brilliant wife, Dr.

8:57Catherine Drinker, to conduct a study at the New Jersey plant to get to the bottom of what's going on, anticipating that it will give them a clean bill of health. Cecil and Catherine Drinker drew blood from the women working at the factory They examined their teeth And then they noticed something very odd The women's skin seemed to be glowing Just like the glow-in-the-dark paint they used on the watches

9:28We'll be right back

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12:19When Drs. Cecil and Catherine Drinker noticed that the skin of the women who worked at the watch dial factory was glowing, they investigated each ingredient in the paint. And what did the study find? The study found that radium was at fault. The element radium was what made the watches glow. When the women licked the brushes to paint the numbers on each watch face, they were ingesting radium. Cecil and Catherine Drinker concluded that this was what was making them sick, which was not what the factory wanted to hear. They get into a private rouse with Dr Drinker, disputing his results, saying it's not a full study, casting doubt on his professionalism, refusing to admit the results basically, and then they bury it.

13:14They refuse to allow Drinker to publish it independently, and they themselves sit on it. They don't publish it. They don't warn anyone. They completely try and hush it up. Kate Moore says that in the early 1920s, radium was everywhere. You walk into your local drugstore and there would be radium dressings, radium toothpaste, to give you a brighter smile with every brushing. Radium Cosmetics to give you a glowing complexion. Radium Pills to treat anything from hay fever to gout. Radium Chocolate just to sort of give you a little extra pep with your sugary snack. Radium Lingerie to try and boost your sex life.

14:01Because you'd be kind of like shining? Yeah, literally. I mean, that was the idea. You'd be glowing. Glowing, absolutely. There was radium lipstick, radium energy drinks. One farmer even suggested putting radium in chicken feed to see if it would make the eggs boil themselves. It even made it into a Broadway play called Piff, Paff, Poof in a song called The Radium Dance.

14:34It was actually the most expensive substance on earth at that time. A single gram would retail for the equivalent of$2.2 million in today's values. The women working in the factory knew it was valuable, and they felt glamorous painting with it. They used to slip off to the darkroom and sort of use it on their faces. They might paint their lips with it. They might paint their dresses with it. Sometimes they had a laugh with it. They'd paint a sort of funny moustache or kind of comedy eyebrows on their faces and then, you know, squirrel themselves away in the darkroom and have a laugh with each other at these, you know, comedy faces they'd created with this radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint.

15:19They would wear their good dresses to the plant because they'd get covered in this shining dust and then go out dancing after work in the music halls and the speakeasies of the Roaring Twenties. They'd be shining and shimmering on the dance floor. People called them the Radium Girls. What's interesting about the story of the Radium Girls was the type of poisoning they suffered had never actually been seen in, you know, human biology before. So it was a complete medical mystery when they started getting sick. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium in 1898 in her Paris laboratory. Marie Curie was curious about what exactly made a new invention called the X-ray work.

16:10She eventually coined the term radioactivity and successfully isolated several radioactive elements, like radium. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work. Six years after that, Molly Maggia and her friends started painting with radium in the factory. Marie and Pierre Curie had also discovered that radium could be used to kill cancers and tumors in the body, and that in very small doses, it could be good. But Pierre Curie said that in large doses, radium was unbelievably dangerous. He said that it could burn all the skin off of his body. you know, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him.

16:56But here you've got women who are working day in and day out with the tiniest amount of radium. And, you know, this is why they think that it's so safe because you can be around it and you don't have all those side effects that Pierre Curie described. But it turned out that radium is actually biomedically very similar to calcium. Calcium and radium are what are known as bone seekers. If you ingest them, they will seek out a skeleton and they will settle in those bones. Now, calcium makes the bones strong, but radium has the opposite effect. And essentially, it buried itself within the women's skeletons.

17:46It built up over time, you know, depending on the dose that they were receiving every day, how long they worked at the studio, how many times they pointed the brush each time they painted a dial. But once it was in the body, there was no protection from it. You know, in the labs of the radium plants next door to where the girls are lip pointing in their studio, those lab workers are issued with protective equipment, you know, ivory-tipped tongs and lead aprons to protect them from these dangerous amounts of radium. Within the women's bones, there is, of course, no protection at all, and therefore the alpha radiation in the radium is able to destroy them from the inside out.

18:34One of the women who worked at the factory remembered early on a scientist coming to her with a warning. The warning was given to a radium girl called Grace Fryer. And it's Grace who remembers being sat at her desk in the studio. You know, the girls were absolutely crammed in at this point during the war. And she's lipping and dipping her brush as she's been taught to do. And Sabin von Sohotsky, he was a scientist. He wasn't often in the studio. He was normally in the lab. and he crossed through the studio and he saw her painting and lipping and dipping her brush and he said to her, do not do that, you will get sick.

19:15Sabin Von Zahotsky had been handling the radium in the paint with his bare hands for years. He invented the paint and it helped start the company. And the tip of his index finger had been affected by it and it looked as though it had been gnawed off And Grace, being the intelligent, curious person that she is, goes and speaks to her boss about it. And the boss reassures her that it's safe. And, you know, the company reiterate that they actually get vice presidents over to reassure the women as these sort of rumors continue to fester. and that's only after the damage has been done and many of Grace's cohorts and Grace herself have already started to show the symptoms of the radium poisoning that the work has effected in them.

20:03But then in 1925, a man at the factory died. The chief chemist, Dr. Edwin Lehman. And in fact, it was Dr. Lehman who was the first radium victim to be autopsied. His death got the attention of the county's medical examiner. Dr. Harrison Martland was the chief medical examiner in New Jersey. You know, he was a Sherlock Holmes fan. He used to do exercises every morning to bagpipes. A real character and a workaholic as well. You know, he made no difference between weekdays and Sundays. You know, he'd always be working in his lab late. And it was ultimately on his desk that it fell, this case, this mysterious case of the dial painters who were dying within his jurisdiction.

20:56Dr. Martland found that the factory scientist had died of anemia, which didn't make sense to him. Anemia wouldn't kill that quickly. Dr. Martland wanted to know what caused it. He wanted to test the dead man's bones, but he needed the expertise of the scientists who worked at the factory to do that test. The factory agreed to help if the results were kept confidential, just like they were in the Harvard study. They turned Dr. Lehman's bones into dust and tested the bone dust with a device called an electrometer. It was the first time in history a human body was tested for radioactivity. The test results showed dangerous amounts of radium in the scientist's bones.

21:45A scientist helping Dr. Martland then asked him if he could examine the sick women who were still alive. He met the girls at St. Mary's Hospital in New Jersey. He didn't know how to test them, because they were still alive, and the only test he knew for radioactivity used pulverized bones. So with the help of another scientist, Dr. Martlin devised two tests he thought might work. First, the gamma ray test, which involved using an electroscope to measure if gamma radiation was emanating from the women's skeletons. And the second, to test if the women had radon in their breath. The theory being that if radium was in their jawbones and their teeth, when radium decays it gives off this gas radon and they devised a series of bottles that the women blew through and it would measure how much radon and how much radioactivity was actually in their breath.

22:48And what do they find with these tests? that it was there. The radium that the women had once worked with to make these glow-in-the-dark watches and clocks was in their bodies, and it was measurable. It was there with every breath they took. Shortly after, one of the women died, and Dr. Martland performed an autopsy. And he found that the radium was throughout her, It was in her organs. You know, her organs were radioactive. Her bones were radioactive. When, you know, you left her bones with X-ray filmed, they would cause emanations on the film. The film would be fogged because of the radiation, even after death.

23:38Even as the autopsy is happening, the power that has destroyed her, this force, this radioactive force that has destroyed her, is still going strong. While Dr. Martlin had agreed, at the factory's request, to keep his findings on the company chemist confidential, he had never agreed to keep his exams of the women confidential. Before he even had the final autopsy results, he spoke to reporters and said the radium likely causing the poisoning was, quote, so insidious and sometimes takes so long to manifest itself that it's possible it had been going on throughout the country for some time without being discovered.

24:25Headlines shortly after read, Radium rays kill six in factory where watch dials are made. The factory denied that radium killed the girls. Saying that such a tiny amount of radium couldn't possibly be to blame, even after they have, you know, scientific proof from experts that radium is responsible, they're still denying it and denying any connection. Dr. Martlin tested the women one by one and told every one of them, for the first time, what was making them sick and that there was no cure. When the news about radium went public, the women came together to figure out what to do. they wanted justice if justice can be done in any way they wanted the company to admit responsibility they wanted other women to be warned they wanted the truth to come out so many radium girls families were financially ruined by what happened to them because they had to pay for you know everything they had to pay for every doctor's visit they had to pay for every x-ray.

25:34They had to pay for travel to hospitals. You know, medical treatment does not come cheap. The women tried to find a lawyer, but they ran up against a problem. Many of them had left the factory a couple of years before, and the statute of limitations was up. No lawyer would take the case. And their last-ditch hope is a lawyer called Raymond Berry. He is someone who is up for the fight. And he comes up with several ways around the problem, but I think the most brilliant is that he says, you know, radium is inside the women's bodies, and therefore the point of injury is happening anew every second.

26:17It didn't matter that the women hadn't worked at the factory for years. Raymond Berry wanted to argue that the radium was still hurting them. He also needed to prove in court that radium, without a doubt, was to blame for their illnesses. Because at that time, they still wanted definitive proof of what was hurting the women. And so he decided the best way to do that was to exhume one of the radium girls who had passed away and probe and test her body and her bones to prove, you know, incontrovertibly that radium alone was responsible for her demise. And the radium girl they chose was Molly Maggia.

27:04Molly Maggia, the first style painter to die. It was a rainy October day and they all gather round the graveside in New Jersey and, you know, the gravediggers take the earth off and they reveal this wooden coffin that she was buried in, a silver nameplate shining with her name on it, and they take off the lid of the coffin and eyewitnesses said her coffin was glowing because of the radium in her bones. Radium has a half-life of about 1 ,600 years, so her bones will continue to be radioactive, for thousands of years. The press became absolutely captivated with the story of the radium girls. They called it the case of the five women doomed to die.

27:59They had bandages wrapped around their jaws from, you know, several operations that they just had to keep going back and back and back for more operations because that was the nature of the disease, this thing called jaw necrosis, where, you know, the jaw is disintegrating. The company weren't interested in actually drilling down into the truth of the matter. They were trying every legal technicality to get off the hook and they tried to draw the case out as well because they wanted the women to die so that the case would go away.

28:38We'll be right back.

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