This was thousands of times over the smallest potentially lethal dose. But a dial painter could point her brush up to 15 times per dial this meant that the average painter consumed approximately 4,000 micrograms of radium in six months. It was estimated that a dial painter could paint up to 300 dials per day earning as much as $24 a day. Paid 8 cents per dial, working in a clean, light factory watch painting was considered a good job for young women in the 1920s. The young women were slowly irradiating themselves from within. The women pointed their brushes with their lips to create a finer tip each time ingesting small amounts of radium. These young women painted the dials of watches using a luminous paint made from radium salts.
One of these factories owned by the US Radium Corporation was established in New Jersey in 1917, employing more than 700 women. By 1920 the public demand for watches with luminous dials was so great that numerous manufacturing companies had been set up. It would almost certainly destroy our sight and burn our skins to such an extent we could not survive.” The dangers of using radium in an industrial environment however, were unknown to ordinary workers. The terrifying dangers of radium were well known by the scientific community, as early as 1903, British scientist William Crookes was quoted in the New York Times warning that “half a kilogram… would kill us all. However, it was a seemingly insignificant product, a watch with a luminous face, which would expose the horrifying dangers of radium misuse. A slew of products began to be sold by quack doctors including ‘radium emanators’ and tablets like Radione which were advertised to enthuse ordinary water with radium’s ‘life-giving’ properties. Radium’s medical applications were touted by many doctors and scientists and the radioactive metal became associated with rejuvenation and invigoration. While many of these products didn’t actually include any radium, others did. Business soon began to capitalise on this popularity using radium as a selling point for everything from make-up to butter. This rarity coupled with the element’s ability to glow in the dark captured the public’s imagination. The extreme rarity of radium made it a prestige item, in 1903 the New York Times reported that a single gram cost $2,000. There was even a nightclub in Brooklyn called ‘The Radium Club’ and casinos began playing radium roulette played in the dark with a ball and roulette wheel painted with glowing radium. It became a plot device in novels and influenced the naming of consumer products ranging from fertilizers to cigarettes to cosmetics. The radium craze permeated almost every aspect of American society, it featured in everything from religious sermons to cartoons and films. However, by the early 1930s radium’s unknown dangers became tragically clear. It came to represent America’s burgeoning modernity and symbolise the country’s progress. Within forty years radium had permeated American society to the point where it was so engrained within the popular consciousness that scarcely a person in the civilised world was unfamiliar with the word radium. The radioactive metal’s unusual and unique properties captured the imaginations of both the scientific community and the public. Radium had been discovered in 1898 and was quickly hailed as a miracle element. At the beginning of the 20 th century America became gripped by a dangerous phenomenon.
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