The neighborhood called them the “ghost girls.” 24, 1916Īt the end of each day, the girls - their clothes and hair covered in tiny bits of radium dust - would walk home, glowing in the dark. Radium watch ad from the Granby Leader newspaper, Nov. To produce the watches, the girls would put fine-haired paintbrushes into their mouths to form a precise tip and then dip them into the radium paint, a process they repeated for hours on end. Thousands of them shipped from the Newark factory.
The watches, though, were something less trivial, intended for soldiers fighting in World War I.
Radium girls glowing in coffin full#
In the Newark factory, and others like it, women hunched over trays full of wristwatches, upon which they meticulously painted glow-in-the-dark numbers with a proprietary concoction containing something they were told was perfectly safe: radium.ĭiscovered less than two decades earlier, radium was considered something of a wonder material at the time, used on everything from toothpaste to furniture cleaner to purported medicines. Schaub, and hundreds of other young women just like her, found themselves employed thanks to the radium craze of the early decades of the 20th century. 1, 1917 - Katherine Schaub reported for the first day of her new job at Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, not knowing the job would eventually kill her.
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