The work was easy, the wages high and most dial painters were typically single and living with their parents. The job was promoted as ideally suited for delicate female hands. Young women ranging in age from the mid teens to the early 20s were employed to apply the paint to clock dials and watch faces.

In the Roaring Twenties, women earned the right to vote, got the urge to smoke and marched to work in factories alongside their male counterparts. Doctors used it to treat everything from colds to cancer. Salesmen promised that it could extend your life, pump up your sex drive and make women more beautiful. Their ads extolled “the magic of radium!” And according to some, radium was magic.

In the early 1920s, the hot new gadget was a wristwatch with a glow-in-the-dark dial. Enter Mary “Mae” O’Donnell Keane and the radium girls. Of course, at this time, the dangers of radioactivity were not fully understood. The dimness of the glow was beneficial as they could tell the time without giving away their position. By November of 1915, British soldiers were putting dots of radium paint next to the hour numerals to make them visible at night.

Before the Great War, wristwatches were primarily worn only by women, with men favoring pocket watches. Soon, watchmakers created men’s watches with straps designed to be worn on a wrist rather than placed in a pocket. Not only were soldiers crawling and wading around in the mud unable to see their watch dials at night, their pocket watches weren’t suitable for this environment. Time dragged on endlessly when you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face, you had no hope of seeing the hands of a clock face. A single match lit by a soldier hunkered down in a pitch dark trench might be the spark to draw enough enemy fire to wipe out an entire company of soldiers.

During World War I the advent of trench warfare necessitated the invention of many things. Although the latter sounds admirably feasible, the former should sound shocking when you consider that radium is highly radioactive.Īdditionally, it was found that when radium salts were mixed with zinc sulfide and a glue agent, the result was a glow-in-the-dark paint. Radium was soon all the rage: bottled radium water was used as a health tonic, radium-filled facial creams were used to “rejuvenate the skin” the Radium Institute in New York City was giving radium injections to all who could pay for them some toothpastes started to include radium high-end spas began adding radium to the water of their pools and some hospitals were using radium as a treatment for those who had cancer after it was observed that exposing tumors to radium salts would shrink them. She went on to win a second Nobel Prize in 1911 this time in chemistry, for isolating radium, making her the first person to win two. Five years after that, they won a Nobel Prize in physics for their discovery, making her the first woman to win one. On December 21, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive element radium after extracting it from uraninite. Lost among them is a woman you may have never heard of. The year 2014 has come and gone and along with it, the passing of many notables whose time on this earth has run out.

Where are the radium girls buried