In the early 1920s, company officials hired physiologist and Harvard Professor Cecil Drinker to report on working conditions. These US Radium guys must have been genuine, mustache twirling, villains. Only later were the two revealed to be company executives. By that time she was seriously ill, yet Columbia University “Specialist” Frederick Flinn and a “Colleague” pronounced her to be in “fine health”.
Part of her jaw, came with it.ĭoctors began to suspect that Grace Fryer’s condition may be related to her previous employment in US Radium. Company labs were equipped with lead screens, masks and tongs, while literally everything on the factory floor, glowed.įrances Splettscher died in 1925 at age 21, suffering severe anemia and unbearable toothaches. The active ingredient in Undark was a million times more active than Uranium, and company owners and scientists knew it. The only side effects of all that radium, they were told, would be rosy cheeks. The stuff was odorless and tasteless, and some couldn’t resist the fun of painting nails and even teeth with the luminous paint. Supervisors encouraged the women to sharpen brushes using lips and tongues for a nice, sharp point. Camel hair brushes tended to splay out with use. The harmful effects of radiation were relatively well understood by 1917, though the information was withheld from factory workers.
Radioactivity levels were so small as to be harmless to users of these objects, but not so to the people who made them. Hundreds of women worked in US Radium’s Orange New Jersey factory, hand painting the stuff on watches, gun sights and other instruments. Any number of companies stepped up to fill the need, but none larger than US Radium and its glow-in-the-dark paint, “Undark”. It didn’t take long to recognize the advantages of glow in the dark instruments. Authorities warned consumers to be on the lookout for fake radium, while the business in bogus radium products, soared. Prices skyrocketed to $84,500 per gram by 1915, equivalent to $1.9 million today. Unseen at the time, one benefit of the craze was that demand for radium vastly outstripped actual production. Serious physicians had early success killing cancer cells, driving a quack medicine craze where charlatans sold radium creams, salts and suppositories claiming to to cure everything from impotence to acne to insanity, rickets, tooth decay, and warts. The smiling farmer of the future, tilled glowing fields. Radium plays and dances featured performers, dressed in glow-in-the-dark costumes. Newspapers waxed rhapsodic about cities of the future, streets aglow in the light of radium lamps as smiling restaurant patrons sipped “liquid sunshine”. The stuff was an industrial wonder, a medical cure-all. We’ve seen some strange pop culture fads over the years, from goldfish swallowing to pole sitting, but none stranger than the radium craze of 1904. This new and radioactive element was Radium, one of the ‘alkaline earth metals’.Ĭurie’s work would make her the first female recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1906, and the only person of either sex to ever win two Nobels, in 1911. On December 21, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the 88th element of the Periodic Table. Grace Fryer’s jawbones were so honeycombed with holes, they looked like moth eaten fabric. Her doctor was able to identify the problem, but couldn’t explain it. She was 23 at the time and too young to have her teeth falling out, yet that’s what was happening. In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer began to feel soreness in her jaw.
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