Radium's Death Toll

Pierre and Marie Curie

When discovered by science's power couple, Pierre and Marie Curie, in 1898, radium was considered a magical element. It's characteristics were not replicated elsewhere in nature, and it was believed to have miraculous healing properties.

Radium treatments were used to kill cancer cells and reduce the size of tumors. Potions and infusions were sold to improve digestion or use as a beauty tonic. Radium also had a peculiar glow that led to its use in paint for dials and instruments used in World War I. Instead of a pocket watch, soldiers began wearing wrist watches, which were easily accessed in most circumstances and could be read at night because of the radium mixture used to paint the dials.

Then it started killing people.

It is difficult to shift people's opinion of something from one extreme to the other, especially if those people are profiting from its sale. Such was the case with radium, and countless people died before the radioactive element was treated with appropriate control and safety standards.

Marie Curie, who had exposed herself and her assistants to radium for years, was anemic and suffered from leukemia when she died. Both were most likely caused by radium. Sabin von Sochocky was the inventor of the glowing paint that was used by thousands of young women as part of the war effort. He, too, died of aplastic anemia caused by radium exposure. We will never know how many of those dial painters died of conditions caused by radium poisoning because their complaints were ignored for decades as a wide variety of diseases and cancers resulted from their exposure.

Sabin von Sochocky knew he was taking a risk. He had cut off part of his own finger when it became damaged by radium. Those working in his New Jersey lab wore lead-lined aprons and handled radium with caution. However, the young women working as dial painters for the same company used no protection and pointed brushes dipped in radium paint with their lips in order to accurately trace the tiny numbers.

Grace Fryer

Grace Fryer was shocked when Sabin von Sochocky admonished her not to put the brush in her mouth. That was how all the dial painters did it. Later, when Grace Fryer and others were suing US Radium Corp for damages, he tried to backtrack on this comment, not because he believed radium was harmless but because he didn't want his company to have to pay the medical expenses for the sick and dying employees.

The same thing was happening at Radium Dial in Illinois. Young women were dying, and it was contributed to everything from syphilis to diphtheria. No doctor wanted to be the first to say that radium was poisonous, even if those who had worked closely with it for years already knew that to be the case.

It is unknown how many dial painters, including Grace Fryer, died of radium poisoning because so many were denied justice and some didn't die until decades later of cancers that likely had radium at their source. But few seemed concerned until the death of Eben Byers in 1932, fourteen years after the end of World War I. A rich, well-known socialite, Byers took to the radium trend with gusto, drinking Radithor (radium infused water) by the case. He died painfully, his mouth and jaw rotting away, just as the poor dial painters had been doing for over a decade.

With the death of one more valued by society than dozens of working-class girls, radium products were removed from shelves. Finally, a discussion of radium's hidden dangers began, but the health and environmental impact of radium use continues to this day. In Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois, where dial painting studios once stood, the Environmental Protection Agency is still working to clean up Superfund sites, and both towns suffer high rates of cancers and other health issues in residents and wildlife.

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Additional Reading:
Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 by Claudia Clark