The Radium-Dial Painters
Other workers also have been uninformed about their exposures to radiation—and have paid a fearsome price. Among the first were several thousand Americans—most of them women—hired to paint radioactive radium onto watch faces, making them glow in the dark.46
Radium is a by-product of uranium ore, found in nature. In the 1920s company managers told many employees that ingesting radium would add to their vitality, curl their hair, improve their complexions, and make them sexually attractive. The dial painters thus eagerly licked their paintbrushes to give them the fine point they needed to paint the watch dials. Many also applied the radioactive substance to their rings, buttons, and belts. One man even painted his teeth to make them glow—an act that anticipated the current widespread use of uranium in the manufacture of false teeth and ceramic tooth caps.
By 1924 news that four employees of the U.S. Radium Corporation had died of necrosis of the jaw—a rare degenerative disease—reached the Board of Health of Orange County, New Jersey. Eight other women were seriously ill, and local dentists were reporting still more cases. But when Katherine Wiley of the National Consumers League approached the company, she was told the problem was due to poor dental hygiene.47
The company, however, had already secretly hired Dr. Cecil Drinker of Harvard to study the plant. Drinker found radium paint spattered throughout the work area, on employees’ clothes and even on their underwear. He also learned U.S. Radium had ordered its workers to stop licking their paintbrushes, a clear indication they knew something was wrong. Drinker’s report clearly implicated radium as the source of the necrosis epidemic.48
The company responded with hostility. Katherine Wiley was given an edited version of Drinker’s report, which said "every girl is in perfect condition." Drinker protested and was threatened with a lawsuit. When he later published his full paper anyway, U.S. Radium brought in Dr. F. B. Flinn of Columbia University. Flinn gave the company a clean bill of health. But in 1925 Dr. Harrison Martland, a local health official, confirmed five deaths from radium poisoning and estimated the average radium-dial painter might well ingest, over a five-year period, one thousand micrograms of radium—ten thousand times the 1981 standard.49 In light of Martland’s findings, Flinn repudiated his own study.
Ensuing studies continued to confirm the worst, with indications of increased bone cancer, cancer of the colon, diseases of the blood-forming organs, respiratory problems, and necrosis of the jaw. One study showed that the exhumed bones of former dial painters exhibited such high levels of radium that they photographed themselves on unexposed film.50 And as the victims themselves began complaining of their diseases and filing lawsuits, media coverage led to increased public pressure on the companies to tighten up their procedures. That slowed, but did not stop, the epidemic. Because it emits alpha radiation, radium can be lethal when ingested in sufficient amounts. But radium also emits penetrating gamma rays, and working with it outside the body can lead to exposures that cause a wide range of diseases, including breast cancer and multiple myeloma, which continued to surface even in the "modernized" dial plants.51
Finally, faced with a raft of lawsuits, one operation—the Illinois-based Radium Dial Company—went out of business in 1934. Soon thereafter, however, a "new" company called Luminous Processes emerged as the owner of Radium Dial’s plant and paymaster of its employees. Joseph Kelley, Sr., former president of Radium Dial, now became president of Luminous Processes, whose practices were remarkably similar to those of Radium Dial.
Investigative reporter Anna Mayo reported in The Village Voice that Luminous had grown, by the 1970s, into a multinational concern with offices in Manhattan, Switzerland, and Hong Kong.52
But despite its expansion Luminous apparently maintained many of its traditional modes of production. In 1976 the NRC fined Luminous for sloppy practices at its Illinois factory. In 1978 the commission ordered the plant shut.
Luminous responded by hastily ordering its equipment trucked to Georgia, where it had a plant free of NRC jurisdiction. The commission caught the trucks and confiscated the equipment. The Georgia plant was closed soon thereafter; local officials were still reporting high radiation levels on site in 1980.53 Mayo later visited the Illinois site and reported that seven of the ten former Luminous workers she interviewed there were suffering from breast cancer and tumors on their feet.54
In the mid-1970s luminous watch-dial production shifted from radium to the use of thin glass slivers filled with tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen capable of glowing without an electric source. Though the process was generally believed to be safer than painting with radium, the American Atomics Corporation of Tucson in 1979 contaminated an entire neighborhood with tritium, including the kitchen of the Tucson public school system.
Meanwhile radioactive materials continue to be used in a wide range of light sources including some coffeepots, hand-held calculators, and nightlights.
46. Scott/NlOSH Report, p. 8.
47. Roger J Cloutier, "Florence Kelley and the Radium Dial Painters," Health Physics Journal 39, No. 5 (November 1980): 711-717.
48. Ibid.
49. Harrison S. Martland, "Occupational Poisoning in the Manufacture of Luminous Watch Dials," Journal of the American Medical Association 92 (1929):
466-477.
50. Cloutier, "Florence Kelley and the Radium Dial Painters."
51. Baverstock, et al., "Risks of Radiation at Low Dose Rates," Lancet 21 (February 21, 1981): 430-433; Jack Cuzick, "Radiation-Induced Myelomatosis," New
England Journal of Medicine 304, No. 4 (January 22, 1981).
52. Anna Mayo, "We Are All Guinea Pigs," Village Voice, December 25, 1978, p. 18.
53. Environmental Radiation Surveillance Report, Georgia Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Division, summer 1979 to summer
1980, pp. 177-186.
54. Mayo, "We Are All Guinea Pigs."