At 107 years old, she was one of the last of the radium girls.īlum says the radium girls had a profound impact on workplace regulations. You just don't know what to blame," she said. "I was left with different things, but I lived through them. There's no way to know if her time in the factory contributed. Over the years, she had some health problems - bad teeth, migraines, two bouts with cancer. In all, by 1927, more than 50 women had died as a direct result of radium paint poisoning.īut Keane was among the hundreds who survived. Many of them ended up using the money to pay for their own funerals. At a factory in New Jersey, the women sued the U.S.
Their spines collapsed."ĭozens of women died. "There was one woman who the dentist went to pull a tooth and he pulled her entire jaw out when he did it," says Blum. The radium they had swallowed was eating their bones from the inside. By the mid-1920s, dial painters were falling ill by the dozens, afflicted with horrific diseases. "Of course, no one thought it was dangerous in these first couple of years," explains Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook. Twelve numbers per watch, upwards of 200 watches per day - and with every digit, the girls swallowed a little bit of radium. To get the numbers small enough, new hires were taught to do something called "lip pointing." After painting each number, they were to put the tip of the paintbrush between their lips to sharpen it. was hiring dial people to paint the tiny numbers onto watch faces for about 5 cents a watch. Radium wristwatches were manufactured right here in America, and the U.S. In the 1920s, a young working-class woman could land a job working with the miracle substance. Doctors used it to treat everything from colds to cancer. Radium was the latest miracle substance - an element that glowed and fizzed, which salesmen promised could extend people's lives, pump up their sex drive and make women more beautiful. The directors had a woman, Etta (Susan Heyward), taking pictures throughout the film and the pictures they used were the pictures she was taking to record the times.EPA Expected to Issue Million-Year-Long RegulationĪnd it did seem magical.
AMERICAN RADIUM MOVIE MOVIE
At first, I found this a little disconcerting, but as the movie progressed, I realized how it really set the roaring twenties up for the audience. Throughout the film, they use actual shots of people in the 1920s. Mohler also wrote the script with Brittany Shaw. “Radium Girls” was directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler. I felt all the performances were excellent. She carries “Radium Girls” and puts in a powerful performance. The girl is only 21 and already has 65 acting credits on her resume. I recognized King as Channing Tatum’s character’s daughter, Emily, in “White House Down.” She has an illustrious career ahead of her. This film was very reminiscent of “Silkwood,” starring Meryl Streep and Cher, which told the story of workers exposed to carcinogenic material. We know now that exposure to radium can cause cancer and a myriad of other problems for humans. I found myself wanting to scream, “Stop licking that brush and run out of there!” To keep their paintbrush tips pointed, the women lick the paintbrushes with every stroke, getting radium on their tongues and down their throats. The women at the American Radium factory use radium to paint clock faces so that they glow in the dark.
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