The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
Kate Moore
PROLOGUE
Paris, France
1901
The scientist had forgotten all about the radium. It was tucked discreetly within the folds of his waistcoat pocket, enclosed in a slim glass tube in such a small quantity that he could not feel its weight. He had a lecture to deliver in London, England, and the vial of radium stayed within that shadowy pocket for the entirety of his journey across the sea.
He was one of the few people in the world to possess it. Discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie late in December 1898, radium was so difficult to extract from its source that there were only a few grams available anywhere in the world. He was fortunate indeed to have been given a tiny quantity by the Curies to use in his lectures, for they barely had enough themselves to continue experiments.
Yet this constraint did not affect the Curies’ progress. Every day they discovered something new about their element: ‘it made an impression on photographic plates through black paper,’ the Curies’ daughter later wrote, ‘it corroded and, little by little, reduced to powder the paper or the cotton wool in which it was wrapped . . . What could it not do?’ Marie called it ‘my beautiful radium’ – and it truly was. Deep in the dark pocket of the scientist, the radium broke the gloom with an unending, eerie glow. ‘These gleamings,’ Marie wrote of its luminous effect, ‘seemed suspended in the darkness [and] stirred us with ever-new emotion and enchantment.’
Enchantment . . . it implies a kind of sorcery; almost supernatural power. No wonder the US surgeon general said of radium that ‘it reminds one of a mythological super-being’. An English physician would call its enormous radioactivity ‘the unknown god’.
Gods can be kind. Loving. Benevolent. Yet as the playwright George Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘The gods of old are constantly demanding human sacrifices.’ Enchantment – in the tales of the past, and present – can also mean a curse.
And so, although he had forgotten about the radium, the radium had not forgotten him. As the scientist travelled to that foreign shore, through every second of his journey the radium shot out its powerful rays towards his pale, soft skin. Days later, he would peer in confusion at the red mark blooming mysteriously on his stomach. It looked like a burn, but he had no memory of coming near any flame that could produce such an effect. Hour by hour, it grew more painful. It didn’t get bigger, but it seemed, somehow, to get deeper, as though his body was still exposed to the source of the wound and the flame was burning him still. It blistered into an agonising flesh burn that grew in intensity until the pain made him suck in his breath sharply and rack his brains for what on earth could have inflicted such damage without him being aware.
And it was then that he remembered the radium.
PART ONE
Knowledge
1
Newark, New Jersey
United States of America
1917
Katherine Schaub had a jaunty spring in her step as she walked the brief four blocks to work. It was 1 February 1917, but the cold didn’t bother her one bit; she had always loved the winter snows of her home town. The frosty weather wasn’t the reason for her high spirits on that particular icy morning though: today, she was starting a brand-new job at the watch-dial factory of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, based on 3rd Street in Newark, New Jersey.
It was one of her close pals who had told her about the vacancy; Katherine was a lively, sociable girl with many friends. As she herself later recalled, ‘A friend of mine told me about the “watch studio” where watch-dial numerals and hands were painted with a luminous substance that made them visible in the dark. The work, she explained, was interesting and of far higher type than the usual factory job.’ It sounded so glamorous, even in that brief description – after all, it wasn’t even a factory, but a ‘studio’. For Katherine, a girl who had ‘a very imaginative temperament’, it sounded like a place where anything could happen. It certainly beat the job she’d had before, wrapping parcels in Bamberger’s department store; Katherine had ambitions far beyond that shop floor.
She was an attractive girl of just fourteen; her fifteenth birthday was in five weeks’ time. Standing just under five foot four, she was ‘a very pretty little blonde’ with twinkling blue eyes, fashionably bobbed hair and delicate features. Although she had received only a grammar-school education before she left school – which was ‘about all the education that girls of her working-class background received in those days’ – she was nevertheless fiercely intelligent. ‘All her life,’ Popular Science later wrote, ‘Katherine Schaub had cherished [the] desire to pursue a literary career.’ She was certainly go-getting: she later wrote that, after her friend had given her word of the opportunities at the watch studio, ‘I went to the man in charge – a Mr Savoy – and asked for a job.’
And that was how she found herself outside the factory on 3rd Street, knocking on the door and gaining admittance to the place where so many young women wanted to work. She felt almost a little star-struck as she was ushered through the studio to meet the forewoman, Anna Rooney, and saw the dial-painters turning diligently to their tasks. The girls sat in rows, dressed in their ordinary clothes and painting dials at top speed, their hands almost a blur to Katherine’s uninitiated eyes. Each had a flat wooden tray of dials beside her – the paper dials were pre-printed on a black background, leaving the numerals white, ready for painting – but it wasn’t the dials that caught Katherine’s eye, it was the material they were using. It was the radium.
Radium. It was a wonder element; everyone knew that. Katherine had read all about it in magazines and newspapers, which were forever extolling its virtues and advertising new radium products for sale – but they were all far too expensive for a girl of Katherine’s humble origins. She had never seen it up close before. It was the most valuable substance on earth, selling for $120,000 for a single gram ($2.2 million in today’s values). To her delight, it was even more beautiful than she had imagined.