Yet the flip side of the coin was all the positive literature about radium. As early as 1914, specialists knew that radium could deposit in the bones of radium users and that it caused changes in their blood. These blood changes, however, were interpreted as a good thing – the radium appeared to stimulate the bone marrow to produce extra red blood cells. Deposited inside the body, radium was the gift that kept on giving.
But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications, there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole, worked for radium firms. As radium was such a rare and mysterious element, its commercial exploiters in fact controlled, to an almost monopolising extent, its image and most of the knowledge about it. Many firms had their own radium-themed journals, which were distributed free to doctors, all full of optimistic research. The firms that profited from radium medicine were the primary producers and publishers of the positive literature.
Szamatolski’s opinion, therefore, was a lone, unheard and hypothetical voice, set against the flamboyant roar of a well-funded campaign of pro-radium literature. Szamatolski himself, however, was a conscientious as well as smart man. Given his tests would take a few months, and mindful of the fact that work was continuing in the dial-painting studio, he took care to add a special note to his letter of 30 January. Though his radical theory had not yet been proven, he wrote plainly, ‘I would suggest that every operator be warned through a printed leaflet of the dangers of getting this material on the skin or into the system, especially the mouth, and that they be forced to use the utmost cleanliness.’
Yet, for some reason, this did not happen. Perhaps the message was never passed on.
Perhaps the company chose to ignore it.
As 1923 drew on and Szamatolski ran his tests, Irene Rudolph, who had been sent home from hospital, continued to endure the horrific ulcers and sores that had tortured Mollie Maggia. Irene’s anaemia grew more serious; as did Helen Quinlan’s. They were pale, weak creatures, with no energy to them; no life. Doctors treated them first for one thing and then another – but not a single treatment helped.
And they weren’t the only ones who were sick. Since George Willis, the co-founder of the Orange radium firm, had been ousted from his company, things had deteriorated for him. It seemed a long time ago that he had thoughtlessly carried tubes of radium with his bare hands every day at work – but all time is relative. With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium could take its time to make itself known.
As the months had passed since his departure from the company, Willis had sickened and in September 1922, the same month Mollie Maggia died, he’d had his right thumb amputated; tests revealed it was riddled with cancer. Willis didn’t keep his sickness to himself; instead, he published his findings. In February 1923, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), he wrote: ‘The reputation for harmlessness enjoyed by radium may, after all, depend on the fact that, so far, not very many persons have been exposed to large amounts of radium by daily handling over long periods . . . There is good reason to fear that neglect of precautions may result in serious injury to the radium workers themselves.’
What his former company thought of his article is not recorded. They probably dismissed it: he didn’t work for them anymore; thus, he did not matter. And they weren’t the only ones to ignore it. No one, it seemed, took much notice of the small article in the specialist publication.
By the April of 1923, Szamatolski had completed his tests. As he had suspected, there was not a single trace of phosphorus in the luminous paint.
‘I feel quite sure,’ he therefore wrote, on 6 April 1923, ‘that the opinion expressed in my former letter is correct. Such trouble as may have been caused is due to the radium.’
8
Ottawa, Illinois
1923
The radium, the girls in Ottawa thought, was one of the best things about their new job. Most women who worked in the town at that time were shop girls, secretaries or factory workers – this was something a little different. No wonder it was the most popular gig in town.
Girls from all walks of life tried their hand at it, drawn by radium’s allure. Some dial-painters ‘were what I call “slumming”’, said one of their colleagues with more than a hint of disapproval. ‘[One worker] was the darling daughter of a prominent physician – one of the better people. She and her friend were just there for a very few days.’ The well-off women simply wanted to see what it was like to be one of the ghost girls: a kind of voyeuristic life tourism. Perhaps as a result of their interest, ‘Mrs Reed had [her training] room all dolled up like a kindergarten’: it boasted curtains at the windows and flowers in a porcelain vase.
Radium Dial had initially advertised for fifty girls, but would eventually employ as many as two hundred. More workers were needed to keep up with demand: in 1923, Westclox, Radium Dial’s main client, had a 60-per-cent share of the US alarm-clock market, worth $5.97 million ($83 million). So many girls wanted to become dial-painters that the company could afford to be choosy. ‘The practice,’ a former employee recalled, ‘was to hire about ten girls at a time and try them out. Out of the ten, they would usually keep about five.’
One who made the grade was Margaret Looney, whose family called her Peg. She was good friends with Catherine Wolfe: they had gone to the same parish school and Peg also attended St Columba across the way; as did the vast majority of Radium Dial workers.
Everyone knew the Looney family. At the time Peg started at Radium Dial in 1923, there were eight kids in the clan; that number would eventually grow to ten. The whole family lived in a cramped house right on the railroad tracks, where the roar of the trains was so frequent that they didn’t even think about it anymore. ‘It was a very tiny house: one-storey, wood frame [and] four rooms, basically,’ said Peg’s niece Darlene. ‘It had two bedrooms [and] the big bedroom, where the kids slept, had blankets hanging from the ceiling, separating the girls’ side from the boys’; there’d be three to four kids in a bed. They were dirt poor, just as poor as you could be.’