Joining Albina at the long wooden desks was her little sister Amelia, whom everyone called Mollie. She seemed to have found her calling at the studio, being unusually productive. A foot taller than Albina, she was a sociable nineteen-year-old with a broad face and bouffant brown hair, often seen laughing with her colleagues. She got on particularly well with another newcomer, Eleanor Eckert (nicknamed Ella): the two were as thick as thieves. Ella was popular and good-looking, with blonde, slightly frizzy hair and a wide smile; a sense of fun was never far from her, whether she was at work or play. The girls would socialise and eat lunch together, barely stopping work as they shared food across the crowded desks.
The company also organised social events; picnics were a favourite. The dial-painters, dressed in white summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, would eat ice-cream cones while sitting on the narrow makeshift bridge that lay across the brook by the studio, swinging their legs or holding on to one another as they tried not to fall in the water. The picnics were for all employees – so at these events the girls got to mix with their co-workers, whom they rarely saw: the men who worked in the laboratories and refining rooms. It wasn’t long before the odd ‘office romance’ began; Mae Cubberley started walking out with Ray Canfield, a lab worker: one of many blossoming relationships among the girls, though most were not with colleagues. Hazel Vincent, for one, was in love with her childhood sweetheart, a mechanic called Theodore Kuser, who had baby-blue eyes and fair hair.
The company’s founder, Sabin von Sochocky, an Austrian-born, thirty-four-year-old doctor, could often be seen holding court at these picnics, sat among his workers on a rug, his jacket off and a beaker of cold drink in one hand. The girls seldom saw him in their studio – he was usually too busy working in his lab to grace them with his presence – so it was a rare opportunity for their paths to cross. It was he who had invented the luminous paint they used, back in 1913, and it had certainly been a success for him. In his first year, he had sold 2,000 luminous watches; now, the company’s output ranked in the millions. In many ways he was an unlikely entrepreneur, for his training had been in medicine; initially, he’d intended the paint to be a ‘potboiler’ to fund medical research, but the growing demand had necessitated a more businesslike approach. He had met a ‘kindred soul’ in Dr George Willis and the two physicians had founded the company.
Von Sochocky was, according to his colleagues, a ‘remarkable man’. Everyone called him simply ‘the doctor’. He was indefatigable: ‘someone that liked to start late, but is then willing to go on and on until all hours’. American magazine called him ‘one of the greatest authorities in the world on the subject of radium’ – and he had studied under the best: the Curies themselves.
From them, and from the specialist medical literature he had studied, von Sochocky understood that radium carried great dangers. Around the time he studied with the Curies, Pierre was heard to remark that ‘he would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him’. The Curies, by that time, were intimately familiar with radium’s hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumours, it was true, by destroying unhealthy tissue – but it was indiscriminating in its powers, and could devastate healthy tissue too. Von Sochocky himself had suffered its silent and sinister wrath: radium had got into his left index finger and, when he realised, he hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as though ‘an animal had gnawed it’.
Of course, to the layman, all this was unknown. The mainstream position as understood by most people was that the effects of radium were all positive; and that was what was written about in newspapers and magazines, championed across product packaging and performed on Broadway.
Nonetheless, the lab workers in von Sochocky’s plant in Orange were provided with protective equipment. Lead-lined aprons were issued, along with ivory forceps for handling tubes of radium. In January 1921, von Sochocky would write that one could handle radium ‘only by taking the greatest precautions’.
Yet despite this knowledge, and the injury to his own finger, von Sochocky was apparently so transfixed by radium that all reports say he took little care. He was known to play with it, holding the tubes with his bare hands while watching the luminosity in the dark or immersing his arm up to the elbow in radium solutions. Company co-founder George Willis was also lax, picking up tubes of radium with his forefinger and thumb, not bothering with forceps. Perhaps understandably, their colleagues learned from them and copied what they did. No one heeded the warnings of Thomas Edison, working just a few miles away in sight of the Orange plant, who once remarked, ‘There may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results; everybody handling it should have a care.’
Yet in the sunny second-floor studio, the girls working there had not a care in the world. Here there were no lead aprons, no ivory-tipped forceps, no medical experts. The amount of radium in the paint was considered so small that such measures were not deemed necessary.
The girls themselves, of course, had no clue that they might even be needed. This was radium, the wonder drug, they were using. They were lucky, they thought, as they laughed among themselves and bent their heads to their intricate work. Grace and Irene. Mollie and Ella. Albina and Edna. Hazel and Katherine and Mae.
They picked up their brushes and they twirled them over and over, just as they had been taught.
Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint.
3
Wars are hungry machines – and the more you feed them, the more they consume. As the fall of 1917 wore on, demand at the factory showed no signs of slowing; at the height of operations, as many as 375 girls were recruited to paint dials. And when the firm announced it needed more women, the existing workers eagerly promoted the job to their friends, sisters and cousins. It wasn’t long before whole sets of siblings were sat alongside each other, merrily painting away. Albina and Mollie Maggia were soon joined by another sister, sixteen-year-old Quinta.
She was an extremely attractive woman with large grey eyes and long dark hair; she considered her pretty teeth her best feature. Down-to-earth and kind, her favourite pastimes included card games, checkers and dominoes. She also confessed cheekily, ‘I don’t go to church half as often as I should.’ She hit it off brilliantly with Grace Fryer and the two became ‘inseparable’.
Grace was another who brought her little sister to work: Adelaide Fryer adored the social side of it, being a very gregarious girl who loved to be around people, but she wasn’t quite as sensible as her big sister; in the end, she was fired for talking too much. The girls may have been sociable, but they still had a job to do, and if they didn’t knuckle down and do it, they were out.