The harmful effects of radiation were relatively well understood by 1917, though the information was withheld from factory workers. Radioactivity levels were so small as to be harmless to users of these objects, but not so to the people who made them. Hundreds of women worked in US Radium’s Orange New Jersey factory, hand painting the stuff on watches, gun sights and other instruments. Any number of companies stepped up to fill the need, but none larger than US Radium and its glow-in-the-dark paint, “Undark”. It didn’t take long to recognize the advantages of glow in the dark instruments. Authorities warned consumers to be on the lookout for fake radium, while the business in bogus radium products, soared. Prices skyrocketed to $84,500 per gram by 1915, equivalent to $1.9 million today. Unseen at the time, one benefit of the craze was that demand for radium vastly outstripped actual production. Serious physicians had early success killing cancer cells, driving a quack medicine craze where charlatans sold radium creams, salts and suppositories claiming to to cure everything from impotence to acne to insanity, rickets, tooth decay, and warts. The smiling farmer of the future, tilled glowing fields.
![radium girls jaw radium girls jaw](https://www.netheatregeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/unnamed.jpg)
Radium plays and dances featured performers, dressed in glow-in-the-dark costumes. Newspapers waxed rhapsodic about cities of the future, streets aglow in the light of radium lamps as smiling restaurant patrons sipped “liquid sunshine”. The stuff was an industrial wonder, a medical cure-all. We’ve seen some strange pop culture fads over the years, from goldfish swallowing to pole sitting, but none stranger than the radium craze of 1904. This new and radioactive element was Radium, one of the ‘alkaline earth metals’.Ĭurie’s work would make her the first female recipient of a Nobel Prize in 1906, and the only person of either sex to ever win two Nobels, in 1911. On December 21, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the 88th element of the Periodic Table. Grace Fryer’s jawbones were so honeycombed with holes, they looked like moth eaten fabric. Her doctor was able to identify the problem, but couldn’t explain it.
![radium girls jaw radium girls jaw](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0294215824_10.jpg)
She was 23 at the time and too young to have her teeth falling out, yet that’s what was happening. In 1922, a bank teller named Grace Fryer began to feel soreness in her jaw.