The Poisoner's Handbook
Radiant health, the ads proclaimed—beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight.
MARTLAND FOUND radium to be neither beautiful nor inspirational.
He’d been drawn into researching it by a peculiar health crisis in Orange, New Jersey, a community just northwest of Newark. Situated on a main turnpike to Pennsylvania, Orange had long been a bustling little industrial city. It was a popular stop on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western railroad line. The trains made a flurry of stops at the Orange terminal, picking up and dropping off passengers, delivering Pennsylvania coal, and carrying away factory products: clocks, pencil sharpeners, boxes of shoes. Until Prohibition, the Orange Brewery had shipped its beer out on the DL&W. The old building stood dark now. But other businesses thrived in its place. The U.S. Radium Corporation, which had opened a plant there in 1917, was busier than ever.
The Radium Corporation had gotten its start in the Great War, with its new technological demands. Soldiers, huddled in the muddy trenches of Europe, learned quickly that the pocket watches they carried were unsuited to battlefields. They fell out of pockets and were crushed by the next crawling soldier; if the watches somehow weren’t smashed, they were hopelessly unreadable at night. Driven by military need, watch companies began putting watches on straps, which could be safely buckled onto wrists, and they looked for a way to make watch faces glow in the dark.
Luckily, some years before the war, German scientists had developed a “self-luminous” paint. This paint glowed, due to a rather neat little cascade of chemical interactions: if radium salts were mixed with a zinc compound, particles emitted by the radium caused the zinc atoms to vibrate. The vibration created a buzz of energy, visible as a faint shiver of light. This pale greenish glow was easily outshone by daylight, but in the dark it was just luminous enough to make an instrument readable without making it easily detectable to a watching enemy.
After American troops joined the war in Europe, the factory in Orange won a contract to supply radium-dial instruments to the military. By the time the war ended, wristwatches with their glowing dials and handy wristbands were all the style. So were luminous-faced clocks, nicely dressed up in gold and ebony for elegant homes. The corporation’s business was as healthy as ever—as healthy, you might say, as radium itself.
Hardly a quibble, hardly a doubt was raised, that radium might not really be the golden child of the elements.
AT THE FACTORY the dial painters were taught to shape their brushes with their lips, producing the sharp tip needed to paint the tiny numbers and lines of watch dials and the lacy designs of fashionable clocks. Each worker was expected to paint 250 dials a day, five and a half days a week. They earned about twenty dollars a week for that work, at a rate of one and a half cents per completed dial.
The painters were teenage girls and young women who became friendly during their hours together and entertained themselves during breaks by playing with the paint. They sprinkled the luminous liquid in their hair to make their curls twinkle in the dark. They brightened their fingernails with it. One girl covered her teeth to give herself a Cheshire cat smile when she went home at night. None of them considered this behavior risky. Why would they, when doctors were using the same material to cure people? When wealthy spa residents were paying good money to soak in the stuff? When a neighboring company promoted the popular tonic Radithor? No one—certainly not the dial painters themselves—saw anything to worry about.
Until one by one the young workers began, mysteriously, to fall ill. Their teeth fell out, their mouths filled with sores, their jaws rotted, and they wasted away, weakened by an apparently unstoppable anemia. By 1924 nine of the dial painters were dead. They were all women in their twenties, formerly healthy, with little in common except for those hours they had spent, sitting at their iron and wood desks at the factory, painting tiny bright numbers on delicate instruments.
The bones that Martland asked Charles Norris and his staff to evaluate for radioactivity belonged to one of the first dial painters to die in Orange. Martland had ordered her body dug up and her bones sent to New York for the work. His decision got enough attention that the Newark newspaper took a picture of the New Jersey pathologist with the bones before they were sent off: a carefully posed shot of Harrison Martland with a crumbling jaw in his hand.
THE INDUSTRIAL SCANDAL in New Jersey foretold a change in attitude, both by scientists and by members of the public, toward radioactive elements. The change came on gradually—after all, radium had first been seen as a miracle cure. It would take more than twenty years for the element to be recognized as a killer as well as a savior.
Marie and Pierre Curie, along with Henri Becquerel, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their work with radioactive elements; Marie later donated much of her share of the prize money to the Allied war effort. She’d toured the United States, seeking money for radium research in 1921. She’d received, during that visit, the cheering welcome accorded to a woman of heroic stature.
As Curie demonstrated on her tour, she did not fear her own discovery. She kept vials of radioactive isotopes in her skirt pockets, bringing them out to show off during her lectures. She liked to see them in the dark, she’d say, to sit back and watch their pretty blue-green light. Curie was entirely reassuring about that luminous glow, but in other quarters a certain scientific wariness was surfacing regarding radium. Rumor had it that her husband, Pierre, killed in 1906 by a horse-drawn carriage, had stumbled into the street due to radiation-induced weakness. Several scientists from the European radium laboratories had developed disturbing leukemias. And when Curie finished her tour, American dignitaries presented her with a gram of radium as a gift from the United States—but it was carefully contained in a 110-pound lead box.
The occasional deaths of scientists in Europe stirred little reaction in the United States. In New Jersey, however, worries about the element grew as illness spread among the dial workers. Ironically, they began falling ill shortly after Curie’s triumphant American tour. By 1924, as the painters continued to die, managers at the U.S. Radium Corporation hired a team of scientists from Harvard University to investigate the inexplicably accelerating deaths.
The Harvard scientists discovered that the watch factory was thick with radium dust. The employees were frequently covered in it. In the dark, one researcher said, the dial painters glowed like luminous ghosts. The researchers concluded that the deaths were connected to the factory work. Connected to rather than caused by: radium had a safe reputation, and they were reluctant to blame it completely. Even this cautious assessment did not go over well with factory management. The U.S. Radium Corporation refused to allow the study to be published, saying the information was too sensitive to be released.
The same year, though, a team of less cooperative scientists pursued the problem at U.S. Radium, running tests on many of the ailing workers, some still employed, others who had moved on to other jobs. The doctors from the New Jersey Consumers’ League, already well known for its uncompromising positions on worker safety, published their findings, summing up with a declaration that the factory in Orange was incubating a new, strange, and terrible occupational disease.
At this point Harrison Martland decided to conduct his own investigation, one that would be uncolored by claims of pro-management or pro-worker bias. He soon agreed that radium exposure had to be the source of the problem. In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss.
The women were exhaling radon gas.
THAT FINDING PROVIDED the first real clue as to what was happening inside the workers’ bodies. It also provided an early insight as to the way radium behaves, causing damage based on its naturally self-destructive nature.
The element’s atomic structure is a deeply unstable one. Essentially, it exists in a state of perpetual breakdown, discarding excess parts as it decays. Subatomic particles fizz away in all
directions, leaving behind an even more crazily unbalanced chemical arrangement, prone to immediate further decay. Radium is actually a breakdown product itself, created when uranium decays. Its own disintegration produces the hypercharged element polonium (sometimes called radium A) and radon gas.
Radium, then, is “radioactive” because it is constantly turning into something else, discarding unwanted parts in the form of energetic subatomic particles. The primary emissions from radium are called alpha particles; they are basically tight little bundles of protons and neutrons.
As alpha particles speed away, they take with them some of the element’s energy-charged life. This high-speed flight is radiation, or alpha radiation, to be specific. Radium also emits, to a lesser degree, two other kinds of radiation: beta radiation, which consists of electrons, and gamma radiation, which consists of dangerous particles with a higher energy than X-rays.
During his evaluation of the dial painter illnesses, Martland calculated that more than 90 percent of the particles shooting out of radium were alpha radiation. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been an external exposure. Outside the body, alpha particles are rather wishy-washy bits of atomic energy. They can be stopped by a sheet of paper or a layer of clothing, even the upper layer of dead cells that overlies the skin. The two other forms of radiation are more penetrating: beta radiation easily slices through paper, although it can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum. Gamma radiation is the toughest; it takes a dense metal like lead to halt its flying particles.
But once inside the body, as Martland would soon realize, alpha radiation creates a precisely engineered internal poisoning. The radium dust noted by the Harvard team was a definite hazard because it could be inhaled. But it wasn’t the source of the lethal illness among the dial painters, who were dying at a higher rate than others in the plant. The source was their practice of lip-pointing the brushes. Every time a painter put a brush in her mouth, to bring the bristles to a sharper point, she swallowed a bit of radium.
It would turn out to be the worst way to absorb the poison. Structurally, the element radium can be considered a close if crazed cousin of the element calcium. Both are alkaline earth metals, silvery white in color. Both are built in cubic crystalline structures. As a result, when a person swallows radium, the body channels it in a way similar to calcium—some is metabolized away, some goes toward nerve and muscle function, and most is deposited into the bones.
But where calcium strengthens the mineral content of the skeleton, radium does the opposite. It bombards skeletal material with alpha radiation, blasting bony material full of tiny holes, then larger ones, then larger still. It irradiates the blood-forming marrow in the bone’s center. Nothing removes it until it burns itself out—and this is a material with a half-life of sixteen hundred years. Eventually Martland did find a way to get radium out of bones, but only after death: he incinerated the skeleton and then boiled the bone ashes for hours in hydrochloric acid. After that alpha radiation seemed to disappear. But otherwise, in the living body, radium spits out its alpha particles in apparently infinite supply. And its affinity for the bones explains precisely why jaws rotted away, hips broke, and ankles crumbled, why anemias and leukemias bubbled in the bone marrow.
In 1925 Martland detailed these principles of radiation poisoning in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He’d learned many of the facts by studying the bodies of dial painters who had died. Among those still living, based on the gas they exhaled, he’d developed a formula that calculated the amount of radium in their bodies. Radon gas was produced in the skeleton as the radium there decayed; the gas diffused into the bloodstream, was carried to the lungs, and was exhaled, to drift away.
Until the next breath.
THE YEAR Martland’s report was published, a small group of former employees sued U.S. Radium Corporation. Only five of the Radium Girls (as the press liked to call them) joined in that action. A few had settled, afraid to take on a big corporation, sure that they’d lose the jobs they held now, and that they’d lose in the courts as well.
These doubters knew that the company had no intention of giving in easily. It took the employees three years of legal wrangling even to get a trial date. That was why Harrison Martland called Charles Norris only in 1928 about the skeleton of a woman who had died years earlier.
The bones belonged to an Italian-American, Amelia Maggia, dead at twenty-five, who had worked as a dial painter for four years. In her last year at the factory, 1921, she’d abruptly lost weight and complained of joint pains. The following year her dentist discovered that her jaw was splintering apart; almost all of it was removed. She developed a worsening anemia and bled constantly from her mouth and died in September 1923. Her death certificate read “ulcerative stomachitis.”
Martland, having found Maggia on a list of former dial painters, suspected that the diagnosis was wrong. The symptoms read like textbook radium poisoning to him. Still, the only way to prove it was to look for radiation in her skeleton, which he’d had exhumed. But he wasn’t sure of the best way to test for radioactivity in these slightly decayed bones. So he wondered if the New York medical examiner’s office would be willing to help him out.
Norris volunteered the time of his talented toxicologist to do the work. They were curious at Bellevue too. No one really knew that much about radium poisoning. (The title of Martland’s paper was: “Some Unrecognized Dangers in the Use and Handling of Radioactive Substances.”) Scientists remained unsure of what the risk was to the living and were even more uncertain about how long alpha radiation might rattle in a dead woman’s bones.
THE REPORT on Amelia Maggia’s bones had a title that pretty much gave away the ending: “Radioactive Substances in a Body Five Years After Death.”
The paper, written by Alexander Gettler, Ralph Muller of New York University, and A. V. St. George of Bellevue’s pathology laboratories, offered detailed instructions on how to take bones and tissue from an aging corpse and test them for radioactivity.
The scientists first used a knife to scrape away as many shreds of remaining tissue as possible. They burned some of those scraps into ash, then boiled a selection of bones (the skull, five cervical vertebrae, five slices of rib, both feet, both femurs, the right tibia, the right fibula) for three hours in a solution of washing soda (the alkaline compound sodium carbonate). The bones were scrubbed to dazzling white and then air-dried. The larger bones were then sawed into two-inch pieces.
Gettler and Muller next took the prepared bones into a darkroom. They had prepared their test material: X-ray films wrapped in black safety paper. The scientists placed the pieces of bone on the wrapped film and sealed everything tight to keep any stray light from interfering with the experiment. They went through the same careful procedure for the tissue ash. Then, for comparison, they went through the same process with pieces of washed bone and tissue from a normal corpse. The bone, tissue, and film packages were left to sit for ten days with the idea that “if radioactive, the bones and the tissue ash would emit rays, and the beta and gamma rays would penetrate the black paper and affect the photographic film.”
After ten days they opened the packages. The published photographs showed a dazzle of pale spots, starred against a black background. “Those on which normal bones were placed are not shown, because they did not show any impression,” the authors noted. As the Bellevue team reported, every bright spot was the signature of a charged particle blowing from the dial painter’s bones through the protective paper onto the film. “Every piece of bone, as well as every tissue ash that we examined, showed radioactivity by the photographic method.”
The report displayed Gettler’s usual obsessive need to verify his results in multiple ways. He accompanied the film tests with results from experiments that relied on other techniques. He’d taken more pieces of skull, a few remnants of jaw, a vertebra, and bits of leg and foot and burned them into a gray-white ash. Scraps of tissue from the liver, lung, spleen, and brain were also weigh
ed and incinerated.
Those ashes were placed into a radiation detector, called a Lind electroscope, and compared with comparable tissue and bone ash from another, “normal,” body. The device detected alpha radiation as well as beta and gamma rays. The electroscope work confirmed the results from the film tests. Maggia’s body, even after five years, was “strongly radioactive,” according to the published report.
Gettler and Muller would later find an even more theatrical way to demonstrate the danger of radium in bones. In a tube attached to a Geiger counter, they placed a piece of bone from their Radium Girl. The counter click-click-clicked as it registered the bombardment of alpha and beta particles. The scientists connected a pair of loudspeakers to the equipment, boosting the volume of that rapid-fire rattle. In a lecture hall, the amplified crackle of radium emissions evoked the unnerving sound of enemy fire.
AS THE LAWSUIT dragged on, the five Radium Girls became sicker and sicker.
Two of them, Quinta MacDonald and Albina Larice, were sisters of Amelia Maggia, whose bones had provided so much evidence. Both of Quinta’s hips had fractured. Albina was bedridden, and one of her legs was now four inches shorter than the other. Edna Hussman could barely shuffle across her room. Years after leaving the factory, her hair still glowed in the dark. Grace Fryer now worked in a bank, with a metal brace from neck to hips to support her spine. Katherine Schaub’s jaws were starting to break apart; as she told her lawyers, she hoped the money—they were asking for $250,000 each—would pay for her funeral. “If I won my $250,000, mightn’t I have lots of roses?”