![]() In 1925, doctors began to suspect that Grace Fryer’s condition may be related to her previous employment in US Radium’s Orange, New Jersey factory. Company labs were equipped with lead screens, masks and tongs, while literally everything on the factory floor, glowed. The active ingredient in Undark was a million times more active than Uranium, and company owners and scientists knew it. The only side effects of all that radium, they were told, would be rosy cheeks. The stuff was odorless and tasteless, some couldn’t resist the fun of painting nails and even teeth with the luminous paint. Camel hair brushes tended to splay out with use, supervisors encouraged the women to sharpen their brushes using their lips and tongues. The harmful effects of radiation were relatively well understood by 1917, though the information was kept 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 their factories, hand painting the stuff on watches, gun sights and other instruments. A number of companies stepped up to fill the need, perhaps none larger than US Radium and their glow-in-the-dark paint, “Undark”. When WWI began, 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 fake radium products soared. Prices skyrocketed to $84,500 per gram by 1915, equivalent to $1.9 million today. Serious doctors had early successes killing cancer cells, while quacks and charlatans sold radium creams, drinks and suppositories to cure everything from acne to warts.Īn unseen benefit of the craze, at least for a time, was that demand for radium was vastly greater than actual production. Newspapers waxed rhapsodic about cities of the future, streets aglow in the light of radium lamps as smiling restaurant patrons enjoyed luminescent cocktails. There have been strange fads over the years, from goldfish swallowing to pole sitting, but none stranger than the radium craze of 1904. Curie’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. This new and radioactive element was Radium, one of the ‘alkaline earth metals’. ![]() 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 he couldn’t explain it. ![]() 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.
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