The Factory Girls Who Glowed in the Dark — Then Died Horribly

They were young women working in one of the cleanest, best-paying factory jobs available to them in the 1920s. They painted the glowing numbers on watch dials using a fine brush, a jar of radium-based paint, and a technique their supervisors had taught them on their very first day. Lip. Dip. Point. Nobody told them the paint was entering their bones. Nobody told them the company already knew. Nobody told them that the glow they brought home on their dresses every evening was the same thing slowly destroying them from the inside. This is the story of the Radium Girls — the dial painters of Orange, New Jersey and Ottawa, Illinois — and the hidden cost of an industry that treated their bodies as the cheapest part of the machine. Their suffering produced the scientific data that would eventually protect millions of American workers. The rules changed because of them. But the rules came too late for the women who paid for them. This video is a documentary-style narration based on the documented history of radium dial painters in early twentieth century America, including the cases of former United States Radium Corporation workers and the legal battles that followed. If someone in your family worked in an old factory or industrial plant, their story may never have made the newspaper. Write it down before it disappears. #RadiumGirls #ForgottenWorkers #AmericanIndustrialHistory #FactoryDanger #WorkplaceDisaster #LaborHistory #DarkHistory #TrueHistory #ForgottenHistory #AmericanHistory