Carter Roy

Within five years of the settlement, Grace Fryer, Catherine Shobe, and Quinta McDonald all die from radium poisoning.

Edna Hussman dies in 1939.

Albina Larisse, the longest survivor of the group, dies in 1946.

None of them live to see old age.

The case makes headlines across the world.

The public is outraged, and the radium girls are celebrated as heroes.

But here's what doesn't happen.

The country doesn't pass any new laws or impose regulations on USRC.

There are still no federal standards for workplace safety.

USRC pays a settlement, but they don't admit wrongdoing.

And radium dial painting is still completely legal, which means it's still happening.

The whole time the lawsuits were working their way through the courts, there was another factory a thousand miles away in Ottawa, Illinois.

The Radium Dial Company.

They have the same paint, the same brushes, the same technique.

Lip dip paint.

They opened in 1922, the same year Molly Magia died.

While women in New Jersey had their teeth falling out, women in Illinois were showing up for their first day of work.

While Grace was searching for a lawyer, these women were licking brushes.

And while the USRC case was making headlines across the country, Radium Dial was telling its workers not to worry.

The problem in New Jersey, they said, was impure radium.