Carter Roy
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
Their radium is totally safe.
You can probably guess what's happening to those Illinois workers.
Same paint, same symptoms, and the company knows this.
Radium Dial has been screening employees for radium poisoning for three years.
They have test results showing dangerous levels of radiation in their workers' bodies, but they never share the results with the workers themselves.
One of those workers is Catherine Wolfe Donahue.
She starts painting dials in 1922, the same year the Ottawa factory opens.
She's 19 years old.
By 1925, she's limping from pain.