by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN Senior Scientist

Last month, this column considered the ways in which the military demands of World War I gave rise to the modern branch of earth science called hydrogeology.

During that conflict, combatants were quartered for long periods of time in forward bases that were literally entrenched in the earth. They needed groundwater to stay out of their dugouts, and they also needed clean water for themselves and their warhorses to drink.

To both those ends, geologists accompanied the allied troops into of the battlefields of the Western Front and figured out how to identify, assess, and exploit aquifers.

The first World War was the last major conflict involving soldiers on horseback—with the huge quantities of water that cavalries require—but it was also the first conflict involving soldiers in airplanes.

And those pilots, flying high above the trenches, needed to see their instrumentation at night.

Engineers served this particular military exigency by developing new technology, namely, paint laced with radium and phosphor (aka zinc oxide, which fluoresces when exposed to energy). This concoction, called Undark, made cockpit instruments and gunsights glow in the dark.

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Radium, chemical symbol Ra, inhabits the bottom left corner of the periodic chart of elements, three squares below calcium. Keep that fact in mind. We’ll come back to it.

Famously discovered and named by Marie Curie in 1898, the element radium is considered a naturally occurring radionuclide, but it is mostly found deep under the ground, sometimes in groundwater aquifers, most often bound up with uranium ores.

All forms of radium are radioactive, meaning as it decays, radium emits ionizing radiation—subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves with energy sufficient to knock electrons off of surrounding molecules.

Radium is not biologically useful to any living organism inhabiting the sunlit surface of the earth, but its usefulness in creating images of the interior structures of the body, under the skin’s surface, was recognized almost immediately.

By the time World War I had overrun Europe, Marie Curie’s husband and radium co-discoverer was dead, and she went to work outfitting a fleet of Red Cross ambulances with radiumgraph equipment, comparable to X-ray imaging and capable of providing diagnostic services.

These ambulances were known as Little Curries, and she sometimes drove them herself, saying,

I shall never forget the horrible impression, seeing such a holocaust of human life. To hate war, it was enough to see it only once, what I was witnessing constantly throughout those years: men and boys carried to our ambulances covered with blood and mud. Many of them were soon to die, others were to experience pain and suffering for months.

In this way, the pilots above the trenches and the wounded soldiers in the trenches were both exposed to radium.

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After the armistice, peacetime markets were needed for wartime inventions, and the luminous paint designed for the purpose of enabling night raids was turned to illuminating the dials of inexpensive timepieces.

The United States Radium Corporation, which had paid young women to paint military instruments for the war effort, now paid them to paint numbers and hands on watch faces. Encouraged by management to use their lips to draw their brushes into fine points, these workers—4,000 in all, some in New Jersey, some in Illinois, some in Connecticut, all known as Radium Girls—soon developed lesions, ulcers, and tooth loss as the alpha radiation began to eat away at their jaws.*

A number of these workers went on to develop bone cancer and anemia. Others became unable to walk. Ankles, spines, and hips crumbled and shattered. Several women died.

It was a dentist who figured out that the dial painters were suffering from radiation poisoning. Radium follows the same biochemical pathways in the body that calcium does, depositing itself in bony structures and mutating them from within.

But this was not the end of the story. In 1925, five dying women workers in Ottawa, Illinois sued U.S. Radium for damages. The company pursued various delay tactics, denied any responsibility, and commissioned research whose results showed no link to radiation exposure. The company alleged that the statute of limitations had run out.

The company counter-accused that women workers were actually suffering from syphilis.

The judge who allowed these run-out-the-clock tactics was found to hold stock in U.S. Radium.

Eventually, media backlash against U.S. Radium forced an out-of-court settlement in 1928, with each girl paid $10,000. With five years of the settlement, all five litigants were dead. Another case finally succeeded in 1939 after eight appeals. But the public outrage generated by the news coverage of young women workers fighting for justice from their deathbeds paved the way for the creation, in 1970, of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Association and prompted reforms in labor law that lifted the statute of limitations for many chronic illnesses.

And now, a century later, as documented by journalist Justin Nobel, the fracking boys who haul radioactive waste from the oil and gas fields of America are the radium girls of today.

*The fuller story is told in Kate Moore’s Radium Girls: The Dark Story of American’s Shining Women (Sourcebooks, 2018).

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RePercussion Section: Luminous Cockpits, Radium Girls, and Fracking Boys