Divya 
During the early 1920s, in what seemed like an epoch, the discovery of the radium element turned the realm of science and the consumer age on its head. It poured as bottled moonlight, the pristine essence of health, progress, and luxury. Physicians labeled it as a potent substance and poured it into the water for consistency, and beauty companies desperately infused it into creams. It is intriguing that, during this period, radium found its most captivating use in the booming watchmaking industry, where time could be seen at night.
In Orange, New Jersey, the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation and the United States Radium Corporation served as a focal point of activity during this period. The warfare space was also deeply penetrated by the production of photoluminescent materials for military dials and wristwatches. Civilians found it easier to look at the wristwatches without looking for a lamp, while soldiers were able to read them in trenches without the need for a match. All of this was possible due to the flourishing of the wristwatch business, and the workers behind this advancement were young women.
The Girls Who Painted Time
Grace Fryer was also one of them, an intelligent, energetic young woman with endless possibilities ahead of her. It was that same hope of easing into good wages and vigorous work that made her and several others join factories. Just imagine it a high seamstress could earn three times the pay just for painting delicate numbers around the face of a watch. While making sure the numbers were painted exactly, however, the procedure was very simple.
Lip, dip, paint
The words that they uttered became their chant, their sacred words. The girls first dipped their brushes in radium paint and then used their lips to give the brush a round shape, and then they painted numbers that sparkled like stars in the night sky. Supervisors made it possible, which made it easier for the employees to work. Note: no one warned them about the radiation, often referred to as side effects, starting with that glorious mass of luminescence.
A Factory of Dreams
The working environment was dark as the air was filled with grains of sparkle from the nuclear dust. Recently graduated girls never bowed down from gossip or laughter while painting. For fun, some would smear the substance on their teeth or nails and find it amusing to see how they glowed in the dark. The name stuck: They were the shining girls. They were radiant in a way they did not understand.
Among them was Catherine Wolfe Donohue, a bighearted woman with keen eyes and expert hands. She was an artist in her own right and paid attention to every brush stroke. She had ordinary aspirations: a house, a family, and a comfortable life from hard labor. The radium in her opinion was something that offered hope to the world. Why would she not consider it as such? The firm asserted that radium was a harmless scientific development meant to enhance the well-being of mankind.
The Glow of Promise
The girls came back from the factory with some remnants of radiance on their clothes and hair. Town residents were entranced by the girls they saw under the street lamps, the radiant ghosts returning from work. Mothers proudly exclaimed, My daughter works with radium! Now that was something meaningful and honorable.
They were boys and girls, believing in better days and completely charmed by the wealth of them. After the war, the world was still in need of healing, and these people imagined that they had found the most elusive of things: a well-paying, significant, and even slightly mystical combination of factors that an employment opportunity offered.
Foreshadowing the Shadows
However, the light that illuminated their life was destined to dissolve them from the inside out. Radium started to work idly within their bodies. Bones began to take in the substance as they would calcium. My teeth started to shatter. A combination of compounds began to pave and build small quantities day by day, giving adverse consequences.
Yet in the early days, it was a blissful experience. The girls would paint, and laugh, and concoct wild fantasies. Grace desired to pursue a career in teaching; Catherine envisioned a dreamy life where there was a white picket fence around her house and children were running around in the garden. For them, Radium was a magical tool that they could depend on to build their future.
A Termed Dangerous Kind of innocence
The country they grew up in possessed unyielding optimism concerning its progress. Thanks to science, homes could now have electricity, and cars are now commonplace on roads, as well as radium embedded in wristwatches. There was a particular group of people who paid the price but questioned no one, least of all the girls, and that was the price tag.
The first chapter of their story does not involve tragedy. It concerns the girls’ youth and aspirations together with the fascination with a miracle compound and a better country. At the same time, however, as they were painting with the shimmering opportunity, darkness was beginning to creep in.
One certain thing was that while there was still opportunity, the story remained one of lights shining, of mystery, and undue caution. As they were painting new dials, the clock was already able to count the seconds. Their life story was going to be one of agony, determination, fairness, and policies.
Science was yet to show Radium’s realities, and hence the world of endless possibilities remained pointless.
To be continued in Part 2. Till then, keep reading DipDives.com.
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