We take for granted how easily we can read the time in darkness. But back in the early 1900s, there was only one way to make a clock glow in the dark—painting the numbers with radium. It was delicate work, and radium dial factories hired young women to do it. All day they would press them between their lips to keep them sharp.
Of course, radium is radioactive. The young women got horribly and gruesomely sick. They began to die. The companies refused to do anything about it. So the young women fought back, in court. Writer Kate Moore tells their story in “The Radium Girls.” She told Anne Strainchamps she could not stop thinking about the girls.
Wanting to hear more about how Radiant Dial's treatment of these women affected the town itself, Anne traveled to Ottawa to hear firsthand what happened to the women and their families in the years that followed.