The Radium Girls
She was the central protagonist and lead plaintiff of the 1927 New Jersey lawsuit, refusing to let corporate delays stop her fight for justice.
Grace Fryer
The inventor of radium paint who cautioned Grace Fryer about lip-pointing early on.
Sabin von Sochocky
This idealistic young attorney bravely took the girls' case after dozens of other lawyers turned them down due to corporate intimidation or legal technicalities.
Raymond Berry
Radium acts as a biological imposter because it belongs to the exact same chemical family on the periodic table as this essential bone-building nutrient.
Calcium
The factory supervisors instructed the dial-painters to perform this specific habit with their paintbrushes to maintain a fine tip for painting.
Lip-pointing
This fashionable worker, who was also a writer, was one of the first to notice the health problems and famously used radium paint to make her hair and teeth glow for dates.
Katherine Schaub
The original president of USRC
Arthur Roeder
This doctor, who was initially seen as a helper, eventually became a hostile witness.
Sabin von Sochocky
Once swallowed, radium targets this specific part of the human anatomy, where it remains trapped for life.
This is a money-based conclusion that many of the women chose to end their legal battle with USRC.
She is remembered as the tragic "Patient Zero" of the tragedy; her jaw completely disintegrated before her death at age 24.
Mollie Maggia
This deceptive corporate consultant held a PhD but masqueraded as a medical doctor to falsely tell Grace Fryer she was in "fine health."
This Essex County Chief Medical Examiner developed the scientific tests that definitively linked the girls' bone decay to radium ingestion.
Though easily blocked by paper outside the body, these highly destructive radioactive particles are incredibly dangerous when emitted from inside the bone.
Alpha particles
This was the name of the luminous, radium-based paint manufactured by the United States Radium Corporation.
Undark
This plaintiff joined the historic lawsuit alongside her coworkers, determined to hold the company accountable before they all succumbed to bone decay like her sister.
Quinta McDonald
USRC officials repeatedly used this defense to not only explain the illnesses, but also make the girls look bad in the process.
Syphilis
This Harvard husband-and-wife research team defied the USRC by publishing their independent, damning findings about the factory's contamination.
Katherine and Cecil Drinker
Radium has a measurement of roughly 1,600 years for this metric, explaining why the girls' remains are still radioactive today.
Half-life
This strict legal time limit on filing lawsuits was the biggest hurdle the girls had to overcome, as their symptoms didn't appear until years after exposure.
Statute of limitations
To secure absolute medical proof of radium poisoning years after her death, a historic legal order was granted to perform this procedure on Mollie Maggia.
An exhumation/testing of her bones.
The USRC legal team famously employed this type of defense strategy.
"Waiting it out" in hopes that the plaintiffs would die before legal proceedings could begin.
The Drinkers' research proved that the factory environment itself was a hazard because this specific visual phenomenon was happening to almost every surface.
What is glowing in the dark? (or being radioactive)
This medical term describes the death of bone and tissue from radium exposure.
Necrosis
This was the setting of another groundbreaking work-related hazard in the United States.
Meat-packing plants in Chicago.