فصل 02

2

For the past two and a half years, the war in Europe had left America mostly untouched, except for the economic boom it brought. The majority of Americans were happy to stay out of the horrific trench warfare happening across the Atlantic, stories of which had reached them undiluted by distance. But in 1917, the neutral position became untenable. On April 6, just a week or so after Katherine’s promotion, Congress voted America into the conflict. It would be known as “the war to end all wars.”

In the dial-painting studio on Third Street, the impact of the decision was immediate. Demand rocketed. The studio in Newark was far too small to produce the numbers required, so Katherine’s bosses opened a purpose-built plant just down the road from Newark in Orange, New Jersey, closing the Third Street factory. This time there wouldn’t only be dial-painters on site; the company had grown so much it was to do its own radium extraction, requiring labs and processing plants. The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation was expanding massively, and the new site comprised several buildings, all located in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Katherine was among the first workers through the door of the two-story brick building that would house the application department. She and the other dial-painters were delighted by what they found. Not only was Orange an attractive, prosperous town, but the second-floor studio was charming, with huge windows on all sides and skylights in the roof. The spring sunshine streamed in, giving excellent light for dial-painting.

An appeal for new workers to help the war effort was made, and just four days after war had been declared, Grace Fryer answered the call. She had more reason than most to want to help; two of her brothers would be joining the several million American soldiers heading to France to fight. Lots of dial-painters were motivated by the idea of helping the troops: “The girls,” wrote Katherine, “were but a few of the many who through their jobs were ‘doing their bit.’”1

Grace was a particularly civic-minded young woman. “When Grace was just a schoolgirl,” a childhood friend of hers wrote, “she planned to be a real citizen when she grew up.”2 Her family was of a political bent; her father Daniel was a delegate to the carpenters’ union, and you couldn’t grow up in his house without picking up his principles. He was out of work rather a lot, as unionism was not popular at that time, but while the family may not have had much money, they did have a lot of love. Grace was one of ten children—she was number four—and she was especially close to her mother, also called Grace; perhaps because she was the eldest girl. There were six boys and four girls in total, and Grace was close to her siblings, especially her sister Adelaide, who was nearest to her in age, and her little brother Art.

Grace was already working when the call-up came, in a position that earned about the same as dial-painting, but she left to join the radium company in Orange, where she lived. She was an exceptionally bright and exceptionally pretty girl, with curly chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and clear-cut features. Many called her striking, but her looks weren’t of much interest to Grace. Instead, she was career-minded, someone who at the age of eighteen was already fashioning a prosperous life for herself. She was, in short, “a girl enthused with living.”3 She soon excelled at dial-painting, becoming one of the company’s fastest workers, with an average production rate of 250 dials a day.

A young woman called Irene Corby also signed on that spring. The daughter of a local hatter, she was a very cheerful girl aged about seventeen. “She had a very humorous disposition,” revealed her sister Mary, “exceptionally so.”4 Irene instantly got on well with her coworkers—with Grace in particular—and they regarded her as one of the more skilled employees.

It fell to Mae Cubberley and Josephine Smith to train the new girls. The women sat side by side at long tables running the full width of the studio; there was a walkway in between them, so Miss Rooney could continue her over-the-shoulder inspections. The instructresses taught them how to dab a tiny amount of the material (the girls always called the radium “the material”) into their crucibles, “like a fine smoke in the air,”5 and then mix the paint carefully. Even the softest stirring, however, left most women with splashes on their bare hands.

Then, once the paint was mixed, they instructed them to lip-point. “She told me to watch her and imitate her,”6 Katherine remembered of her training. As surely as night follows day, Grace and Katherine and Irene followed the instructions. They put the brush to their lips…dipped it in the radium…and painted the dials. It was a “lip, dip, paint routine”7: all the girls copied each other, mirror images that lipped and dipped and painted all day long.

They soon found the radium hardened on their brushes. A second crucible was supplied, ostensibly for cleaning the bristles, but the water was changed only once a day and soon became cloudy: It didn’t so much clean as spread the bristles, which some workers found a hindrance; they simply used their mouths to dampen the brush instead. Others, however, always used the water: “I know I done it,” one said, “because I couldn’t stand that gritty taste in my mouth.”8

The taste of the paint was a source of debate. “It didn’t taste funny,” Grace observed; “it didn’t have any taste.”9 Yet some ate the paint specifically because they liked it.

Another new worker tasting the magic element that summer was sixteen-year-old Edna Bolz. “Here is a person,” Popular Science later wrote of her, “blessed from birth with a sunny disposition.”10 She was taller than many of her coworkers, though still only five foot five, and had an innate elegance about her. She was nicknamed the “Dresden Doll”11 because of her beautiful golden hair and fair coloring; she also had perfect teeth and, perhaps as a result, a beaming smile. Over time she became close to the forelady, Miss Rooney, who described her as “a very nice type of girl; very clean-living type of very good family.”12 Edna’s passion was music, and she was also devoutly religious. She joined in July, at a time when production was rocketing due to wartime demand.

That summer, the plant was a ferment of activity: “The place was a madhouse!”13 one worker exclaimed. The girls were already doing overtime to keep up with demand, working seven days a week; now, the studio started operating night and day. The dial-painters glowed even brighter from the radium against the dark windows: a workshop of shining spirits laboring through the night.

Though the pace was demanding, the setup was in many ways fun for the women, who reveled in the drama of the long shifts painting dials for their country. The majority were teenagers—“merry giggling girls”14—and they found time for the odd bit of fun. One favorite game was to scratch their name and address into a watch: a message for the soldier who would wear it; sometimes, he would respond with a note. New girls were joining all the time, which made the job even more sociable. In Newark, perhaps seventy women had worked in the studio; during the war, that number more than tripled. The girls now sat crammed in on both sides of the desks, only a few feet apart.

Hazel Vincent was among them. Like Katherine Schaub, she came from Newark; she had an oval face with a button nose and fair hair that she set in the latest styles. Another new worker was twenty-one-year-old Albina Maggia, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, who came from a family of seven girls; she was the third. She was a somewhat round and diminutive woman of only four foot eight, with classic Italian dark hair and eyes. She was pleased to get back into the world of work—as the eldest unmarried daughter, she’d quit her hat-trimming job to nurse her mother, who’d died the year before—but she discovered she was not the fastest dial-painter. She found the brushes “very clumsy”15 and painted only a tray and a half a day. Nonetheless, she tried as hard as she could, later remarking, “I always did my best for that company.”16

Joining Albina at the long wooden desks was her little sister Amelia, whom everyone called Mollie. She seemed to have found her calling at the studio, being unusually productive. A foot taller than Albina, she was a sociable nineteen-year-old with a broad face and bouffant brown hair, often seen laughing with her colleagues. She got on particularly well with another newcomer, Eleanor Eckert (nicknamed Ella): the two were as thick as thieves. Ella was popular and good-looking, with blond, slightly frizzy hair and a wide smile; a sense of fun was never far from her, whether she was at work or play. The girls would socialize and eat lunch together, barely stopping work as they shared food across the crowded desks.

The company also organized social events; picnics were a favorite. The dial-painters, dressed in white summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, would eat ice-cream cones while sitting on the narrow makeshift bridge that lay across the brook by the studio, swinging their legs or holding on to one another as they tried not to fall in the water. The picnics were for all employees—so at these events the girls got to mix with their coworkers, whom they rarely saw: the men who worked in the laboratories and refining rooms. It wasn’t long before the odd “office romance” began; Mae Cubberley started walking out with Ray Canfield, a lab worker: one of many blossoming relationships among the girls, though most were not with colleagues. Hazel Vincent, for one, was in love with her childhood sweetheart, a mechanic called Theodore Kuser, who had baby-blue eyes and fair hair.

The company’s founder, Sabin von Sochocky, an Austrian-born, thirty-four-year-old doctor, could often be seen holding court at these picnics, seated among his workers on a rug, his jacket off and a beaker of cold drink in one hand. The girls seldom saw him in their studio—he was usually too busy working in his lab to grace them with his presence—so it was a rare opportunity for their paths to cross. It was he who had invented the luminous paint they used, back in 1913, and it had certainly been a success for him. In his first year, he had sold 2,000 luminous watches; now, the company’s output ranked in the millions. In many ways he was an unlikely entrepreneur, for his training had been in medicine; initially, he’d intended the paint to be a “potboiler”17 to fund medical research, but the growing demand had necessitated a more businesslike approach. He had met a “kindred soul”18 in Dr. George Willis, and the two physicians had founded the company.

Von Sochocky was, according to his colleagues, a “remarkable man.”19 Everyone called him simply “the doctor.” He was indefatigable: “someone that liked to start late, but is then willing to go on and on until all hours.”20 American magazine called him “one of the greatest authorities in the world on the subject of radium”21—and he had studied under the best: the Curies themselves.

From them, and from the specialist medical literature he had studied, von Sochocky understood that radium carried great dangers. Around the time he studied with the Curies, Pierre was heard to remark that “he would not care to trust himself in a room with a kilo of pure radium, as it would burn all the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight, and probably kill him.”22 The Curies, by that time, were intimately familiar with radium’s hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumors, it was true, by destroying unhealthy tissue—but it was indiscriminating in its powers, and could devastate healthy tissue too. Von Sochocky himself had suffered its silent and sinister wrath: radium had got into his left index finger and, when he realized, he hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as though “an animal had gnawed it.”23

Of course, to the layman, all this was unknown. The mainstream position as understood by most people was that the effects of radium were all positive; and that was what was written about in newspapers and magazines, championed across product packaging and performed on Broadway.

Nonetheless, the lab workers in von Sochocky’s plant in Orange were provided with protective equipment. Lead-lined aprons were issued, along with ivory forceps for handling tubes of radium. In January 1921, von Sochocky would write that one could handle radium “only by taking the greatest precautions.”24

Yet despite this knowledge, and the injury to his own finger, von Sochocky was apparently so transfixed by radium that all reports say he took little care. He was known to play with it, holding the tubes with his bare hands while watching the luminosity in the dark or immersing his arm up to the elbow in radium solutions. Company cofounder George Willis was also lax, picking up tubes of radium with his forefinger and thumb, not bothering with forceps. Perhaps understandably, their colleagues learned from them and copied what they did. No one heeded the warnings of Thomas Edison, working just a few miles away in sight of the Orange plant, who once remarked, “There may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results; everybody handling it should have a care.”25

Yet in the sunny second-floor studio, the girls working there had not a care in the world. Here there were no lead aprons, no ivory-tipped forceps, no medical experts. The amount of radium in the paint was considered so small that such measures were not deemed necessary.

The girls themselves, of course, had no clue that they might even be needed. This was radium, the wonder drug, they were using. They were lucky, they thought, as they laughed among themselves and bent their heads to their intricate work. Grace and Irene. Mollie and Ella. Albina and Edna. Hazel and Katherine and Mae.

They picked up their brushes and they twirled them over and over, just as they had been taught.

Lip… Dip… Paint.