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Wars are hungry machines—and the more you feed them, the more they consume. As the fall of 1917 wore on, demand at the factory showed no signs of slowing; at the height of operations, as many as 375 girls were recruited to paint dials. And when the firm announced it needed more women, the existing workers eagerly promoted the job to their friends, sisters, and cousins. It wasn’t long before whole sets of siblings were seated alongside each other, merrily painting away. Albina and Mollie Maggia were soon joined by another sister, sixteen-year-old Quinta.

She was an extremely attractive woman with large gray eyes and long dark hair; she considered her pretty teeth her best feature. Down-to-earth and kind, her favorite pastimes included card games, checkers, and dominoes. She also confessed cheekily, “I don’t go to church half as often as I should.”1 She hit it off brilliantly with Grace Fryer, and the two became “inseparable.”2

Grace was another who brought her little sister to work: Adelaide Fryer adored the social side of it, being a very gregarious girl who loved to be around people, but she wasn’t quite as sensible as her big sister; in the end, she was fired for talking too much. The girls may have been sociable, but they still had a job to do, and if they didn’t knuckle down and do it, they were out. It could be tough. As Katherine Schaub had observed in Newark, the girls were under a lot of pressure. If a worker failed to keep up, she was criticized; if she fell short repeatedly, she eventually lost her job. The only time the girls really saw Mr. Savoy, whose office was downstairs, was when he came to scold them.

The biggest issue was the wasting of the paint. Each day, Miss Rooney issued a set amount of powder to the girls for completing a particular number of dials—and they had to make it last. They could not ask for more, but neither could they eke it out; if the numerals were not sufficiently covered by the material, it would show up during inspection. The girls took to helping each other out, sharing material if one found she had a little extra left over. And there were also their water dishes, filled with the radium sediment. Those, too, could be a source of extra material.

But the cloudy water hadn’t gone unnoticed by the company bosses. Before too long, the crucibles for cleaning the brushes were removed with the explanation that too much valuable material was wasted in the water. Now the girls had no choice but to lip-point, as there was no other way to clean off the radium that hardened on the brush. As Edna Bolz observed, “Without so doing it would have been impossible to have done much work.”3

The girls themselves were also targeted in the drive to limit waste. When a shift was over and they were about to leave for home, they were summoned to the darkroom to be brushed off: the “sparkling particles”4 were then swept from the floor into a dustpan for use the next day.

But no amount of brushing could get rid of all the dust. The girls were covered in it: their “hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial-painters were luminous.”5 Edna Bolz remembered that even after the brushing down, “When I would go home at night, my clothing would shine in the dark.”6 She added, “You could see where I was—my hair, my face.”7 The girls shone “like the watches did in the darkroom,”8 as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.

They were unmissable. Unassailable. The residents of the town noticed not just the wraithlike shine but also the expensive, glamorous clothes, for the girls dressed in silks and furs, “more like matinee idlers than factory workers,”9 a perk of their high wages.

Despite the attractions of the job, however, it wasn’t for everyone. Some found the paint made them sick; one woman got sores on her mouth after just a month of working there. Though the girls all lip-pointed, they did so at different intervals, which perhaps accounted for the varying reactions. Grace Fryer found that “I could do about two numbers before the brush dried,”10 whereas Edna Bolz lip-pointed on every number, sometimes even two or three times per number. Quinta Maggia did the same, even though she hated the taste: “I remember chewing [the paint]—gritty—it got between my teeth. I remember it distinctly.”11

Katherine Schaub was one of the more infrequent pointers; only four or five times per watch would she slip the brush between her lips. Nonetheless, when she suddenly broke out in pimples—which could have been due to her hormones, for she was still only fifteen—she was perhaps mindful of some of her colleagues’ adverse reactions, as she decided to consult a doctor.

To her concern, he asked her if she worked with phosphorus. This was a well-known industrial poison in Newark, and it was a logical suspicion—but it made Katherine feel anything but logical and calm. For it wasn’t only her acne that caused the doctor concern: there were changes, he noted, in Katherine’s blood. Was she sure she didn’t work with phosphorus?

The girls weren’t entirely clear what was in the paint. Flummoxed by her doctor’s questions, Katherine turned to her colleagues. When she told them what her physician had said, they became frightened. En masse, they confronted Mr. Savoy, who tried to allay their fears, but this time his words about the paint being harmless fell on deaf ears.

And so, as any middle manager would do, he went to his managers. Soon after, George Willis came over from New York to lecture the girls on radium and convince them it was not dangerous; von Sochocky also participated. There was nothing hazardous in the paint, the doctors promised: the radium was used in such a minuscule amount that it could not cause them harm.

And so the girls turned back to their work, their shoulders a little lighter, Katherine probably feeling a bit sheepish that her teenage spots had caused such bother. Her skin cleared up, and so too did the minds of the dial-painters. When one of the greatest radium authorities in the world tells you that you have no need to worry, quite simply, you don’t. Instead, they laughed about the effect the dust had on them. “Nasal discharges on my handkerchief,” Grace Fryer remembered, “used to be luminous in the dark.”12 One dial-painter, known as a “lively Italian girl,”13 painted the material all over her teeth one night before a date, wanting a smile that would knock him dead.

Those budding romances of the girls were now coming into full flower. Hazel and Theo were as close as ever, and Quinta started courting a young man called James McDonald—but it was Mae Cubberley who became a winter bride on December 23, 1917. As was traditional, she wanted to leave work right away, but Mr. Savoy asked her to stay a little longer, so she was still in the studio when Sarah Maillefer signed on that same month.

Sarah was a little different from the other girls. For a start, she was older at twenty-eight: a shy, matronly woman who often seemed a little separate from the teenagers, though they were inclusive of her. Sarah was broad-shouldered with short dark hair—and those shoulders needed to be broad, for she was also a single mother. She had a six-year-old daughter, Marguerite, named after Sarah’s little sister.

Sarah had married, back in 1909. Her husband, Henry Maillefer, was a tall, French-Irish sexton with black hair and black eyes. But Henry had disappeared; where he was now, nobody knew. And so Sarah and Marguerite still lived with her mom and pop, Sarah and Stephen Carlough, as well as her sister Marguerite, who was sixteen. Stephen was a painter and decorator, and the family were “hard-working, reasonable”14 people. Sarah, too, was hard-working, and would become one of the most loyal employees the radium company had.

For Mae Cubberley Canfield, however, her loyalty had come to an end. Soon after she married, she became pregnant and therefore handed in her notice in the early months of 1918. That chapter of her life was over.

Her place was quickly filled. That year, an estimated 95 percent of all the radium produced in America was given over to the manufacture of radium paint for use on military dials; the plant was running at full capacity. By the end of the year, one in six American soldiers would own a luminous watch—and it was the Orange girls who painted many of them. Jane Stocker (nicknamed Jennie) was a new recruit, and in July a slim, elfin-featured girl called Helen Quinlan joined. She was an energetic woman whom the company rather sniffily described as “the type that did altogether too much running around for her own good.”15 She had a boyfriend she often brought to the girls’ picnics, a smart, blond young man who wore a shirt and tie to the gatherings. He and Helen posed for a picture at one of them: Helen had her skirts flapping around her knees, always on the move, while he stared at her rather than the camera, looking utterly besotted with this playful creature he had somehow been lucky enough to meet.

The women were still encouraging their families to join them in their work. In September 1918, Katherine wrote proudly, “I obtained a position for Irene at the factory.”16 Irene Rudolph was her orphaned cousin, the same age as Katherine; she lived with the Schaubs. Perhaps understandably given her early life, Irene was a cautious, thoughtful young lady. Rather than spending her wages on silks and furs as some of the other girls did, she squirreled it away in a savings account. She had a narrow face and nose with dark eyes and hair; the only picture of her that survives shows her somewhat downcast.

A month after Irene started, another new employee began work. But this was no dial-painter striding into a new job: this was Arthur Roeder, a highly successful businessman who was the company’s new treasurer. He’d already demonstrated a skill for seizing career opportunities: though he had left his university without a degree, he’d ascended rapidly through the ranks of his chosen career. A round-faced, smart-looking man with a Roman nose and thin lips, he favored bow ties and pomade, which he slicked through his dark hair to press it close to his skull. He was based at the head office in New York and now took on responsibility for the dial-painters. Though he said he was in the studio on numerous occasions, his presence there was an exception, as most of the executives rarely went inside. In fact, of the firm’s top men, Grace Fryer remembered von Sochocky passing through her place of work just once. She didn’t pay it much attention at the time, but it would come to take on a great significance.

She was at her desk as usual that day, lipping and dipping her brush, as were all the other girls. Von Sochocky, as per his usual, had his head full of ideas and complex science as he walked briskly about his work. On this occasion, as he passed swiftly through the studio, he stopped and looked straight at her—and at what she was doing, as though seeing her actions for the first time.

Grace glanced up at him. He was a memorable-looking man, with a dominant nose and close-cut dark hair above his slightly protruding ears. Conscious of the pace of work around her, she bent again to her task and slipped the brush between her lips.

“Do not do that,”17 he said to her suddenly.

Grace paused and looked up, perplexed. This was how you did the job; how all the girls did it.

“Do not do that,”18 he said to her again. “You will get sick.” And then he was on his way.

Grace was utterly confused. Never one to back down from something she thought needed further investigation, she went straight over to Miss Rooney. But Miss Rooney merely repeated what the girls had already been told. “She told me there was nothing to it,” Grace later recalled. “She told me it was not harmful.”19

So Grace went back to her work: Lip… Dip… Paint. There was a war on, after all.

But not for much longer. On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent. Peace reigned. More than 116,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in the war; the total death toll for all sides was around 17 million. And in that moment of the Armistice, the radium girls, the company executives, and the world gave thanks that the brutal, bloody conflict was over.

Enough people had died. Now, they thought, it was time for living.