The Radium Girls of Ottawa, Illinois

In 1922, the Radium Dial Company moved into a former high school building on Columbus Street in Ottawa, Illinois. Its main customer was Westclox, the clock maker. Young women were hired to paint numbers on clock and watch dials with paint that glowed in the dark because it contained radium. The brushes lost their points quickly. Supervisors told the women to reshape them with their lips, a routine known as “lip, dip, paint,” and assured them the paint was harmless. At its peak, around 1925, the company employed about 1,000 young women, who painted about 4,300 dials a day. The company tried glass pens at one point, but dropped them because they slowed down piece-rate work. The same thing had already happened in New Jersey. Dial painters there began falling ill, and in 1928 five of them settled a lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corporation. In Ottawa, workers began showing signs of radium poisoning in 1926 and 1927, but management refused to pay their medical and dental bills. In 1937, five Ottawa women, represented by attorney Leonard Grossman, took their case to the Illinois Industrial Commission. They won in 1938, and in October 1939 the U.S. Supreme Court declined the company’s appeal. By then Radium Dial had already left town, and some of the women never received anything. The cases helped establish workers’ right to sue employers for occupational harm. In Ottawa, radium waste and demolition debris from Radium Dial and its successor, Luminous Processes, left contamination around town, and federal Superfund crews spent years digging it out. In 2011, the city unveiled a bronze statue of a dial painter at Clinton and Jefferson Streets. It came about because an eighth grader, Madeline Piller, lobbied for a memorial.