Radium’s “incredible glow” Charlotte Nevins Purcell was 16 years old when she took a job at the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois in the 1920s.

Amelia “Mollie” Maggia was the first to die. The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was ...

In 1917, glow-in-the-dark watches were all the rage. But the girls who painted them with radioactive paint weren’t told how dangerous it was.

That warming glow radium puts out is caused by the element’s atoms acting like tiny batteries. Light photons strike the radium atom, bumping its electrons into a higher orbit.

Radium quickly became a veritable marketing force. ... In one ad, a pastoral landscape dotted with grazing cows near a pristine stream are bathed in the warm glow of a rising sun.

Deadly Glow. The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy . Reviewer: Linda Simoni-Wastila, PhD. Disclosures. November 13, 2003. By Ross Mullner, PhD, MPH American Public Health Association $32.00 ...

The glow of radium’s medicinal magic was fast fading. What was once trumpeted as an “elixir of youth” had become “bottled death,” as the Tribune’s Roy Gibbons said in a 1959 look back ...

When mixed with phosphorescent copper-doped zinc sulfide, radium emits a characteristic green glow: Quora. The use of radioluminescent paint was mostly phased out by the mid-1960s.

In the early 20th century, it was all the rage to add Radium to items. The most famous being watch faces, where the numbers would glow so you could see what time it is in the dark.