A century ago, glow-in-the-dark watches were an irresistible novelty ... But the paint made the watches glow because it contained radium, a radioactive element discovered less than 20 years ...

So around World War I, when manufacturers started looking for workers to paint clock faces and other equipment with radium to make them glow in the dark, they had no problem finding employees.

It was lucrative — plus painting glow-in-the-dark radium on soldiers’ wristwatch ... they literally glowed in the night from the radium powder on their bodies. “Nasal discharges on my ...

Wearing a watch with a glow-in-the-dark dial was the hot new fashion accessory. “Made possible by the magic of radium!” promised one advertisement. The work involved using luminous radium ...

A girl with "phossy jaw" would literally glow in the dark as her jawbone slowly disintegrated ... girls before she went to the United States Radium Corporation in New Jersey, just after World ...

factory painting radioactive glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches. They were told to lick their brushes to a fine point. They were told that the glowing radium in the paint was safe. Radium is ...

radium ended up in a lot of crazy places for its purported magical healing properties and its glow-in-the-dark novelty. Food products containing radium, like the Radium Schokolade chocolate bar ...

Irreproachably intended to illuminate a shameful chapter in US labor history, this stilted drama never quite manages to glow in the dark ... dip them into the radium powder.

In the early 1920s, the hot new gadget was a wristwatch with a glow-in-the-dark dial. And it did seem magical. Radium was the latest miracle substance — an element that glowed and fizzed ...