Each dial-painter had her own supply. She mixed her own paint, dabbing a little radium powder into a small white crucible and adding a dash of water and a gum-arabic adhesive: a combination that created a greenish-white luminous paint, which went under the name ‘Undark’. The fine yellow powder contained only a minuscule amount of radium; it was mixed with zinc sulphide, with which the radium reacted to give a brilliant glow. The effect was breathtaking.
Katherine could see that the powder got everywhere; there was dust all over the studio. Even as she watched, little puffs of it seemed to hover in the air before settling on the shoulders or hair of a dial-painter at work. To her astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam.
Katherine, like many before her, was entranced by it. It wasn’t just the glow – it was radium’s all-powerful reputation. Almost from the start, the new element had been championed as ‘the greatest find of history’. When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumours, with remarkable results. Consequently – as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element – other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation . . . anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: ‘The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.’
For another claim of radium was that it could restore vitality to the elderly, making ‘old men young’. One aficionado wrote: ‘Sometimes I am halfway persuaded that I can feel the sparkles inside my anatomy.’ Radium shone ‘like a good deed in a naughty world’.
Its appeal was quickly exploited by entrepreneurs. Katherine had seen adverts for one of the most successful products, a radium-lined jar to which water could be added to make it radioactive: wealthy customers drank it as a tonic; the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day. But as some of the models retailed for $200 ($3,700), it was a product far out of Katherine’s reach. Radium water was drunk by the rich and famous, not working-class girls from Newark.
What she did feel part of, though, was radium’s all-pervasive entry into American life. It was a craze, no other word for it. The element was dubbed ‘liquid sunshine’ and it lit up not just the hospitals and drawing rooms of America, but its theatres, music halls, grocery stores and bookshelves. It was breathlessly featured in cartoons and novels, and Katherine – who loved to sing and play piano – was probably familiar with the song ‘Radium Dance’, which had become a huge hit after featuring in the Broadway musical Piff! Paff! Pouf! On sale were radium jockstraps and lingerie, radium butter, radium milk, radium toothpaste (guaranteeing a brighter smile with every brushing) and even a range of Tho-Radia make-up, which offered radium-laced eyeshadows, lipsticks and face creams. Other products were more prosaic: ‘The Radium Eclipse Sprayer,’ championed one advert, ‘quickly kills all flies, mosquitoes, roaches. [It] has no equal as a cleaner of furniture, porcelain, tile. It is harmless to humans and easy to use.’
Not all of these products actually contained radium – it was far too costly and rare for that – but manufacturers from all kinds of industries declared it part of their range, for everyone wanted a slice of the radium pie.
And now, to Katherine’s excitement, thanks to her job she would have a prime seat at the table. Her eyes drank in the dazzling scene before her. But then, to her disappointment, Miss Rooney ushered her into a room that was separate to the main studio, away from the radium and the shining girls. Katherine would not be dial-painting that day – nor the day after, as much as she longed to join the glamorous artists in the other room. Instead, she would be serving an apprenticeship as an inspector, checking the work of those luminous girls who were busy painting dials.
It was an important job, Miss Rooney explained. For although the company specialised in watch faces, they also had a lucrative government contract to supply luminous airplane instruments. Given there was a war raging in Europe, business was booming; the company also used its paint to make gunsights, ships’ compasses and more shine brightly in the dark. And when lives were hanging in the balance, the dials had to be perfect. ‘[I was] to see that the number outlines were even and [thorough] and to correct minor defects,’ Katherine recalled.
Miss Rooney introduced her to her trainer, Mae Cubberley, and then left the girls to it, resuming her slow march up and down the rows of painting girls, casting a watchful eye over their shoulders.
Mae smiled at Katherine as she said hello. A twenty-six-year-old dial-painter, Mae had been with the company since the previous fall. Although she was new to the industry when she joined, she already had a reputation as a brilliant painter, regularly turning in eight to ten trays of dials daily (there were either twenty-four or forty-eight dials in each tray, depending on the dial size). She had quickly been promoted to training other girls in the hope that they would match her productivity. Now, in the little side room, she picked up a paintbrush to instruct Katherine in the technique that all the dial-painters and inspectors were taught.
They were using slim camel-hair brushes with narrow wooden handles. One dial-painter recalled: ‘I had never seen a brush as fine as that. I would say it possibly had about thirty hairs in it; it was exceptionally fine.’ Yet as fine as the brushes were, the bristles had a tendency to spread, hampering the girls’ work. The smallest pocket watch they painted measured only three-and-a-half centimetres across its face, meaning the tiniest element for painting was a single millimetre in width. The girls could not go over the edges of these delicate parameters or there would be hell to pay. They had to make the brushes even finer – and there was only one way they knew of to do that.
‘We put the brushes in our mouths,’ Katherine said, quite simply. It was a technique called lip-pointing, inherited from the first girls who had worked in the industry, who came from china-painting factories.