Via Capitol Fax, the documentary Radium City is available in full on YouTube. It’s a simply made, affecting account of the deaths attributed to the Radium Dial plant in Ottawa, Illinois, and the legal ...

Hundreds of women and girls were exposed to a radioactive chemical at an Illinois factory in the 1920s. Years later, they helped change workplace safety standards. In the early 1900s, radium was all ...

Three Crows Theatre has made a name for itself performing plays based on true stories, and this one hits close to home. Melanie Marnich’s one-act, directed by Kristin Davis, details the radioactive ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. In the 1920s, young women worked in an Ottawa, Illinois, factory ...

In November, I attended North High School’s production of “Radium Girls.” I found the story compelling and decided to read the book the play is based on — “The Radium Girls” by Kate Moore. Moore tells ...

The town of Ottawa, Ill., is banding together to honor the memories of watch dial painters who were poisoned by a radium paint in the town during the 1920s and 1930s. Piller’s father, William, is a ...

WATERBURY They are scrubbing down Apartment 507. Men and women in white lab coats, protected by plastic masks, are vacuuming radioactive dust from the wooden floorboards and scraping radium off the ...

The technique was called lip pointing. They would put the small brush with camel hair bristles between their lips, twist it with their tongue and then dip it into a mixture of sulphite, water and ...

In 1922, an exciting new opportunity came to the women of Ottawa, Illinois. The Radium Dial Company opened a factory and began hiring well-paid female employees by the dozen. Their job was to paint ...

In most musicals, factory work is presented as quotidian drudgery, something to be endured before heading out, say, to ride the carousel. But in the early minutes of “Shining Lives: A Musical,” the ...

They would, quite literally, glow. During World War I and the years thereafter, dozens of teenage girls and young women worked in radium-dial factories, painting glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches ...