Hi Ella. Hey, Johanna. You have a story for me today, as always. So this takes place in Orange, New Jersey in the 1920s. If you were walking around at night, you might have noticed these women coming out of a factory. People called them ghost girls sometimes because these women glowed in the dark.

Their clothes, their skin, their hair, they were covered in radioactive dust.

Where they worked was the U.S. Radium Corporation's New Jersey factory.

Their job involved glow-in-the-dark paint.

The key ingredient in this paint was radium, which is one million times as radioactive as uranium.

But these women didn't think anything of it. For fun, they would sometimes even paint their nails with this paint.

And then, predictably, at least to us now, they started to get sick.

This is Alice Obscura.

I'm Johanna Mayer.

And I'm Ella Fetter.

And today we're talking about the U.S. Radium Corporation's old factory in Orange, New Jersey.

And about the women who helped us figure out that, yeah, radium wasn't actually a miracle health elixir.

That's after this.

Yeah. So a century ago in orange, New Jersey, there were women walking around covered in radioactive dust. Why?

Okay. The story starts back in World War I with watches. So imagine you are a soldier in a dark trench and you need to check the time. Well, the U.S. Radium Corporation has the perfect

solution for you, a watch that glows in the dark. The great thing about it was if you were a

soldier, it wasn't lighting up, you know, your hiding place. You could actually look at your

instruments without giving your position to the enemy.

Deborah Blum.

She's a journalist who writes a lot about toxicology, and she covered this story in her book,

The Poisoners Handbook.

She says that the key to the glow-in-the-dark watches was radium-based paint.

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