It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hi, I'm Susie On. Recently, physicist John Zarling was visiting Argonne National Laboratories in the southwest suburbs.

His group walked down into the lower levels and came across an area with thick concrete walls.

It was dark and smelled of machine oil.

It did almost look like a castle dungeon mixed with a mental institution.

A colleague told John that this was once where Argon held its radium program,

where they studied the radium girls, workers who were poisoned in the 1920s. John wanted to know

more. Who were the radium girls? And how did they end up at Argon? To understand that, we need to

go back to the early 1900s when radium was all the rage.

You could go to the corner pharmacy and pick up radium pills and tonics to help all sorts of ailments, like gout, hay fever, and fatigue.

Glow in the dark clocks and equipment for airplanes and automobiles painted with radium were in high demand during

the First World War. And that meant manufacturers needed workers to do the fine precision work

of painting numbers onto these items. That's how a lot of women got into it. A lot of the women

were young. We're talking teenagers. Records show that some of them were as young as 11.

Kate Moore is the author of the Radium Girls, the dark story of America's Shining Women.

There were a few factories across the country, including one in Ottawa, Illinois.

Kate says the women were instructed to use their lips to make a fine point on the paintbrushes.

They consumed the radium and inhaled it

because it came in a powder form before they mixed it. Because they were told it was safe,

you know, the women embraced this. They wore their party dresses to the studios and went out

dancing and not because they'd be shining and shimmering on the dance floor with this

incredible glow. Some women would paint their nails and teeth to get that glow before stepping out on the town.

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