The 'Radium Girls' were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, around 1917. The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to give them a fine point.
In 1924, a woman named Mae Keane was hired at a factory in Waterbury Connecticut. Her first day, she remembers she didn't like the taste of the radium paint. 'I wouldn't put the brush in my mouth,' she remembered many years later. After just a few days at the factory, the boss asked her if she'd like to quit, since she clearly didn't like the work. She gratefully agreed. That's why she was saved from radiation poisoning. Mae Keane died this year. At 107 years old, she was the last of the radium girls.
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