In the early months of 1917, Grace Fryer was an eighteen-year-old New Jersey girl with ten siblings, two brothers heading off to fight in the First World War, and a pressing need to support her family. On April 8, just four days after the United States entered the war, she found work at the United States Radium Corporation in her hometown of Orange. The company mass-produced Undark, a glow-in-the-dark paint developed in 1902 that soldiers used to read their watches and dials at night. The pay was roughly triple that of a standard factory job, making the studio one of the best-paid positions available to working-class women in the country, and most of the painters were teenage girls.
Grace’s younger sister Adelaide worked alongside her for a time, until she was dismissed for talking too much. The work demanded precision. After a few strokes, a brush would lose its fine point, so the women were taught a technique called lip-pointing, shaping the bristles with their mouths. Every time they did, they swallowed a small amount of the sweet, glowing paint.
Some of the girls asked whether it could hurt them. Managers assured them it was harmless, saying the only side effect was rosy cheeks. Many young women painted their nails, dresses, and even their teeth with the luminous substance so they could shine at night. Before long, some workers began to glow in the dark, a sign they did not yet understand.
They would later be remembered as the ghost girls. The company knew the dangers. Its scientists handled the paint with lead aprons, tongs, and lead screens. The painting staff received no such protection.
Radium companies had funded research promoting small doses of radium as beneficial to health, and papers of the time claimed it could add years to a person’s life. So when the women fell ill, few suspected the cause. In 1922, Grace’s colleague Mollie Maggia left work after a toothache that would not stop. Her teeth began falling out, then her jawbone deteriorated so badly that a dentist lifted the entire bone from her mouth.
Doctors insisted nothing was wrong with her. She died in September of that year, just months after the first symptoms appeared, the first of the dial painters to die. Soon Grace and many of her coworkers developed serious bone problems, particularly in their jaws. Other painters began dying in quick succession.
The deaths were bad for business, so United States Radium launched a disinformation campaign, concealing the cause of the illnesses and cooperating with doctors to attribute the deaths to syphilis, a diagnosis that damaged the women’s reputations and let the company deny responsibility. In 1924, the company commissioned Harvard physiology professor Cecil Drinker to study working conditions in the factory. His findings confirmed the link between radium and the mysterious deaths. Company executives were outraged and suppressed the report, financing new studies that found no connection.
By 1925, Grace’s health was collapsing. Her jaw was weakening, her spine had crushed under the strain, and she wore a steel back brace. Her own doctor suspected her former employment. A specialist she consulted, Frederick Flynn, assured her the condition had nothing to do with her work.
Flynn was not a doctor and was not a specialist. He was a toxicologist on the payroll of United States Radium. In the same year, the company’s first male employee died of the same unknown causes that were killing the women. The breakthrough came when physician Harrison Martland proved once and for all that the illnesses and deaths were caused by radium poisoning.
Once inside the body, radium continually emitted radiation, creating holes in the bones and destroying the worker from within. Martland understood that the poisoning was fatal. The girls who had once glowed in the dark now knew they were dying. Grace Fryer became the driving force behind a lawsuit against United States Radium.
She did not expect to survive long, but she had a purpose. She said it was not for herself she cared, but for the hundreds of girls who might be saved by her example. For two years, lawyers refused the case, because the radium industry was powerful and had worked to discredit Martland’s findings. Eventually a young attorney, Raymond Berry, agreed to take it on.
He filed suit on behalf of Grace and four other dial painters, demanding $250,000 in damages for each woman. The case made national headlines. By the first court appearance in January 1928, Grace had lost all her teeth, could not walk, and needed a back brace to sit up. Reporters still described her as pretty.
The other women were in similar or worse condition; two were bedbound. At the following hearing in April, none of the women were well enough to attend. The judge adjourned the case until September because many witnesses were vacationing in Europe. A newspaper editor called the decision a damnable travesty of justice, and the outcry pushed the hearing up to early June.
United States Radium tried to drag the proceedings out, gambling that the women would die first. Some had been given only four months to live. Days before the hearing, Berry secured an out-of-court settlement. The women reluctantly accepted.
Each received $10,000, with medical and legal expenses covered, far less than they had sought. But Grace had achieved her main objective. She had brought the dangers of radium poisoning and the exploitation of the workers into the public eye. On October 27, 1933, Grace Fryer died in New Jersey at the age of thirty-four.
Her fight did not end with her death. Another dial painter, Catherine Wolfe Donohue, read about the New Jersey women in the papers and launched her own legal battle in the mid-1930s against Radium Dial in Illinois. The company denied responsibility, lied, and interfered with autopsies to hide the truth. Catherine was shunned for suing one of the few companies still operating during the Great Depression.
In 1938, her case finally went to court, and she won while testifying from her deathbed. She died on July 27, 1938, at the age of thirty-five, but her victory was not just her own. The two cases forced companies to take responsibility for employee safety and led to life-saving industrial regulations across the United States. In the 1860s, the die was cast differently for Karolina Olsson, a girl born on October 29, 1861, on the remote island of Oknö off the southern coast of Sweden.
Her father was a fisherman, her family poor, and the island community largely isolated from the mainland. On February 18, 1876, at the age of fourteen, Karolina hit her head while playing on the late-winter ice. She developed a toothache, then four days later went to bed and did not wake up for thirty-two years. Her family, unable to afford a physician and steeped in the superstitions of rural life, believed a local witch had cast a spell on her.
The island’s midwife advised them, and Karolina’s mother force-fed her sweetened milk and water daily to keep her alive. The community collected money to bring a doctor from the mainland. He determined she was in a coma, tried smelling salts and needles, and could not wake her. He left a bottle of tonic and visited weekly.
Over the years, reports of the sleeper of Oknö reached newspapers and medical journals across Sweden, drawing more doctors to the island. None could rouse her. Some believed she was in a strange hibernation, others suspected a psychological disorder, and some proposed the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. Unusual details surfaced: her hair and nails never seemed to grow, and she occasionally sat up and mumbled prayers or sleepwalked without ever reaching full consciousness.
In 1892, after sixteen years asleep, doctors treated her with electroconvulsive shock therapy. It had no effect, and they gave up. In 1904, her mother died from exhaustion. Neighbors stepped in to help care for her while her father and brothers fished.
On April 3, 1908, at the age of forty-seven, Karolina Olsson suddenly woke up. She was told her mother was dead, and two of her brothers had drowned at sea. When she looked in the mirror and barely recognized herself, she wept. She underwent psychiatric evaluation in Stockholm, where her mental faculties were found fully intact, and she seemed to wake as though she were still fourteen.
Physicians noted she looked no older than twenty-five. No consensus was ever reached on what had happened. One explanation is a severe case of Kleine-Levin syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by excessive sleep, sometimes for days on end, often triggered by a head injury, and sometimes appearing to slow the aging process. Another possibility is that the entire episode was a hoax, a deception perhaps aided by her mother, then a brother, that she abandoned when he died in 1907.
Neither theory has ever been proven. Karolina returned to Oknö and lived quietly until her death on April 5, 1950, at the age of eighty-eight. Her case remains unsolved. In 1542, a different kind of tragedy struck the Medici family in Florence.
Bia de’ Medici was born around 1536, the illegitimate daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, who became Duke of Florence at seventeen after the assassination of his cousin Alessandro. Cosimo’s mother, Maria Salviati, knew the identity of Bia’s mother but never revealed it, and the secret died with her. Some believed the mother was a peasant, others an unnamed Florentine noblewoman. Cosimo claimed Bia as his own and raised her within the Medici household.
When he married Eleonora of Toledo, daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, in 1539, Eleonora reportedly treated the two-year-old girl with kindness rather than resentment. Bia was sent to live at the Villa di Castello under the care of her grandmother, sharing her home and bedroom with Julia de’ Medici, the illegitimate daughter of the assassinated Duke Alessandro. The two girls became inseparable. Bia was radiant, lively, and mischievous, and her father doted on her, slipping away from court to visit her whenever he could.
After Eleonora gave birth to legitimate heirs, first Maria and then Francesco, Bia remained part of the family, raised alongside her younger siblings under the careful direction of nurses and tutors. In late February of 1542, Cosimo took Bia on a trip to the Tuscan town of Arezzo. On the way home, both Bia and Julia fell suddenly ill with a high fever. Julia slowly recovered.
Bia did not. From February 25 to 28, her decline was swift. On March 1, 1542, she died, likely from malaria. She was six years old.
She was buried with honor in the Medici crypt at San Lorenzo. Six months later, Cosimo’s daughter Isabella was born, and friends wrote that God had granted him a new child in recompense for the one taken to paradise. After Bia’s death, Cosimo is believed to have commissioned a plaster death mask and a posthumous portrait by the court painter Agnolo Bronzino. The painting shows a serene young girl in white and pearls, a delicate medallion bearing Cosimo’s profile at her chest.
For centuries, it was mistaken for a portrait of Bia’s sister Maria, and the truth was only uncovered in 1893 by art historian Cosimo Conti, who found archival evidence confirming Bia’s existence. The portrait, which hangs today in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, remains one of Bronzino’s most celebrated works and a tender memorial to a child who barely had time to live.