A century ago, glow-in-the-dark watches were an irresistible novelty. The dials, covered in a special luminous paint, shone all the time and didn’t require charging in sunlight. It looked like magic.

The young women sat in rows, heads bent, painting numbers on paper watch and clock faces with luminous paint. The numbers on the wristwatches and clock dials were so tiny, the workers needed a very ...

The young women sat in rows, heads bent, painting numbers on paper watch and clock faces with luminous paint. The numbers on the wristwatches and clock dials were so tiny, the workers needed a very ...

In the early days of the 20th century, the United States Radium Corporation had factories in New Jersey and Illinois, where they employed mostly women to paint watch and clock faces with their ...

Get local news you can trust in your inbox. In the early 1920’s, radium was known as a “miracle cure”, and luminous watches were the latest craze. But in Orange, New Jersey, the young women who ...

Amelia “Mollie” Maggia was the first to die. The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was lucrative — ...

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 ...