Literally, the work was light as the main job the young ladies were given was to apply glowing paint to the faces of clocks, instrument gauges, and wristwatches for the United States Radium Company.

The girls, some as young as 14, painted watch dials with a luminous, radium-containing paint to make the dials visible in the dark. When the girls mixed the paint, radium dust got everywhere ...

In the 1920s when radium paint was introduced into the manufacture of clock dials in a New Jersey factory, the dangers of the newly developed material were still to be discovered.

Stories about mythical Greek gods and heroes, 1920s radium dial painters in New Jersey, and 1930s nightclub goers in Berlin ...