EditorsNov 06, 2026
The Spectrum Pieces I Can’t Stop Thinking AboutFrom a Betta fish brooch to a “dragon’s trove” of zircon eggs, here are seven pieces that’ve stuck with Associate Editor Lauren McLemore.
WatchesDec 30, 2014
NPR profiles the last ‘radium girl’
Mae Keane, the last of a group of women who were hired to paint watch dials with radium in the 1920s, died this year.
New York--It seems Mae Keane really dodged a bullet when she quit a job she didn’t like as a young woman.
Hired
in the early 1920s at a watch factory in Waterbury, Conn., and the last
living of the “radium girls,” Keane died this year at the age of 107.
Her
life and struggles recently were detailed in a report on the NPR
program “All Things Considered,” which is paying tribute to some of
those who died in 2014 but whose passing didn’t necessarily make
headlines.
According to the report, when Keane was hired in
1924, she was taught the same technique as all the other women at the
factories to paint the numbers on the wristwatch dials--between painting
numerals, put the brush between the lips to bring the bristles to a
sharper, finer point.
But the paint that they were using wasn’t
just regular paint; it was mixed with a newly discovered material called
radium, which helped the dials glow and be read in the dark.
Keane
was an employee of the U.S. Radium Corp. that summer, but quit before
she had the misfortune of ingesting too much radium because she didn’t
like the taste on the brush.
Though they wouldn’t know it until
much later, she was one of the lucky ones. Many fell ill and died of
diseases caused by the radium. Eventually women from a factory in New
Jersey sued the U.S. Radium Corp. for poisoning and won.
Learn more about Keane and her life by listening to the entire story on NPR.org.
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