Inside the U.S. Radium Corporation site behind the Radium Girls case

On a quiet street in the New Jersey town of Orange once stood the factory that became the centre of a drama that would reshape workplace-health law worldwide. Atlas Obscura describes the former U.S. Radium Corporation site as a place marked only by a small plaque but historically layered.

The factory opened in 1917 to produce radium-based luminous paints, one of the period's notable innovations. Women hired as dial painters applied the paint to military and civilian watch faces with the smallest of brush tips. To keep their lines sharp, they would point the brushes with their lips.

The workers were told the work was safe; the scientific knowledge that radium was a deadly radioactive element was denied by production managers. As Atlas Obscura reports, by the mid-1920s serious health problems — jaw bone necrosis, anaemia and sarcomas — began to spread among the workers.

The group of women now remembered as the Radium Girls took the company to court. The 1928 case, led by Grace Fryer, was a watershed for its era: it established a precedent that an employer could be held liable for harm to employees from workplace exposure. The monetary settlement was symbolic, but the legal principle endured.

The case is considered one of the launch points of US workplace safety reform. According to Atlas Obscura, the legal and political processes that later led to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were directly connected to the path the Radium Girls had opened.

The factory closed in 1926, but radioactive residues lingered on site for decades. In the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added the site to the Superfund cleanup list. Decontamination of soil and groundwater was largely completed in the 2000s.

Today no trace of the factory or the original buildings remains on the site. Atlas Obscura notes that only a small marker informs visitors that 'this was the place where the Radium Girls worked and fought.' Historians point out that this plain marker continues to remind passers-by of the origin of America's twenty-first century workplace-safety framework.

The story has international resonance. After the Second World War, occupational health regulation in Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe was shaped by similar tragedies. Uranium mines in Saxony, radium ore operations in Belgium and the health damage at Soviet-era sites can be read as part of one historical arc.

On the cultural memory side, the Radium Girls have been kept alive in both documentary and fictional storytelling. Kate Moore's book 'The Radium Girls' (2017) is one of the best-known post-academic revivals of the story, and it has also been adapted for theatre and musicals.

Atlas Obscura tells visitors that this is a place 'not to see, but to understand.' Because while only a small plaque is visible, beneath this street sits one of the foundational stones of modern labour law.