I have had a chance to have a bit more of a look at Moore's
Radium Girls. Essentially, from a academic point of view it is junk and I would be tempted to put it into the class of an emotionally driven historical novel closely tied to some narrow aspects of real events. The dialpainters come across to me as being her useful characters to fulfill her agenda.
I won't get past the Prologue with my comments, it would take too long. In that Moore relates a story about a scientist who in 1901 accidently carried a vial containing some radium in his vest pocket (it would have been a fraction of a gram)
for the entirety of his journey across the Atlantic. Who is this scientist and what is the purpose of mentioning it? She doesn't say (maybe she expands on it later, I wouldn't bother to read the book to find out). I assume she means us to think that event is the discovery of the fact that radiation from radium burns the skin, else without identifying the person and the context she is just relating useless information to pad out a novel.
In fact the main actors in the discovery that radiation from radium burns the skin are Giesel, Walkoff and Henri Becquerel. Becquerel was the discoverer of spontaneous radioactivity in last half of the 1890s and he is well known (he shared the 1903 Nobel with the Curies). Giesel and Walkoff's reports were due to intentional self exposure of skin to radium (strapped to arm), however Becquerel's burn was accidental and due to carrying radium in his jacket (Moore's "vest" reference, perhaps?) pocket and is a frequently related event. It was in 1901; is this what she is referring to, if she is, well Becquerel only had it in his pocket for a few hours, not for the time of an Atlantic crossing (and also, as far as I know, was not crossing the Atlantic).
There may well have been some event as Moore describes but does not seem to want to tell what the guts of its relation is. If it is meant to give some message as to when the damaging properties of radium was discovered then she is a year out as Walkoff's work (and I think Giesel's too) was in 1900. I can find no reference by a text search on name in the book for any of Giesel, Walkoff or Becquerel.
Insofar as a text search is concerned I could also find no other reference to
1901 except in the Epilogue when Moore states after
‘Every family has sadness and grief,’ Jean said steadily. ‘But Margaret’s death was unnecessary.’ that
That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary. In fact radium was known to be harmful in 1900 and in 1901 it was known to be so only to a very small group of scientists and then only that it burnt skin, not killed people. To extrapolate from knowing something causes harm by burning skin, as even many everyday things do, to it should have been known to cause deaths is an extraordinary claim. Where it did lead was to the use of radium for medical purposes such as removing malignant tumors (which grew into the radiotherapy used today).
I have pulled out Claudia Clark's book and have had a browse (it is promoted to next on my reading list) and have to say that Moore's book reads very poorly and engenders no confidence as to fact in comparison. Clark's book is from a history academic who worked in the industrial safety field (unfortunately she died relatively young). Despite that it is a very easy read. It takes a sociopolitical approach identifying where the issues lay, why people and organizations acted as they did (she is also quite expansive on the role of women and their vulnerability in work at the time) and without emotive drama or propaganda. It also brings in as adjuncts other chemical related industry harm in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Finally, I have clipped 3 paragraphs from the Introduction in Clark's book regarding mortality and morbidity rates among the dialpainters (in the book they are referenced to source) as it may give context for those interested. Apart from emotive references (mainly with respect to the fates of her "characters") I did not see, but may have missed, data on these in Moore's book.
Spoiler:
Noncancer deaths seem to have had a negligible impact on the overall mortality data. Of 1,235 workers employed before 1930, expected deaths by 1976 were 461 and actual deaths were 529 (before age eighty-five), or 68 excess deaths, or 5.5 percent. With the incidence of bone, sinus, and mastoid cancers among the 1,600 known dialpainters who worked before 1927 calculated at 5.4 percent, it is likely that deaths from noncancerous industrial diseases only minimally affected the population from an aggregate perspective. For the first six years following the discovery of radium poisoning, however, such effects as anemia and jaw infections caused most of the deaths and sparked most of the fears among dialpainters.