Luminous watch dials created a factory trade of young women painting numerals with radium paint, trained to point the brush between their lips. At the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, and plants like it, the 'Radium Girls' developed horrific jaw necrosis and cancers; their 1927–28 lawsuits helped found modern occupational-safety law. Safer luminous compounds ended radium dial painting, and the trade with it.
Radium dial painter no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1800 – 1969
Factory time: America and the Swiss Jura
American factories at Waltham and Elgin proved watches could be mass-produced with interchangeable parts, forcing the Swiss to industrialize in response. The Jura valleys perfected a hybrid — machine-made blanks finished and assembled by networks of skilled workers — while the First World War moved the watch from pocket to wrist for good. By mid-century, Switzerland dominated the world's watch trade, employing around 90,000 people at the peak.
What else was happening then
1926
Rolex makes the wristwatch waterproof
Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf patents the screw-down Oyster case, and in October 1927 puts one on swimmer Mercedes Gleitze during a highly publicized English Channel swim attempt; the watch emerges running after more than ten hours in the water, and Wilsdorf buys the Daily Mail's front page to say so. The wristwatch — a soldiers' convenience of the First World War — becomes a serious instrument.
1969
Seiko's Astron starts the quartz era
On 25 December 1969 in Tokyo, Seiko releases the Astron, the world's first quartz wristwatch — accurate to about five seconds a month and priced at 450,000 yen, roughly the cost of a small car. Within a decade, mass-produced quartz movements are more accurate than the finest mechanical chronometers and cost almost nothing to make.
1970–1983
The quartz crisis guts the Swiss industry
Swiss watch-industry employment collapses from roughly 90,000 in 1970 to under 35,000 by the mid-1980s, and well over half its firms disappear. The banks force the industry's two giant groups to merge under Nicolas Hayek, and in March 1983 the plastic, machine-assembled Swatch launches — profitable at a low price, and the cash engine that funds mechanical watchmaking's survival.
Where that work lives now
The craftsman who builds and revives the tiny machine on the wrist — a trade that survived the quartz crisis and now has more work than trained hands.
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