The company was founded in 1914 in New York City, by Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis, as the
Radium Luminous Material Corporation. The company produced uranium from
carnotite ore and eventually moved into the business of producing
radioluminescent paint, and then to the application of that paint. Over the next several years, it opened facilities in
Newark,
Jersey City, and Orange. In August 1921, von Sochocky was forced from the presidency, and the company was renamed the United States Radium Corporation, Arthur Roeder became the president of the company. In Orange, where radium was extracted from 1917 to 1926, the U.S. Radium facility processed half a ton of ore per day. The company's luminescent paint, marketed as
Undark, was a mixture of
radium and
zinc sulfide, with the radiation causing the sulfide to fluoresce. During World War I, demand for dials, watches, and aircraft instruments painted with Undark surged, and the company expanded operations considerably. The delicate task of painting watch and gauge faces was done mostly by young women, who were instructed to maintain a fine tip on their paintbrushes by licking them. At the time, the dangers of radiation were not well understood. Around 1920, a similar
radium dial business, known as the
Radium Dial Company, a division of the
Standard Chemical Company, opened in Chicago. It soon moved its dial painting operation to
Ottawa, Illinois to be closer to its major customer, the
Westclox Clock Company. Several workers died, and the health risks associated with radium were allegedly known, but this company continued dial painting operations until 1940. U.S. Radium's management and scientists took precautions such as masks, gloves, and screens, but did not similarly equip the workers. Unbeknownst to the women, the paint was highly radioactive and therefore, carcinogenic. The ingestion of the paint by the women, brought about while licking the brushes, resulted in a condition called
radium jaw (radium necrosis), a painful swelling and porosity of the upper and lower jaws that ultimately led to many of their deaths. This led to litigation against U.S. Radium by the so-called
Radium Girls, starting with former dial painter Marguerite Carlough in 1925. The case was eventually settled in 1926 and several more suits were brought against the company in 1927 by
Grace Fryer and Katherine Schaub. The company did not stop the hand painting of dials until 1947. After the war came another period of retrenchment. Not only did military supply contracts end, but luminous dial manufacturing shifted to
promethium-147 and
tritium. Also,
radium mining in Canada ceased in 1954, driving up supply costs. In that year, the company consolidated its operations at facilities in
Morristown, New Jersey and
South Centre Township east of
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. In Bloomsburg, it continued to produce items with luminescent paint using radium,
strontium-90 and
cesium-137 such as watch dials, instrument gauge faces, deck markers, and paint. It ceased radium processing altogether in 1968, spinning off those operations as Nuclear Radiation Development Corporation, LLC, based in
Grand Island, New York. The following year, a new facility at the Bloomsburg plant opened for the manufacturing of "tritiated metal foils and tritium activated self-luminous light tubes," and the company switched focus to the manufacture of glow-in-the-dark exit and aircraft signs
using tritium. Starting in 1979, the company underwent an extensive reorganization. A new corporation, Metreal, Inc., was created to hold the assets of the Bloomsburg plant. Manufacturing operations were subsequently moved into new wholly owned subsidiary corporations: Safety Light Corporation, USR Chemical Products, USR Lighting, USR Metals, and U.S. Natural Resources. Finally, in May 1980, U.S. Radium created a new
holding company, USR Industries, Inc., and merged itself into it. The
Safety Light Corporation, in turn, was sold to its management and spun off as an independent entity in 1982. Tritium-illuminated signs were marketed under the name Isolite, which also became the name of new subsidiary to market and distribute Safety Light Corporation's products. In 2005, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to renew the licenses for the Bloomsburg facility, and shortly thereafter the
EPA added the Bloomsburg facility to the
National Priorities List for remediation through
Superfund. All tritium operations at the plant ceased by the end of 2007. ==Immediate aftermath==