September 7, 2011 • 30 mins
Between in 1917, hundreds of women got jobs applying radium-treated paint to various products. Many experienced severe health problems. Five former workers decided to sue the U.S. Radium corporation, and faced a campaign of misinformation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Debline and Chok reboarding and I'm scared out and
we're just stearing up for our long Labor Day weekend.
But by the time this episode airs, that will already
(00:21):
have passed and a labor related memorial should have been
unveiled in a town called Ottawa, Illinois. And the memorial,
which was unveiled Friday, September two, is a statue of
a woman holding flowers in one hand and paint brushes
in the other, and it's meant to symbolize the women
who worked for the Ottawa based Luminous Processes factory and
(00:42):
there they painted watch and clock dials in the early
tent twentieth century. And they were women who ended up
getting serious radiation poisoning as a result of their jobs.
And I'm not sure how much national media attention this
memorial and it's unveiling are going to receive. It was
conceived of by a young lady named Madeline Pillar, who
actually came up with this idea for the memorial after
(01:04):
doing a junior high history project. How about that, Yeah,
her dad is a sculptor and she did this project
and kind of couldn't get this woman out of her
head and proposed the idea of doing a memorial to them,
and they raised all this money. But we're not sure.
I haven't seen that many news stories about it. I
just randomly kind of stumbled upon it. But the story
of the women who came to be known as the
Radium Girls actually became a media sensation in the nine
(01:27):
twenties and the nineteen thirties. Yeah, they certainly deserve a monument.
And it wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because
workers at factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really
in the same boat. In fact, it was a story
coming out of New Jersey that first brought this issue,
this radium poisoning issue, to the public's attention in the
(01:49):
first place. And that's the story that we're going to
focus on today in the podcast. And we're gonna just
sort of take a look at the historical circumstances and
working conditions that d to these women getting radiation poisoning
in the first place, because you're probably gonna wonder pretty
quickly how something like this could happen. Yeah, and we're
also going to take a look at how they came
(02:10):
to be known as the Radium Girls and their struggle
for justice that led to some workplace reforms in the end,
so kind of try to put a positive spin on
what is ultimately a very sad story. But before we
can talk about the Radium Girls, we need to take
a closer look at the element that's at the heart
of their story, and that is, of course radium, literally
the element very good punned bluinus. So we're going to
(02:31):
be talking about radium, of course, but that also gives
us the chance to talk about one of our most
frequently requested podcast subjects, Polish born scientists and Nobel Prize
winner Marie Curie. And this isn't a podcast on her,
it's not a profile on her, but she is an
important character in it, mostly because she discovered radium in
(02:52):
eight and radioactivity was still pretty new at that time.
It was not well understood. The German and physicists Wilhelm
Conrad rent Gen had just discovered X rays back in
and just a few weeks after that discovery and rebekr
l had identified radioactivity during experiments with uranium salts. So
(03:15):
when Marie Carey made her discovery. All of this stuff
was kind of floating around and kind of new science,
and people were really fascinated by it, and Carrie was
one of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerrel's
findings because not that much attention were given to them
at the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend,
which was which is a shiny tar like byproduct of mining.
(03:36):
That eventually led she and her husband Pierre to isolate
two new chemical elements, polonium and the one we're focusing
on today, which is radium. It was radioactive, it seemed
to pulse with spontaneous energy, and the other cool thing
about radium was that it glowed in the dark. Yeah,
that certainly seemed to be a selling point for it,
as we'll see. But by this time people had started
(03:58):
to realize that even though radiation was invisible, it did
have strong powers. They could cause injury. Scientists were exposed
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss, so clearly this element could do something. But
this also cluded physicians into the possibilities that radiation held
(04:19):
for treating cancer. Something that's powerful could potentially fight something
that was hurting people as well as burn them or
injure them. Yeah, So it was that potential and along
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
much from the get go, people thought it could cure
(04:39):
everything from arthritis to diabetes, not just cancer, and an
entire radium industry grew out of that belief. Some form
of the word radium was actually incorporated into a lot
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or not.
It was funny, yeah, but a lot of products had
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic, bath salts, lotions,
(05:02):
heating pads, and male pouches. You got to explain what
do you know what a male pouches now, because you
told me, But it's it's your job to tell listeners.
They were condoms, so those also contained radium or some
with radium, but radium or raid on laced water was
probably one of the most widely touted products, and it
was called liquid Sunshine because people thought that this was
(05:24):
some sort of magical elixir that could like extend your
youth and make you healthy. And one brand in particular
was called Rata Thor. You read about this a lot.
It was a popular brand of radioactive water and doctors
would give it to patients as a tonic. Really doesn't
sound good, does It doesn't sound good to us now,
but maybe it would have back then. I don't know,
And you and I were talking about it. It makes
(05:46):
you kind of concerned, what are we drinking or consuming
now that will sound as horrible and ridiculous as radium
laced tonic in the future. I mean, gosh, yeah, I
kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should, but
but medium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
To write. In nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
(06:06):
pure metal and Marie Curry was involved with that as well,
And soon after American electrical engineer William J. Hammer created
a radium treated paint which had the trade name Undark,
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific instruments and
things like that. It was expensive to do, but it
became really significant during World War One, especially when people
(06:29):
realize the advantage of applying this to military instruments. You're
in a dark trench and you can actually read your
watch or read your instrument exactly. So that's where our
story about the Radium girls really begins. So, between nineteen
seventeen and nineteen hundreds of young women got jobs applying
radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks, and
(06:53):
compass faces in factories in states like Illinois and New Jersey, Connecticut,
even Long Island factories were owned by a big corporation,
even though they were in different parts of the country.
It was the US Radium Corporation. And for the young
women getting these jobs, it seems like a pretty great opportunity,
mostly because it paid a lot better than other factory
(07:16):
jobs at the time, more than three times as much.
It was about eighteen dollars per week instead of five
dollars per week. They got paid about a penny and
a half per dial they painted, and they would paint
about two fifty dials a day, so a pretty good job.
And the work didn't seem too treacherous either, at least
for the time. The women sat together at these long
(07:38):
tables with racks of dials and they would paint the
faces sitting next to them and um mix up. This
concoction of glue and water and radium powder into a
glowing greenish white paint and then use their little camel
hair brushes to apply the paint to the dial numbers.
So it sounds kind of social, kind of artistic in
(07:59):
a way. A pretty nice job. Yeah, as they were
painting these dial numbers, though, after a few strokes the brushes,
those camel hair brushes they were using would lose their
shape and the women couldn't paint as accurately. So their
supervisors had kind of a solution for this. They told
them to point the brushes with their lips, and according
to an article in the Journal American History, some women
(08:21):
later quoted their bosses as saying, quote, not to worry
if you swallow any radium, it'll make your cheeks rosy.
So Grace Friar was one of seventy young women who
started working at a factory like this an orange New
Jersey in the spring of nineteen sev Later, about the brushes,
she said, quote, I think I pointed mine with my
lips about six times to every watch style. It didn't
(08:44):
taste funny, it didn't have any taste, and I didn't
know it was harmful to add to matters. The workers
really had fun with this, licking the brushes with the
radium on it. They'd paint their nails and their teeth
to through of amuse each other and surprise their boy
friends when the lights would go out. Friar even remembers
that after she'd blow her nose, her handkerchief would glow
(09:07):
in the dark with this radium residue. But they just
all have a good laugh about it, go back to work,
keep licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah, they
didn't have any indication that it was hurting them. In
nineteen twenty, Friar quit the factory to take a better
job as a bank teller, but only two years later
she started having some major problems. Her teeth started falling out,
(09:29):
and she developed painful abscesses in her jaw. She got
X rayed and it showed that she had such severe
bone decay. The many doctors and dennis that she went
to to try to figure out what was going on,
they said that they've never seen anything like it. They've
never seen bone decay to that degree. In July n
one doctor finally suggested that her problems might have been
(09:52):
caused by her former job. As a dial painter, and
I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable. So
when it was nineteen two when she started having these
sempt it's not till nineteen five when somebody says, this
looks like it's radium poisoning, and it turned out that
Friar wasn't the only former dial maker having issues. I
guess we can just assume that it took that long
(10:12):
for word to spread among the medical community what was
going on. But at the request of the Orange City
Health Department, the National Consumers League, which was an organization
that fought for safe workplaces and reasonable wages and decent
working hours, started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of
four radium factory workers between nineteen two and nineteen twenty four.
(10:35):
So right around that time that Friar is realizing what's
wrong with her, other people are realizing something's going on here. Yeah,
the cause of death for these other four radium factory
workers was listed as things like phosphorus poisoning, mouth ulcers,
and syphilis, but the factory workers thought that the paint
ingredients did have something to do with it. So New
(10:56):
Jersey Consumer League Chairman Katherine Wiley can hold it some experts.
She brought in a statistician, and she went to Harvard
and consulted some people, and she found out when she
was talking to people at Harvard that a few years earlier,
physiology professor Cecil Drinker had been asked to study the
working conditions at us Radium and report back to the company.
So somebody had already been looking into this before it
(11:19):
even came to their attention, and Drinker found out that
pretty much the entire workforce that US Radium was contaminated.
They had strange blood conditions, and several workers had advanced
radium necrosis. So Drinker made suggestions at that point, and
as of June, I think that's when his report came out,
and he suggested that they make changes that would protect
(11:39):
the workers. But Arthur Rhoder, who was president of us
Radium at the time, he resisted this, and furthermore, he
refused to give drink Or permission to publish his findings,
saying that Drinker had agreed to confidentiality and that he
wasn't allowed to. So it actually turned out later they
found out that Rhodor had been circulating a false report
under Drinkers him. It was basically his report, but it said, oh,
(12:02):
there's no harm here, there's no problem with the radium
that's used in the paint, and why he didn't want
a Drinker to publish the real report exactly. But to
be honest, Drinker's report wasn't the only thing out there
that indicated that radium was a hazard. There were There
was also scientific and medical literature, some of the dating
back as far as nineteen o six that contained plenty
(12:22):
of information about the hazards of radium. Even one of
US Radium's own publications, and that's the part I think
is really surprising. It was distributed to hospitals and doctor's offices,
and it contained a section with dozens of references. This
report was called Radium Dangers dash Injurious Effects, And so
it was out there. They knew what was going on
(12:43):
the entire time from the same company encouraging their workers
to moisten their brushets. Yeah, and too, I guess to
be fair, we don't know that the supervisors on the
floor actually knew that there were dangers, but it became
pretty clear the company as a whole did, though, so
the consumer leagues wildly try. I had to get us
Radium to pay for the medical expenses for Friar and
(13:04):
for the other workers who were ill. But the company
insisted that radium was not to blame, and it went
beyond that though, and launched this campaign of misinformation. They've
tried to tarnish the women workers reputations by saying that
the problem wasn't radium, it was actually that they had syphilis.
And in nine when Friar started exploring radium as a
(13:28):
cause for her illness, a Columbia University doctor named Frederick Flynn,
who said that he was referred to her by friends,
asked to examine her and he found her health to
be quote as good as my own. Later, though, Fryar
found out that Flynn wasn't even a medical doctor. He
was an industrial toxicologist on contract with US Radium. So
(13:49):
it became pretty clear that almost from the get go
us Radium had been acting um shady about covering up
the effects of the element. Yeah, and we should say
that although Flynn wasn't a doctor, I mean, as you
pointed out earlier, it took a long time for doctors
to kind of you mean, you mentioned catching on to
the fact that these women had had radium something to
(14:13):
do with it, right, But I think part of it
was also that they didn't want to Radium had so
much promise. They didn't want to admit that maybe this
wonder element that they had found also had some negative
effects because they were afraid it would keep people from
accepting the positive effects that radium could have, just give
it a bad name essentially. Right. So Friar did decide
(14:34):
to sue US Radium in NI, but it took her
two years to find an attorney who was willing to
take her case. On May eighteenth, ninety seven, though, Raymond Barry,
who was a young Newark attorney, took the case on
contingency and filed a lawsuit in a New Jersey court
on her behalf and pretty much right away, four other
women with severe medical problems joined the lawsuit. Their names
(14:56):
were Edma Hussman, Catherine Schobe, and two sisters, also Quentum
McDonald and Albina Larisse. And as the case started to
grow into a huge media sensation, the press in the
US and Europe soon dubbed the five women the Radium Girls.
So that's where the name comes from. So the Radium
Girls were looking for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in
(15:16):
compensation for medical expenses in pain for each of them.
But first there was this legal obstacle in New Jersey's
law that they had to get by. It was two
year statute of limitations. But the lawyer, Raymond Barry, argued
that the statute applied from the moment the women learned
about the source of their problems, not from the date
(15:37):
they quit working for the factory, since, as we've discussed,
that took quite some time. He also said that US
Radium's campaign of misinformation was the reason the women weren't
informed in the first place, and the reason why they
didn't take legal action within the statute of limitations. So
maybe Radium's fake doctor sort of complicated matters here definitely.
(16:01):
While this was going on, though, medical examiners kept looking
into the situation. Medical examiners from New Jersey and New York.
They investigated the suspicious deaths of the plant workers, and
in the process, a deceased sister of two of the
Radium girls, McDonald and Laurie, was exhumed on October sixteenth,
n Her name was Amelia Maggia, and she had also
(16:22):
worked at the plant, and her bones were found to
be highly radioactive. Her former dentists to tip them off
on it. He actually had removed part of her jaw
soon before she died because it had deteriorated to that point,
and he kind of suspected that radium poisoning might be
part of the issue, radiation poisoning, and so they exhumed
the body and found that he was correct. Yeah, So
(16:44):
these investigations, the exhumation and all of that and the
legal maneuverings took up quite a bit of time, obviously,
And in fact, it took up so much time that
the first hearing didn't take place until January, and by
that point the women's health had really deteriorated. Some of
(17:04):
them couldn't even raise their arms to take the oath.
The two sisters we mentioned where bedridden. Grace Friar had
lost all of her teeth and couldn't sit up without
using a back Braith definitely couldn't walk um. But the
severity of their conditions really affected people in the courtroom
when they did testify. When those who were able to testify,
(17:27):
people in the courtroom were said to have wept when
they when they watched them. Yeah, I'm just an example
of one of their testimonies, Edna Husband's testimony included details
about her financial troubles, which were caused by the medical
bills that she had, and she said quote, I cannot
even keep my little house or bungalow. I know I
will not live much longer. For now, I cannot sleep
(17:47):
at night for the pains. So, of course everyone was
fascinated with the story, and it was everywhere. Even Marie
Curie heard about it, and she was really surprised to
learn how the factory workers had been handling radium on
on the job. Referring to the Radium Girl, she said, quote,
I see no hope for them. My experiments with radium
convinced me that if a poison is taken, if the poison,
(18:09):
sorry is taken internally, it is practically impossible to destroy it. So,
you know, just an aside here. Many of you may
know this, but Curie herself died in nineteen thirty four
of complications resulting from long term radium exposure. Also, but
even then, with with Curie saying that she saw no
hope for them, with the Radium Girls visibly deteriorating and
public sympathy pouring in US Radium didn't hesitate to try
(18:34):
to still delay the legal proceedings as much as they
possibly could, so after hearing in April, the judge granted
the defense of five month adjournment, and Barry tried to
remind the judge that the women might not last those
five months, not survive until September, and he even found
lawyers with cases that we're going to be tried in
(18:55):
less than a month who were willing to switch dates
with him, but US Radium, as the refused, said that
their witnesses were not going to be ready. They weren't
going to be available until that five month window was
was up. Yeah. So what ended ultimately helping them move
the trial up was the power of the press, in
particular Walter Littman of The New York World, and he
(19:18):
helped kind of speed things along. The New York World
was a really influential paper at the time, and Littman
had written a number of editorials about the Radium girls.
When he wrote on May tenth, ninety was particularly skating.
He called the delay a quote damnable travesty of justice
and said that if ever a case called for prompt adjudication,
it is the case of five crippled women who are
(19:39):
fighting for a few miserable dollars to ease their last
days on earth, and those editorials, combined with the public
outrage they caused, and the efforts of Barry and others
altogether helped convince the new Jersey court system to change
the trial day to early June. But just days before
the trial, the Radium girls ended up settling out of court.
(20:00):
They got ten thousand dollars each, coverage of their medical expenses,
and a six hundred dollar annuity until death, so much
less than they were hoping for in the end. Yeah,
but at least it was something before they passed away,
because some of them did start dying from their condition
pretty quickly after that. McDonald died in nineteen twenty nine
(20:21):
at age thirty four, Friar died at age thirty four,
and Shob died at age thirty in nineteen thirty three,
and Husman died in nineteen thirty nine at age thirty seven.
One lived for quite some time after it, Larisse. She
died in nineteen forty six at age fifty one. But
it's a really sad story anyway you look at it.
(20:43):
But there is a silver lining the reason why we're
covering this for Labor Day. They did make some strides
for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced, and the Radium
Girls set a precedent in case law for the right
of individual workers to soothe their ploys for damages caused
by labor abuse. And of course it made people aware
(21:05):
of the dangers of radium. New tolerance levels were set
for workers and for researchers. And as for some of
the products that we talked about earlier, the FTC issued
a cease and desist order against the manufacturer of the
product Rati thor in liquid Sunshine exactly that magical elick, sir,
(21:25):
And they found that it contained enough radium to kill
the people who drank it regularly. And of course the
Radium Girls are not forgotten. There have been poems, books,
and plays written about them. And now there's that memorial
to that we mentioned earlier in Illinois. So so we're
speaking from the past. But maybe after this Labor Day
weekend we will go um check out photos of the
(21:46):
unveiling of the memorial and and hope that something like
this does get a little press for for Labor Day weekend. Yes,
but we're not quite finished with labor related topics. We
have done a few of this year, and one kind
of touched on some of those things. The Leo Frank
trial episode we received a lot of mail on, so
we want to share some of that with you and
our listener male segment now. So one of the things
(22:12):
we asked of our listeners after the Leo Frank trial
episode is, first of all, if they had heard of
Leo Frank, and if so, then how they learned about him?
Did they learn about Leo Frank in history class? Because
Sarah had and I hadn't, and she grew up in
Georgia and I had not, So we wondered if it
was a totally georgeous specific story, and we got back
some interesting responses. We got back a lot of responses,
(22:34):
and most people, I think, especially people who weren't from
Georgia's said that they had never heard of Leo Frank before,
or they hadn't learned about him in class. A few
people had heard about him, quite a few people, but
they heard about him from kind of a surprising source.
And this letter from Grace that I have here kind
of indicates that or tells us a little bit more
about that she says, Hey, guys, I just listened to
(22:54):
the podcast on Leo Frank and the whole time I
wanted to burst out into song. Why because our recently
did a production of Parade. It's a musical about the
trial of Leo Frank. Like you said in the podcast,
a lot of historians think that Leo was innocent, and
that was the stance the play took too. If you
ever get a chance to see it, it's a great production,
written by Jason Robert Brown. Also, I'm from Melbourne, Australia,
(23:16):
and if I hadn't done Parade or listened to this podcast,
it is very unlikely that I would have found out
about such an interesting piece of Georgian history. So we
also got some mail about another artistic interpretation of the
Leo Frank story. This one is from Marika and she wrote, Hey, ladies,
I knew about Mary Fagan and Leo Frank, but not
from history class. I learned about the case because I
(23:37):
am a Lana Turner fan. The movie They Won't Forget
is considered to be one of the best films of
the nineteen thirties, and it's based on the Leo Frank case.
Lana Turner plays Mary Clay, the Murdered Girl, and it
was her very first film appearance. Claude Raines and Edward
Norris also star. So how about that a Lana Turner
movie and a musical. So just like the Radium Girls
(24:03):
that we just talked about, they have some dramatic interpretation. Absolutely.
So those were some positive responses that we got from
people um or some neutral responses, and we also got
a few critical responses of the episode, and we wanted
to share one of those two that brought up some
interesting points and and kind of respond to that a
little bit and just put it out there for you
guys to think about. This is from John in Florida,
(24:25):
and he says, I found the podcast on Leo Frank
to be disturbing on a few levels. I get that
this is about a miscarriage of justice, but I don't
get the Jewish aspect. People are subject to prejudice every
day all over the world. Once you add the element
of a victim's religion, you separate them from the fabric
of society and it becomes more about the prejudice than
the injustice. You could not have worked any harder of
(24:48):
painting a wonderful picture of Leo Frank. In reality, he
was engaged in child labor. To say he was using
children and women for light duty sounds like it is
from a pr firm for the Frank family. How about Mary?
What were her working conditions? We did hear a lot
about Frank's degrees and his work as a leader in
the industry. Why did Mary have to get her check
from Frank? Do you have to get your check from
(25:10):
the founder of how Stuff Works? I found this to
be a one sided and very cold report. I felt
no compassion for Mary, and I felt I was being
told to feel compassion for Frank. Sorry, but in the
real world, I do not trust people who hire women
and children to save a few cents. When we see
this now, we bring it to the media's attention and
boycott the products. Why is Mr Frank excused from this
(25:31):
kind of inspection because it happened a hundred years ago.
Exploitation of workers is exploitation of workers. Mary was exploited
as a worker. Why was she not safe in her
own workplace? What was the effect of the deaf on
her family? Was there prejudice because she was irish? We
did hear about Frank's final request, as we get away
from child labor, we forget the injustice and the abuses
(25:52):
forced on workers. It took the federal government to step
in and stop people like Frank from exploiting children. Do
you really think he had Mary's interest and say afety
at heart? I love your podcast on history, Please don't
let it become revisionist history. Thank you. All right, So,
obviously there's a lot to address in this letter, right, definitely. Yeah,
I mean, first, we wanted to start out by saying
(26:13):
that the podcast, as the title indicates, was to focus
on the Leo Frank trial, and as John mentioned, it
was mostly about the miscarriage of justice there, and so
that's why I think Leo Frank got more or the
focus more of the focus in in the podcast. And
and the murder itself is so horrific and unequivocally wrong
(26:38):
that kind of speaks for itself in a way. Yeah,
I mean, and I think because Mary was so young
and she was the murder victim, and because of the
press that the trial has gotten, we really don't know
that much about her. We know that she was thirteen,
that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she
was a sweet girl, she went to church, that she
was Catholic. I mean, we know all these things about her.
That she worked in the factory, putting the little eraser
(27:00):
is in the middle case scenes at the end of
the pencil. That's what she did, but we don't really
know that much more to answer John's questions well, and
consequently her story and her role in history, and not
just the way we've presented it, but the way it
is presented is as the murder victim, and that's terrible.
That's part of the injustice of her life, that that's
(27:20):
all she got to be. Yeah, and that's one reason
that we pointed out exactly how much money she made.
You know, we talked about her collecting a dollar twenty
five that week, and it was our intention by doing
that to point out how very little she died for
and how tragic her life was and her death. But
beyond that, the podcast did move into more of a
(27:43):
discussion of the trial and of Leo Frank and as
we indicated at the end of that episode, more most
sources do kind of assume that he was not guilty
of her murder, and so maybe that is why that
side of the story came through more. But we did
try to emphasize at the end when we mentioned that
he had received the posthumous pardon that this a lot
(28:04):
of people have said that this doesn't mean that he
is exonerated for the crime. Nobody really knows it is. Yeah,
no one knows what happened to Mary Fagan. And you know,
maybe someday we'll have more information, maybe not, um, but
at this point, we can only give you as much
information that we have, and we can say that we
always try to give you a balanced story and that's
(28:25):
always our goal, but maybe it doesn't always turn out
that way. Maybe sometimes it's a little more emphasis on
one person than another character in a story that we're telling,
and you know, we're we apologize for that. We we
always hope that we can tell something that's a balanced story.
But thank you John for that email. We always love
to get really honest responses from our listeners and here
(28:47):
what you guys are thinking and hopefully kindly put, like, yeah,
this one is really kindly put and it was really
thoughtful and we appreciated it, and um, you know, please
send us more of those. We do read them. So
I hope this shows you guys that But are. We
are at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
If you want to send us anything else about this
or any other podcasts, or rack to any of the
(29:09):
listener mails, or tell us more about Leo Frank or
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You can also look us up on Facebook. You can
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and you can look us up on Twitter at miss Industry.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about radium and radiation, we do have an article called
(29:31):
how nuclear Radiation works, and you can find it by
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dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
(29:53):
The Houstuff Works iPhone app has a rise, download it
today on iTunes. But we do be
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Debline and Chok reboarding and I'm scared out and
we're just stearing up for our long Labor Day weekend.
But by the time this episode airs, that will already
(00:21):
have passed and a labor related memorial should have been
unveiled in a town called Ottawa, Illinois. And the memorial,
which was unveiled Friday, September two, is a statue of
a woman holding flowers in one hand and paint brushes
in the other, and it's meant to symbolize the women
who worked for the Ottawa based Luminous Processes factory and
(00:42):
there they painted watch and clock dials in the early
tent twentieth century. And they were women who ended up
getting serious radiation poisoning as a result of their jobs.
And I'm not sure how much national media attention this
memorial and it's unveiling are going to receive. It was
conceived of by a young lady named Madeline Pillar, who
actually came up with this idea for the memorial after
(01:04):
doing a junior high history project. How about that, Yeah,
her dad is a sculptor and she did this project
and kind of couldn't get this woman out of her
head and proposed the idea of doing a memorial to them,
and they raised all this money. But we're not sure.
I haven't seen that many news stories about it. I
just randomly kind of stumbled upon it. But the story
of the women who came to be known as the
Radium Girls actually became a media sensation in the nine
(01:27):
twenties and the nineteen thirties. Yeah, they certainly deserve a monument.
And it wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because
workers at factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really
in the same boat. In fact, it was a story
coming out of New Jersey that first brought this issue,
this radium poisoning issue, to the public's attention in the
(01:49):
first place. And that's the story that we're going to
focus on today in the podcast. And we're gonna just
sort of take a look at the historical circumstances and
working conditions that d to these women getting radiation poisoning
in the first place, because you're probably gonna wonder pretty
quickly how something like this could happen. Yeah, and we're
also going to take a look at how they came
(02:10):
to be known as the Radium Girls and their struggle
for justice that led to some workplace reforms in the end,
so kind of try to put a positive spin on
what is ultimately a very sad story. But before we
can talk about the Radium Girls, we need to take
a closer look at the element that's at the heart
of their story, and that is, of course radium, literally
the element very good punned bluinus. So we're going to
(02:31):
be talking about radium, of course, but that also gives
us the chance to talk about one of our most
frequently requested podcast subjects, Polish born scientists and Nobel Prize
winner Marie Curie. And this isn't a podcast on her,
it's not a profile on her, but she is an
important character in it, mostly because she discovered radium in
(02:52):
eight and radioactivity was still pretty new at that time.
It was not well understood. The German and physicists Wilhelm
Conrad rent Gen had just discovered X rays back in
and just a few weeks after that discovery and rebekr
l had identified radioactivity during experiments with uranium salts. So
(03:15):
when Marie Carey made her discovery. All of this stuff
was kind of floating around and kind of new science,
and people were really fascinated by it, and Carrie was
one of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerrel's
findings because not that much attention were given to them
at the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend,
which was which is a shiny tar like byproduct of mining.
(03:36):
That eventually led she and her husband Pierre to isolate
two new chemical elements, polonium and the one we're focusing
on today, which is radium. It was radioactive, it seemed
to pulse with spontaneous energy, and the other cool thing
about radium was that it glowed in the dark. Yeah,
that certainly seemed to be a selling point for it,
as we'll see. But by this time people had started
(03:58):
to realize that even though radiation was invisible, it did
have strong powers. They could cause injury. Scientists were exposed
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss, so clearly this element could do something. But
this also cluded physicians into the possibilities that radiation held
(04:19):
for treating cancer. Something that's powerful could potentially fight something
that was hurting people as well as burn them or
injure them. Yeah, So it was that potential and along
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
much from the get go, people thought it could cure
(04:39):
everything from arthritis to diabetes, not just cancer, and an
entire radium industry grew out of that belief. Some form
of the word radium was actually incorporated into a lot
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or not.
It was funny, yeah, but a lot of products had
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic, bath salts, lotions,
(05:02):
heating pads, and male pouches. You got to explain what
do you know what a male pouches now, because you
told me, But it's it's your job to tell listeners.
They were condoms, so those also contained radium or some
with radium, but radium or raid on laced water was
probably one of the most widely touted products, and it
was called liquid Sunshine because people thought that this was
(05:24):
some sort of magical elixir that could like extend your
youth and make you healthy. And one brand in particular
was called Rata Thor. You read about this a lot.
It was a popular brand of radioactive water and doctors
would give it to patients as a tonic. Really doesn't
sound good, does It doesn't sound good to us now,
but maybe it would have back then. I don't know,
And you and I were talking about it. It makes
(05:46):
you kind of concerned, what are we drinking or consuming
now that will sound as horrible and ridiculous as radium
laced tonic in the future. I mean, gosh, yeah, I
kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should, but
but medium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
To write. In nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
(06:06):
pure metal and Marie Curry was involved with that as well,
And soon after American electrical engineer William J. Hammer created
a radium treated paint which had the trade name Undark,
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific instruments and
things like that. It was expensive to do, but it
became really significant during World War One, especially when people
(06:29):
realize the advantage of applying this to military instruments. You're
in a dark trench and you can actually read your
watch or read your instrument exactly. So that's where our
story about the Radium girls really begins. So, between nineteen
seventeen and nineteen hundreds of young women got jobs applying
radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks, and
(06:53):
compass faces in factories in states like Illinois and New Jersey, Connecticut,
even Long Island factories were owned by a big corporation,
even though they were in different parts of the country.
It was the US Radium Corporation. And for the young
women getting these jobs, it seems like a pretty great opportunity,
mostly because it paid a lot better than other factory
(07:16):
jobs at the time, more than three times as much.
It was about eighteen dollars per week instead of five
dollars per week. They got paid about a penny and
a half per dial they painted, and they would paint
about two fifty dials a day, so a pretty good job.
And the work didn't seem too treacherous either, at least
for the time. The women sat together at these long
(07:38):
tables with racks of dials and they would paint the
faces sitting next to them and um mix up. This
concoction of glue and water and radium powder into a
glowing greenish white paint and then use their little camel
hair brushes to apply the paint to the dial numbers.
So it sounds kind of social, kind of artistic in
(07:59):
a way. A pretty nice job. Yeah, as they were
painting these dial numbers, though, after a few strokes the brushes,
those camel hair brushes they were using would lose their
shape and the women couldn't paint as accurately. So their
supervisors had kind of a solution for this. They told
them to point the brushes with their lips, and according
to an article in the Journal American History, some women
(08:21):
later quoted their bosses as saying, quote, not to worry
if you swallow any radium, it'll make your cheeks rosy.
So Grace Friar was one of seventy young women who
started working at a factory like this an orange New
Jersey in the spring of nineteen sev Later, about the brushes,
she said, quote, I think I pointed mine with my
lips about six times to every watch style. It didn't
(08:44):
taste funny, it didn't have any taste, and I didn't
know it was harmful to add to matters. The workers
really had fun with this, licking the brushes with the
radium on it. They'd paint their nails and their teeth
to through of amuse each other and surprise their boy
friends when the lights would go out. Friar even remembers
that after she'd blow her nose, her handkerchief would glow
(09:07):
in the dark with this radium residue. But they just
all have a good laugh about it, go back to work,
keep licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah, they
didn't have any indication that it was hurting them. In
nineteen twenty, Friar quit the factory to take a better
job as a bank teller, but only two years later
she started having some major problems. Her teeth started falling out,
(09:29):
and she developed painful abscesses in her jaw. She got
X rayed and it showed that she had such severe
bone decay. The many doctors and dennis that she went
to to try to figure out what was going on,
they said that they've never seen anything like it. They've
never seen bone decay to that degree. In July n
one doctor finally suggested that her problems might have been
(09:52):
caused by her former job. As a dial painter, and
I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable. So
when it was nineteen two when she started having these
sempt it's not till nineteen five when somebody says, this
looks like it's radium poisoning, and it turned out that
Friar wasn't the only former dial maker having issues. I
guess we can just assume that it took that long
(10:12):
for word to spread among the medical community what was
going on. But at the request of the Orange City
Health Department, the National Consumers League, which was an organization
that fought for safe workplaces and reasonable wages and decent
working hours, started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of
four radium factory workers between nineteen two and nineteen twenty four.
(10:35):
So right around that time that Friar is realizing what's
wrong with her, other people are realizing something's going on here. Yeah,
the cause of death for these other four radium factory
workers was listed as things like phosphorus poisoning, mouth ulcers,
and syphilis, but the factory workers thought that the paint
ingredients did have something to do with it. So New
(10:56):
Jersey Consumer League Chairman Katherine Wiley can hold it some experts.
She brought in a statistician, and she went to Harvard
and consulted some people, and she found out when she
was talking to people at Harvard that a few years earlier,
physiology professor Cecil Drinker had been asked to study the
working conditions at us Radium and report back to the company.
So somebody had already been looking into this before it
(11:19):
even came to their attention, and Drinker found out that
pretty much the entire workforce that US Radium was contaminated.
They had strange blood conditions, and several workers had advanced
radium necrosis. So Drinker made suggestions at that point, and
as of June, I think that's when his report came out,
and he suggested that they make changes that would protect
(11:39):
the workers. But Arthur Rhoder, who was president of us
Radium at the time, he resisted this, and furthermore, he
refused to give drink Or permission to publish his findings,
saying that Drinker had agreed to confidentiality and that he
wasn't allowed to. So it actually turned out later they
found out that Rhodor had been circulating a false report
under Drinkers him. It was basically his report, but it said, oh,
(12:02):
there's no harm here, there's no problem with the radium
that's used in the paint, and why he didn't want
a Drinker to publish the real report exactly. But to
be honest, Drinker's report wasn't the only thing out there
that indicated that radium was a hazard. There were There
was also scientific and medical literature, some of the dating
back as far as nineteen o six that contained plenty
(12:22):
of information about the hazards of radium. Even one of
US Radium's own publications, and that's the part I think
is really surprising. It was distributed to hospitals and doctor's offices,
and it contained a section with dozens of references. This
report was called Radium Dangers dash Injurious Effects, And so
it was out there. They knew what was going on
(12:43):
the entire time from the same company encouraging their workers
to moisten their brushets. Yeah, and too, I guess to
be fair, we don't know that the supervisors on the
floor actually knew that there were dangers, but it became
pretty clear the company as a whole did, though, so
the consumer leagues wildly try. I had to get us
Radium to pay for the medical expenses for Friar and
(13:04):
for the other workers who were ill. But the company
insisted that radium was not to blame, and it went
beyond that though, and launched this campaign of misinformation. They've
tried to tarnish the women workers reputations by saying that
the problem wasn't radium, it was actually that they had syphilis.
And in nine when Friar started exploring radium as a
(13:28):
cause for her illness, a Columbia University doctor named Frederick Flynn,
who said that he was referred to her by friends,
asked to examine her and he found her health to
be quote as good as my own. Later, though, Fryar
found out that Flynn wasn't even a medical doctor. He
was an industrial toxicologist on contract with US Radium. So
(13:49):
it became pretty clear that almost from the get go
us Radium had been acting um shady about covering up
the effects of the element. Yeah, and we should say
that although Flynn wasn't a doctor, I mean, as you
pointed out earlier, it took a long time for doctors
to kind of you mean, you mentioned catching on to
the fact that these women had had radium something to
(14:13):
do with it, right, But I think part of it
was also that they didn't want to Radium had so
much promise. They didn't want to admit that maybe this
wonder element that they had found also had some negative
effects because they were afraid it would keep people from
accepting the positive effects that radium could have, just give
it a bad name essentially. Right. So Friar did decide
(14:34):
to sue US Radium in NI, but it took her
two years to find an attorney who was willing to
take her case. On May eighteenth, ninety seven, though, Raymond Barry,
who was a young Newark attorney, took the case on
contingency and filed a lawsuit in a New Jersey court
on her behalf and pretty much right away, four other
women with severe medical problems joined the lawsuit. Their names
(14:56):
were Edma Hussman, Catherine Schobe, and two sisters, also Quentum
McDonald and Albina Larisse. And as the case started to
grow into a huge media sensation, the press in the
US and Europe soon dubbed the five women the Radium Girls.
So that's where the name comes from. So the Radium
Girls were looking for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in
(15:16):
compensation for medical expenses in pain for each of them.
But first there was this legal obstacle in New Jersey's
law that they had to get by. It was two
year statute of limitations. But the lawyer, Raymond Barry, argued
that the statute applied from the moment the women learned
about the source of their problems, not from the date
(15:37):
they quit working for the factory, since, as we've discussed,
that took quite some time. He also said that US
Radium's campaign of misinformation was the reason the women weren't
informed in the first place, and the reason why they
didn't take legal action within the statute of limitations. So
maybe Radium's fake doctor sort of complicated matters here definitely.
(16:01):
While this was going on, though, medical examiners kept looking
into the situation. Medical examiners from New Jersey and New York.
They investigated the suspicious deaths of the plant workers, and
in the process, a deceased sister of two of the
Radium girls, McDonald and Laurie, was exhumed on October sixteenth,
n Her name was Amelia Maggia, and she had also
(16:22):
worked at the plant, and her bones were found to
be highly radioactive. Her former dentists to tip them off
on it. He actually had removed part of her jaw
soon before she died because it had deteriorated to that point,
and he kind of suspected that radium poisoning might be
part of the issue, radiation poisoning, and so they exhumed
the body and found that he was correct. Yeah, So
(16:44):
these investigations, the exhumation and all of that and the
legal maneuverings took up quite a bit of time, obviously,
And in fact, it took up so much time that
the first hearing didn't take place until January, and by
that point the women's health had really deteriorated. Some of
(17:04):
them couldn't even raise their arms to take the oath.
The two sisters we mentioned where bedridden. Grace Friar had
lost all of her teeth and couldn't sit up without
using a back Braith definitely couldn't walk um. But the
severity of their conditions really affected people in the courtroom
when they did testify. When those who were able to testify,
(17:27):
people in the courtroom were said to have wept when
they when they watched them. Yeah, I'm just an example
of one of their testimonies, Edna Husband's testimony included details
about her financial troubles, which were caused by the medical
bills that she had, and she said quote, I cannot
even keep my little house or bungalow. I know I
will not live much longer. For now, I cannot sleep
(17:47):
at night for the pains. So, of course everyone was
fascinated with the story, and it was everywhere. Even Marie
Curie heard about it, and she was really surprised to
learn how the factory workers had been handling radium on
on the job. Referring to the Radium Girl, she said, quote,
I see no hope for them. My experiments with radium
convinced me that if a poison is taken, if the poison,
(18:09):
sorry is taken internally, it is practically impossible to destroy it. So,
you know, just an aside here. Many of you may
know this, but Curie herself died in nineteen thirty four
of complications resulting from long term radium exposure. Also, but
even then, with with Curie saying that she saw no
hope for them, with the Radium Girls visibly deteriorating and
public sympathy pouring in US Radium didn't hesitate to try
(18:34):
to still delay the legal proceedings as much as they
possibly could, so after hearing in April, the judge granted
the defense of five month adjournment, and Barry tried to
remind the judge that the women might not last those
five months, not survive until September, and he even found
lawyers with cases that we're going to be tried in
(18:55):
less than a month who were willing to switch dates
with him, but US Radium, as the refused, said that
their witnesses were not going to be ready. They weren't
going to be available until that five month window was
was up. Yeah. So what ended ultimately helping them move
the trial up was the power of the press, in
particular Walter Littman of The New York World, and he
(19:18):
helped kind of speed things along. The New York World
was a really influential paper at the time, and Littman
had written a number of editorials about the Radium girls.
When he wrote on May tenth, ninety was particularly skating.
He called the delay a quote damnable travesty of justice
and said that if ever a case called for prompt adjudication,
it is the case of five crippled women who are
(19:39):
fighting for a few miserable dollars to ease their last
days on earth, and those editorials, combined with the public
outrage they caused, and the efforts of Barry and others
altogether helped convince the new Jersey court system to change
the trial day to early June. But just days before
the trial, the Radium girls ended up settling out of court.
(20:00):
They got ten thousand dollars each, coverage of their medical expenses,
and a six hundred dollar annuity until death, so much
less than they were hoping for in the end. Yeah,
but at least it was something before they passed away,
because some of them did start dying from their condition
pretty quickly after that. McDonald died in nineteen twenty nine
(20:21):
at age thirty four, Friar died at age thirty four,
and Shob died at age thirty in nineteen thirty three,
and Husman died in nineteen thirty nine at age thirty seven.
One lived for quite some time after it, Larisse. She
died in nineteen forty six at age fifty one. But
it's a really sad story anyway you look at it.
(20:43):
But there is a silver lining the reason why we're
covering this for Labor Day. They did make some strides
for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced, and the Radium
Girls set a precedent in case law for the right
of individual workers to soothe their ploys for damages caused
by labor abuse. And of course it made people aware
(21:05):
of the dangers of radium. New tolerance levels were set
for workers and for researchers. And as for some of
the products that we talked about earlier, the FTC issued
a cease and desist order against the manufacturer of the
product Rati thor in liquid Sunshine exactly that magical elick, sir,
(21:25):
And they found that it contained enough radium to kill
the people who drank it regularly. And of course the
Radium Girls are not forgotten. There have been poems, books,
and plays written about them. And now there's that memorial
to that we mentioned earlier in Illinois. So so we're
speaking from the past. But maybe after this Labor Day
weekend we will go um check out photos of the
(21:46):
unveiling of the memorial and and hope that something like
this does get a little press for for Labor Day weekend. Yes,
but we're not quite finished with labor related topics. We
have done a few of this year, and one kind
of touched on some of those things. The Leo Frank
trial episode we received a lot of mail on, so
we want to share some of that with you and
our listener male segment now. So one of the things
(22:12):
we asked of our listeners after the Leo Frank trial
episode is, first of all, if they had heard of
Leo Frank, and if so, then how they learned about him?
Did they learn about Leo Frank in history class? Because
Sarah had and I hadn't, and she grew up in
Georgia and I had not, So we wondered if it
was a totally georgeous specific story, and we got back
some interesting responses. We got back a lot of responses,
(22:34):
and most people, I think, especially people who weren't from
Georgia's said that they had never heard of Leo Frank before,
or they hadn't learned about him in class. A few
people had heard about him, quite a few people, but
they heard about him from kind of a surprising source.
And this letter from Grace that I have here kind
of indicates that or tells us a little bit more
about that she says, Hey, guys, I just listened to
(22:54):
the podcast on Leo Frank and the whole time I
wanted to burst out into song. Why because our recently
did a production of Parade. It's a musical about the
trial of Leo Frank. Like you said in the podcast,
a lot of historians think that Leo was innocent, and
that was the stance the play took too. If you
ever get a chance to see it, it's a great production,
written by Jason Robert Brown. Also, I'm from Melbourne, Australia,
(23:16):
and if I hadn't done Parade or listened to this podcast,
it is very unlikely that I would have found out
about such an interesting piece of Georgian history. So we
also got some mail about another artistic interpretation of the
Leo Frank story. This one is from Marika and she wrote, Hey, ladies,
I knew about Mary Fagan and Leo Frank, but not
from history class. I learned about the case because I
(23:37):
am a Lana Turner fan. The movie They Won't Forget
is considered to be one of the best films of
the nineteen thirties, and it's based on the Leo Frank case.
Lana Turner plays Mary Clay, the Murdered Girl, and it
was her very first film appearance. Claude Raines and Edward
Norris also star. So how about that a Lana Turner
movie and a musical. So just like the Radium Girls
(24:03):
that we just talked about, they have some dramatic interpretation. Absolutely.
So those were some positive responses that we got from
people um or some neutral responses, and we also got
a few critical responses of the episode, and we wanted
to share one of those two that brought up some
interesting points and and kind of respond to that a
little bit and just put it out there for you
guys to think about. This is from John in Florida,
(24:25):
and he says, I found the podcast on Leo Frank
to be disturbing on a few levels. I get that
this is about a miscarriage of justice, but I don't
get the Jewish aspect. People are subject to prejudice every
day all over the world. Once you add the element
of a victim's religion, you separate them from the fabric
of society and it becomes more about the prejudice than
the injustice. You could not have worked any harder of
(24:48):
painting a wonderful picture of Leo Frank. In reality, he
was engaged in child labor. To say he was using
children and women for light duty sounds like it is
from a pr firm for the Frank family. How about Mary?
What were her working conditions? We did hear a lot
about Frank's degrees and his work as a leader in
the industry. Why did Mary have to get her check
from Frank? Do you have to get your check from
(25:10):
the founder of how Stuff Works? I found this to
be a one sided and very cold report. I felt
no compassion for Mary, and I felt I was being
told to feel compassion for Frank. Sorry, but in the
real world, I do not trust people who hire women
and children to save a few cents. When we see
this now, we bring it to the media's attention and
boycott the products. Why is Mr Frank excused from this
(25:31):
kind of inspection because it happened a hundred years ago.
Exploitation of workers is exploitation of workers. Mary was exploited
as a worker. Why was she not safe in her
own workplace? What was the effect of the deaf on
her family? Was there prejudice because she was irish? We
did hear about Frank's final request, as we get away
from child labor, we forget the injustice and the abuses
(25:52):
forced on workers. It took the federal government to step
in and stop people like Frank from exploiting children. Do
you really think he had Mary's interest and say afety
at heart? I love your podcast on history, Please don't
let it become revisionist history. Thank you. All right, So,
obviously there's a lot to address in this letter, right, definitely. Yeah,
I mean, first, we wanted to start out by saying
(26:13):
that the podcast, as the title indicates, was to focus
on the Leo Frank trial, and as John mentioned, it
was mostly about the miscarriage of justice there, and so
that's why I think Leo Frank got more or the
focus more of the focus in in the podcast. And
and the murder itself is so horrific and unequivocally wrong
(26:38):
that kind of speaks for itself in a way. Yeah,
I mean, and I think because Mary was so young
and she was the murder victim, and because of the
press that the trial has gotten, we really don't know
that much about her. We know that she was thirteen,
that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she
was a sweet girl, she went to church, that she
was Catholic. I mean, we know all these things about her.
That she worked in the factory, putting the little eraser
(27:00):
is in the middle case scenes at the end of
the pencil. That's what she did, but we don't really
know that much more to answer John's questions well, and
consequently her story and her role in history, and not
just the way we've presented it, but the way it
is presented is as the murder victim, and that's terrible.
That's part of the injustice of her life, that that's
(27:20):
all she got to be. Yeah, and that's one reason
that we pointed out exactly how much money she made.
You know, we talked about her collecting a dollar twenty
five that week, and it was our intention by doing
that to point out how very little she died for
and how tragic her life was and her death. But
beyond that, the podcast did move into more of a
(27:43):
discussion of the trial and of Leo Frank and as
we indicated at the end of that episode, more most
sources do kind of assume that he was not guilty
of her murder, and so maybe that is why that
side of the story came through more. But we did
try to emphasize at the end when we mentioned that
he had received the posthumous pardon that this a lot
(28:04):
of people have said that this doesn't mean that he
is exonerated for the crime. Nobody really knows it is. Yeah,
no one knows what happened to Mary Fagan. And you know,
maybe someday we'll have more information, maybe not, um, but
at this point, we can only give you as much
information that we have, and we can say that we
always try to give you a balanced story and that's
(28:25):
always our goal, but maybe it doesn't always turn out
that way. Maybe sometimes it's a little more emphasis on
one person than another character in a story that we're telling,
and you know, we're we apologize for that. We we
always hope that we can tell something that's a balanced story.
But thank you John for that email. We always love
to get really honest responses from our listeners and here
(28:47):
what you guys are thinking and hopefully kindly put, like, yeah,
this one is really kindly put and it was really
thoughtful and we appreciated it, and um, you know, please
send us more of those. We do read them. So
I hope this shows you guys that But are. We
are at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com.
If you want to send us anything else about this
or any other podcasts, or rack to any of the
(29:09):
listener mails, or tell us more about Leo Frank or
US Radium or the Radium Girls, anything, please write us.
You can also look us up on Facebook. You can
like us there if you actually like us, that is,
and you can look us up on Twitter at miss Industry.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about radium and radiation, we do have an article called
(29:31):
how nuclear Radiation works, and you can find it by
searching for nuclear radiation at www dot how stuff works
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
(29:53):
The Houstuff Works iPhone app has a rise, download it
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