July 13, 2021 • 45 mins
The Radium Girls painted watched with glow-in-the-dark radium in the 1920s and '30s. Most got sick, many died. This is their story.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. COVID Bryant. Do you want me to
to intro you like that? Chuck? Well, I guess the
(00:23):
cats out of the bag. Yeah, we wanted to start
this episode off with the p s A. I have
COVID everybody, and uh, the reason I'm making this so
public is a couple of reasons. One to remind everyone
that we're not out of the woods yet. I'm vaccinated fully, Um,
this is almost likely the delta variant. There's no way
(00:46):
to prove that because I've done a lot of research there.
They're only testing for variants and like specific places than
using statistics to like blow that out to the whole mhmm.
But it is the it just like this week it
was breaking news that it dropped from about the vaccine
effective to against the delta variant. Yeah, I mean that
(01:09):
would that alone would make me suspect that's what it is. Yeah,
And it's the most dominant strain. It's most likely to
bust the vaccine. Uh. I went out of town over
the weekend with friends and like of that group have
COVID now so and they were vaxed. So, oh my god,
it is no joke. Everyone, We're not out of the woods.
Please keep taking it seriously. Please get vaccinated if you haven't,
(01:33):
And if you can use this, I know we're probably
preaching to the choir mainly, but if you can use
this example to try and convince someone you love to
get vaccinated that is hesitant, then that's why I'm saying this. Well, Chuck,
I know Jerry would never come on and say this,
but we're very very glad that you're doing okay, and
we love you very much. We're very proud of you.
(01:56):
Jerry doesn't express herself emotionally like that, not like you do.
Know I'm well known for that kind of thing. But
the good news and the final reason I mentioned it
is is also get vaccinated because it is doing at
least part of its job, and that I had a
couple of days of feeling pretty bad with a cold
and have had four days now and feeling pretty good,
(02:18):
and it is it is doing its job and keeping
it very mild. And uh, I took off a couple
of categories where if I wasn't vaccinated, it may not
be so mild. Yeah, you know that. That's why you're
l u c k y. You ain't got no alum
bi you lucky? All right, Well, now we can talk
about some not so lucky young women. That's true. I'm
(02:43):
hats off to you for that. P. S A too.
By the way, as I never finished, I never finished, Chuck,
there's Jerry Jerome Roland over there. Stuff you should not.
That's right. So now you can take over my former
duties of introing the episode. Well, I mean, it's just funny.
This is another are not funny. But I feel like
we're diving more and more into sort of the horrors
(03:05):
of not only just the workplace. But I feel like
we've covered a lot more over the past couple of years,
these situations in America's history where corporations have tried to
just bury things that made them look bad at the
expense and the lives of people that work for them. Yeah,
we've been examining how terrible life is without government regulations.
(03:29):
That's right. Another p s A. It's true. And and
like you said, we're talking about some unfortunate women who
um were gravely mistreated in part because of like the
place and time that they occupied. But also because they
were women, and because there were again no workplace safety
(03:50):
laws or anything like that. Um. But they despite you know,
everything that was stacked against them, including things like their gender. Um.
They they basically rose up and and established some of
the first successful lawsuits against employers for basically workplace abuse
(04:10):
or at the very least workplace um dereliction of duty
of the employer to look out for workers safety. I
think that's the technical way to put it. Yeah, and
you know, we're talking about the Radium Girls, and uh,
there was a movie about this. It's not we we
loved the hundreds of emails about the Ghost of how
(04:33):
do you pronounce it again? The Brotherhood of the Beast,
Brotherhood of the Wolf. That was the name of the movie.
And apparently I'm the only ship. Yeah, the only person
who has never seen that movie. Yeah. Same here, same here,
Like I think we are the only two. I don't.
I can't remember getting more emails about a single thing
than that one. Yeah, they're literally still coming in and
(04:54):
I uh, I do remember once I saw the trailer,
was like, oh, I know that movie a little bit,
but I didn't know this worry. But there was a
Radium Girls movie from three years ago that I sort
of half watched today. Um, it's I don't want to
I don't want to disparage anyone because filmmakers tried to
get the word out about an important event in history.
(05:16):
But I'll just say that the Roger Ebert dot com
website gave it one and a half stars. And that's
the only thing I'll say out of how many stars, Wow,
it was not very You got a one and a
half percent? That is wow. Yeah, I I I did
not watch that one. I haven't read the book yet either.
But um, one of the problems with taking up something
(05:38):
like this is, like it was the same thing with
Henriett Alas when we did our episode of Kila Cells,
where it's it's really hard to kind of dig past
the wall of journalism surrounding like the release of a
popular book and anything that is written in that book,
and that books take on the story. All of that
stuff basically be ums it like that's it, that's that's
(06:03):
just that, that's this person said this and this person
played this role, and you know it just becomes like
the story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Fortunately for Radium Girls. And I'm not taking away from
Kate Moore's book at all. Um, from everything I've seen,
it was extremely well researched and like it did a
really great job of bringing this to the to the
Forefront team. Um. But fortunately there's also like a lot
(06:26):
of scholarship that was written and researched before that that
still exists on the internet, so you can kind of
like get into some other details too. Besides, well, the
book said this, and the book said that, and then
also fortunately we had our buddy Dave Ruse help us
out with some research too, and Dave hates books, he does,
(06:46):
He's always burning books now. David, in fact, is the
one that said we should definitely mention Kate Moore's seventeen
book The Radium Girls, that we should have a sound
effect for Colin's. Now, what if we had, like, um,
one of those in studio chorus as they go colon,
they're colon. Be great? Okay, we need a barbershop quartet, Yeah,
(07:10):
that'd be good. The Radium Girls in search sound effect
The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Yes, but not one,
but two punts the Dark Story America's Shining Women. So
the whole thing about Radium and the Radium Girls, and
that's what the press dubbed them. They also, I believe,
(07:33):
called themselves the Society of the Living Dead, which is
some pretty serious gallows humored considering like the state in
shape that they were in. Um. They they were. Um.
They kind of came out of this era where Radium,
like the nineteen teens, the early nineties, the first the
(07:54):
first Radium Girls are actually two sets, as we'll see,
but they came out as era where three Radium was
there three. Yeah, there was another factory that we're not
even gonna have time to talk about. Okay, well, let's
say there's what what decade was that one. I think
it was the same decade. I think it was just
another factory that you know, we just can't do a
two hour show, I got you. So they well we're
(08:16):
well on our way already. So um. But they existed
in a in an era where radium was seen as
this thing that was just this amazing cure, all tonic,
a wonder of nature that was um put in all
sorts of different products from cigarettes to condoms to there's
a water called Rata thor that was irradiated water, that
(08:39):
radioactive water that you would drink to get the radioactivity
in your body, because it was you know, thought to
give you um like health, energy, vitalization, cure all sorts
of diseases. It said that it bathed the stomach and
liquid sunshine and all of this was pretty new stuff
because it wasn't um more than two decades before, uh
(09:02):
that Marie Curry and Pierre Cury Um discovered radium in
the first place. Back. Yeah, I mean they discovered it,
and I think they even named it. I think Latin
radius means ray, and they knew that it emitted rays
of energy even at that time, and you know, or
very early on, they started using radiation to try and
(09:24):
help treat cancer, Like hey, let's put this in a
lead box and cut a hole in it and then
put that whole over the human body, like aiming it
towards where a tumor might be. Like very obviously rudimentary stuff,
and you have to make up boop boopo sound the
whole time. That was kind of one of the roles
of the technician at the time, that's right, Uh. And
(09:45):
you should have seen the audition tapes. Some people played
zero rhythm. It would be like, Pep'm sorry, you're well qualified,
but uh so Cury. Actually she died um in four
from a plastic anemia, which is a bone marrow disorder
caused by radiation exposure. So they knew that it was
(10:09):
dangerous and uh but it was still like like you said,
it was in the you know, it was known as
a cure for the living dead in that ratath or water,
and I mean basically used for everything from gout to fatigue.
And it was just one of those crazy times in
American history where now we look back and we're like,
this is just nuts. But back then they didn't know well.
(10:32):
So there were two tacks. From what I could tell,
there was the beginnings of um academic scholarship, and both
of the curies had some sort of suspicion, and there
was this idea that there was easily you could be
exposed to too much. You didn't want to have too
much radium, but a little bit was good for you.
But then there was also this academic tack that was like, no,
(10:53):
this stuff might not be good at all, like we
should really be careful with this. But the popular, the
popular idea of it read in the newspapers, or you know,
maybe even what your doctor thought about it. Um all
came from radium research that was almost exclusively underwritten and
in a lot of cases carried out by companies that
(11:14):
made their money off of radium. Like they were just
touting this stuff as an amazing wonder element basically um
and and so there was like almost these two overlapping
worlds that weren't connected at the time in our understanding
of radium in like the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties, right,
So one of the other kind of cool and interesting
(11:35):
things about radium is that it can make things glow
in the dark. And glow in the dark is very
sort of like who cares now, it's still kind of fun,
But in the nineteen twenties, glow in the dark was
a very big deal. It was basically the future and
kind of space age. And if you had a glow
in the dark watch or a glow in the dark clock,
(11:59):
then you felt cool basically because you could see that
thing in the dark. And so of course these companies
wanted to start painting watch faces and clocks with radium,
and they've got young women and sometimes even girls as
young as like fourteen years old to do this stuff. Yeah,
I think the first company at first they were working
(12:19):
on military clocks and military dials like you might put
in an airplane or something. And the first company I
think that was established to do this was United States
Radium back in nineteen sixteen in New Jersey, Orange, New Jersey,
I think. And like you said, they hired young girls,
very very young girls. Um. I think the oldest one
I saw by far was twenty eight, but for the
(12:39):
most part they were in their teens to early early twenties.
And this was like a really big deal job like
that was very highly paying. I think they were in
the women who painted radium or watch dials with radium paint.
We're in the top five percent of earner is in
(13:00):
America at the time. This is a factory job. Yeah.
And then also its prestigious to from what I saw, Yeah,
the movies and you know, God, I don't know if
it's accurate or not. I'm gonna say what the movie said.
The movie said that they were paid a penny per face,
and a high earner could crank out two day, So
that's about to two dollars a day. Okay, so that's
(13:22):
like a million dollars today. I think that's also what
the movie said, Well a million dollars double that, and
that's about what a gram of radium cost. Uh yeah,
and today's dollars that is, I think it's like a
hundred grand a graham in the nineties for a graham
of radium. So they were they were they were themselves
highly paid, but they also, um, we're working with what
(13:46):
was at the time the most expensive material on Earth um,
and it makes sense that it would be so expensive,
Like radium is really rare. It's super radioactive, but it's
really um. It occurs in very small amounts, which kind
of let you realize how radioactive it is. That you know,
it's a daughter isotope of uranium. Whereas uranium decays, one
(14:07):
of the things that it becomes is is radium UM
and in uranium or I think the curies when they
first um discovered radium, they they found that after they
took uranium out of this or pitch blend, which we
talked about in the uranium mining episode, that the pitch
blend was still radioactive, So like what else is in here?
(14:28):
And out of ten tons of uranium or they managed
to extract one milligram, So it would make sense, especially
at the time, that it would cost a couple million
dollars for a single gram of that stuff. Yeah, and
so these girls and young women were, uh, this stuff
was getting in their hair, it was getting on their clothes. Um.
(14:48):
It was sort of a badge of honor because you
would go out that night dancing or something and you
would glow a little bit. Uh. They would even purposely
put it on their teeth. Sometimes they were called ghost girls,
and it was it was. It wasn't a fad in
that it was widespread because only a select few like
(15:09):
had their hands on it. But I think that's one
of the reason the girls like these jobs is because
they could go out and like attract attention because they
had this glow in their hair and on their dresses. Yeah.
I think also people knew that they were working with radium,
and radium at the time was like um, Missy Elliott
mixed with ecstasy back in the late nineties, like as
(15:31):
cool as it got, you know what I mean? Goodness, thanks,
I'm just trying out some new stuff. How's it going.
It's good. In fact, I think maybe we should take
a break. I need to re examine that analogy so
I can really fully grasp it. All right, you just
let it sink a buddy, So, Chuck, I gotta say
(16:11):
before we start back again, you don't seem like you
have COVID. Are you faking? I'm not faking. Uh, I
am a little spacey though. You're doing great. I mean
you've researched an episode of stuff you should know, probably
the most challenging podcast on the planet, and you're presenting
it like just like an ace. So hats off to
you again. Well, thanks man, you got it. So um.
(16:35):
You were saying before that the radium girls were covered
in um radioactive dust, and they were because they would
mix their own paint, uh, And they worked with a
specific kind of paint called un Dark. It was a
proprietary blend where they would mix them um. They would
basically mix it with water and a little bit of
solvent and create their own paint from this radium dust.
(16:56):
So radium dust was like all over the place, which
is bad enough. You know, you can get pretty radioactive
for me exposed radium radium dust like that, but it
was far far worse in those working conditions because they
were actually ingesting the radium through the paint as well. Yeah.
I mean this is where if you think this already
(17:16):
sounds like a workplace violation, this is where it just
gets bonkers because they would actually, you know, if you're
painting one millimeter wide number on a watch, uh, and
I think the watch faces themselves were like three and
a half centimeters, you have to have a tiny little
point on the end of that paint brush. And painters
know one way you can achieve this is something called
(17:38):
lip pointing, which is when you dip the the brush
and the paint, in this case radium, and then you
put it in your mouth and just sort of press
it down with your lips to make that point finer.
And they were doing this with radium. They were literally ingesting,
like orally ingesting radium in their mouths, which means orally
(17:59):
and in inviting cancer into their bodies unknowingly, yes, which
is some pretty um. I mean, that's not good, like
when you're ingesting the paint itself. Apparently, there was a
guy who worked for Prudential, the insurance company back in
(18:19):
published a paper. His name is fred Hoffman, Frederick Hoffman,
and he calculated that, um, the radium girls who who
painted these watch faces. Because of that lip pointing technique,
they were ingesting something like one and three quarter grahams
of this paint every day. It's a lot of money
had to lip point so much. It is a lot
of money. From the viewpoint of the of the factory owners,
(18:42):
you'd think they would have been like, no, we gotta
stop that, because that is a lot of paint. But
that's also a lot of radium that they were taking
into And the big problem with that is not just
that you know, it's getting inside of you now and
it's burning a hole right through you. It's not really
doing that. Radium is a an alkali earth metal, and
(19:02):
it just so happens that calcium is also an alkali
earth metal into your bones. They're they're the same thing.
Your body doesn't differentiate between the two, and we our
bodies are set up to divert calcium basically from the
bloodstream right to the bones to help build strong bones,
you know, um, And we do the same thing with
radium to our bodies too. So when you ingest radium,
(19:25):
it enters your blood stream and it goes right to
your bones and it sets about screwing you up big time.
From that point on. Yeah, And apparently some of these
young women were saying, you know, they're asking questions. Early on,
they were saying, like this, it's bad for you. Can
it hurt you? Um? And the you know, the US
Radium Corporation was I mean, they started covering up very
(19:46):
early what was going on. They were doing their own
research and they said and of course the people that
were making that radium water did the same thing. They
would have They would hire out these private companies to
do this research basically and say everything's fine, and said,
you know, ingesting a little bit is just fine. It
will pull a rose in your cheek and it's great.
And I guess they just sort of full stop there.
(20:09):
They didn't talk much about how much ingesting a graham
every time you did that over time would be like
over a period of years. Um. I think in nineteen
sixteen they put out their own publication UM from the
Radium Publishing Company that said, uh, the physiological action of
radium sounds not unlike a fairy tale, right, which is weird.
(20:33):
And they said that the red blood cell count surges, um,
so you you will actually kind of seem a little healthier.
I couldn't find that anywhere. From what I saw you, Um,
it causes hemo license, which is like the rupturing of
red blood cells. But um, this is the kind of
stuff that like these publications were peddling and doctors in
(20:53):
the public we're just taking it wholesale. Um. And that
was where that idea that Radium was good for you
came from, was from publications from people like the Radium
Publishing Company. There was just a lot of credulity at
the time, I guess, um, which is weird because this
is also like one of the most avaricious periods in
(21:15):
American history as well. What does that mean? It means
that like people were praying on other people for for
profit and money, that like that you would do anything
for a dollar, you know, avarice. Okay, makes sense. In fact,
I will, man, I'll let that one slide. And I
don't know if I've said this or not. I know
(21:36):
Jerry wouldn't, but we're really glad you're doing that. Uh.
And it's funny in that factory, they didn't say anything
about the fact that, like, oh, you know, can this
be dangerous? Because I've noticed all the men that are
working around Radium are wearing these big lead smocks and aprons,
and uh, they're handling this stuff with ivory tipped tongs.
What's when we're putting this in our mouth? And they're like,
(21:58):
don't worry about that. Yeah, And it wasn't so at
at Us Radium in Orange, New Jersey. It was it's
it was part of the corporate culture to basically just
treat it really cavalierly. Like even the head chemist, um
Edwin Lehman, who would pay dearly for his cavalierness, was
(22:20):
recorded by an investigator who will talk about in a
little bit um as as basically just handling blumps of
radium or or like radi like radium powder without any
kind of gloves, no protection, no lead apron anything, and
just kind of just you know, scoffing at the idea
that that it was it was, you know, dangerous. So
you know, some people there knew that it was dangerous
(22:43):
and treated it so. But the corporate culture in that
company and in particular was that, you know, don't be
don't be ridiculous, who cares, Stop stop talking, stop asking
questions kind of thing. Yeah, So this next part I'm
going to issue a trigger warning because it's certainly got
me with my tooth fears. So if you have dental
fears and tooth fears, uh, just be warned. Uh. This
(23:07):
is from Kate Moore's book and it's about the very
first I think the first young woman to fall ill
at the U s r C. Her name was Molly.
I don't know if it's Maggia or Maggia. And this
is she was twenty four years old. She said she
felt like she was about ninety. Um, she had this really,
I mean she ached all over, but she had this
(23:28):
pain and her lower jaw specifically, and then eventually went
to the dentist, had these um, these abscesses that were
just oozing in her mouth, and her dentist tried to
pull some of her teeth that were rotting, and a
part of her jaw literally came out. And it says
in in the book he removed it not by an operation,
(23:50):
but merely by putting his fingers in the mouth and
lifting it out. Uh. And I think a few days
later took out her entire lower jaw the same way,
just pulled it out of her mouth. Yes, that's horrifying.
And if you have what's known as dentophobia, you're probably
on the floor right now. It may never go see
a dentist again. It got me as well, man, when
(24:13):
I was just like, this is not this is so wrong.
The crazy thing is is Molly Magia. She she lived
for um I believe another year or so um with
this increasing abscess and like the radium was sitting in
her bones in this particular case, in her jaw and
her teeth um and just decaying the tissue around it,
(24:38):
the bone around it, and she just basically rotted from
radiation poisoning from the inside of her jaw out. She
suffered from abscesses and eventually died from an abscess. The
this abscess apparently your whole the whole left side of
her face. The different abscesses grew into one mega abscess
and it finally reached her jugular vein and just ate
(25:00):
away at her jugular vein and she could no longer
pump um, uh, pump pump blood from her heart. Yeah.
That see now I sound like I have COVID the
I mean, that is horrific as you can imagine. And
it gets worse in that when her doctors were asked
what their best guess was of the cause of death,
(25:21):
they blamed it on syphilis. The company jumps on this
and says, and this was a big part of the movie.
They basically start saying that these girls are are spreading
syphilis around each other and that's what they're sick from.
I think in the movie they called it v D
of course, but um, it was you know, one part
to sort of shame them into being quiet, and to
(25:44):
say that in another part to just obviously, you know,
take the blame as far away from radium as possible. Men. Yeah,
for real, so all you know, not to say in
the in the doctor's defense, but they did. No one
knew what what radium poisoning was at the time, right,
(26:06):
So it's not like syphilis wasn't an entirely you know,
just bonkers diagnosis. But there was another thing I saw
that that um, that they considered too, that just didn't
make sense but had kind of come and gone before
among match stick makers, UM, which was something called fossey
jaw or phosphorus jaw, where you're you're like, if you
(26:28):
were exposed to white white phosphorus, which matchmakers were, when
you're making the head of a match. Um, it basically
gets um absorbed into your jaw and rots your jaw.
So they had kind of seen something like this before,
but not since like the early nineteenth century. It was
much more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and they didn't
(26:49):
think that these these women were working with phosphorus anyway,
So it was kind of baffling. But yeah, the idea
that that you know, even if the doctor did naively
or innocent, you know, say it was syphilis or something
like that, the company very much jumped on that kind
of thing to use it to paint that unflattering picture
(27:10):
of the women who would go on to litigate this company.
And it was totally that kind of a company and
it was run by those kind of people for sure.
US dial was yes. So twelve uh, and up to
this point, twelve of them died. Think about fifty of
them were ill at this point, and they are still
(27:31):
full steam ahead. They don't haul production at all. They
don't even call for an investigation until nineteen when it
leaks out to the press a little bit and they
start to get, you know, some sort of bad press
about what might be going on. So they commissioned an
independent investigation that found out that there was definitely connection
going on and that their exposure to radium is leading
(27:53):
to these illnesses and deaths. And they buried it and
got their own, uh not dependent commission together they investigated
and came back and said, oh, no, no, no, these
young ladies are suffering from a hysterical condition brought on
by coincidence. Yeah, and that was actually not even like
a panel's opinion. That was um Arthur Rhoder, the president
(28:17):
of us DIAL, that was his opinion. Yeah, that was
his opinion of the whole thing, and that the independent
investigation was a legitimately independent investigation. It was led by
Dr Cecil Drinker and his wife, Dr Katherine Drinker, who
are both Harvard Harvard public health professors. And when they
came up with these findings like yeah, this is this.
(28:40):
These women are all dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning
from eating this paint because of this stupid lip pointing technique, UM,
and the company did bury it. Not only UM did
they bury it. It's even worse than that. They took
the Drinker's report and altered it so that it said
that every girl is in perfect condition and then submitted
(29:02):
it with the Drinker's name on it to the new
Jersey Labor Department UM and like the drinkers had no idea.
They also told the drinkers if they published their initial report,
they would sue them that they've been working confidentially and UM,
like I was saying, like it was just that kind
of company. They were just they would engage in dirty tricks.
They would do some of the most underhanded stuff you
(29:23):
can imagine, like they I've got one more anecdote, Chuck,
this is gonna knock your socks off. They hired a
UM industrial toxicologist named Frederick Flynn from Colombia to basically
pose as a doctor to examine one of the UM
the dial painters UM and basically tell her that her
(29:44):
health was fine. She was in fine shape. And they
had a VP from U S. Di'll sit in and
make it seem like he was a colleague of this
person who she thought was a doctor who emphatically agreed
and backed up his position. That's the kind of stuff
us dial did. Reprehensible, agreed, Chuck. All right, so we
(30:05):
should probably take another break and we'll talk about how
everything changed a little bit right after this. Alright, So
(30:34):
everything changed when a man got sick, and that's that's
basically the way it went. Ut six year old chemist
at U s r C died of anemia and the
Essex County Health Examiner, guy little figure in pretty prominently
here going forward, Dr Harrison Martlin got involved and you
(30:57):
know this is this is what it took. It took
a man dying for them to sit up and pay attention. Um.
He launched an investigation. He it was. It was very sneaky. Actually,
he actually secretly recruited the technical director from U s
r C as a radiation expert, and his name was
this is one of the best names we've ever said
(31:17):
on the show, Dr sabin A von Sakaki m hm.
And they took autopsied tissue from uh, some of the
bone from these young women who had died or I'm
sorry from the original chemists, and they analyzed it and
they said, yeah, he's he is basically glowing with radiation. Yeah.
I have to say also, um, Dr von so Chalky
(31:41):
or he Um was even more than just the technical director.
He was the co founder of US Radium and he
actually created the radium paint undark that the company used.
So the idea of him basically turning on the company
in order to get to the to the bottom of
you know, what was going on. You know, I think
(32:02):
that's pretty commendable in that sense. It is um he
got he in March, Markland got a Geiger counter. I
think it was sort of an early crude version basically,
and they started going around to the houses and in
the hospitals where some of these young women were and
everything was radioactive. Um. They tested employees at the plant
(32:23):
that even weren't sick, they were radioactive. Basically, everyone that
worked there was radioactive, including uh Von Sakaki himself. He
breathed into the thing and I think he registered the
highest radioactive level of everybody and died within a few
years from from jaw cancer. Yeah, at age forty. And
(32:44):
the from what I saw also, if you took a
Geiger counter to the grave site of um these people
who worked at these factories still today, the Geiger counter
would measure set off. It would be set off by
the radioactivity coming from six six ft of earth separating
you and in the remains and that nuts, dude. It
will do that for one thousand years. Wow. And supposedly
(33:09):
the bodies are still glowing underground. I saw that one
woman who worked at another one we'll talk about um
Radium Dial company. She was exhumed to be examined UM
for I think a lawsuit later on, and they found
that she was so radioactive that when they reburied her,
they buried her in a leadline coffin. Yeah, I mean
(33:32):
this is super radioactive, right. I think we've established that
it's just hard to wrap your mind around how radioactive
these people were, and it's crazy that they even live.
Some of them live for you know, a few more years,
like like um, Molly Magia, she died pretty quickly. The
woman whose jaw came out, she she died within a
(33:53):
couple of years. Some women lasted four or five, six,
even I think even seven years possibly. And the amount
of radiation they were exposed to and the effects that
it had on their body made from the time they
got sick to the time they died just basically like
a living hell. Um and the fact that they're still
radioactive today it really kind of drives home like how
(34:15):
how painful that must have been for them, because apparently
bone pain is not it's not like regular pain at all,
Like you know, if your muscle hurts or joint hurts,
you can just kind of like move your arm or
something and starts to feel a little bit better. With
bone pain, you can't do that. Nothing makes it feel better.
It's just like constant pain. Uh. And that's what you
get when you have radium in your bones. So five
(34:38):
of these women got together that we're still living obviously,
and went to court, or they didn't go to court
right away. It took a long time. It took a
long time for them to get enough money together to
hire attorneys because there wasn't anyone initially he would take
these cases pro bono um and so it took years
to raise the money to do this. And uh. One
(35:00):
of the woman's name was Grace Fryar. She was basically
the leader of the factory workers. And she had to
wear a back brace because her spine had basically rotted
out from the inside and was crushed. She had twenty
at least twenty surgeries on her jaw. Another woman's name
was Albina Larisse. She had to still bursts and couldn't walk.
(35:24):
Another woman was Katherine schalb Um. She I think her
cousin died was another fellow worker there. And so they
were like we have to do something here. Um. They
were you know, they had all these medical bills, they
couldn't even basically pay rent. And finally, after a couple
of years, managed to find an attorney who would take
(35:45):
it on pro bono, and um, you know they did.
They knew they didn't have long to live at this point,
and it's not like they wanted some windfall of money.
They just wanted to get by until they died, and
they wanted to make sure that this didn't happen again. Yeah,
and again. This is like new stuff basically where workers
are like, these were unsafe working conditions. We're gonna see
(36:06):
our employer. This is pretty like groundbreaking. So initially the
women asked for I think two fifty thou a piece
um each for all five of them and their lawyer,
UM Raymond Barry. He apparently was a really good lawyer
and really kind of fought the good fight for him. UM.
And one of the ways that they were ultimately successful,
(36:29):
because it's kind of an understatement to say that US
Radium fought this lawsuit rather than settling UM, was that
they recruited the press, basically, and in particular the editor
of the New York World, The guy named Walter Littman,
UM took up this cause, and like you know, at
the time in the New York newspapers were like the
(36:49):
most important media organizations in the world, and the New
York World was like one of the bigger ones. So
it was like, you know, it was having like all
of the twenty four hour networks on your side, drumming
up public support for your cause, and that really helped them.
But even in the end they didn't get anything even
remotely close to that quarter of a million they were
(37:11):
asking for. So what the Radium Corporation did at first
was they said, you know, in New Jersey, the law
says that we only have to pay you anything if
it's within the first two years of your exposure. And
because it took so long for them to raise this money,
it was beyond that point, which is just a pretty
vile thing to do obviously. Um. Eventually they settled for
(37:34):
ten thousand dollars each plus five i'm sorry, six hundred
dollars a year for when they were alive, which was
only a few years for each of them. I think
within five years all of them had passed away. Um.
It was later exposed that the judge in the case
was a stakeholder in U S r C. Which is
really pretty dirty obviously. Uh. And then I think by
(37:57):
fifty one UM, thirty years later, forty one of those
original painters had died from different cancers. Yeah, not a
single one of the original five litigants UM from the
lawsuit UM made it past age thirty eight. And that's
like you have, by the way, a point one percent
(38:19):
lifetime risk of developing bone cancer. Bone cancer is really rare, rare,
Like you can get cancer in your bones if you
have a different cancer that spreads to your bones. But
to start out with bone cancer like many of these
women did, it's incredibly rare. UM. So the idea of
a cluster of them all happening in this one factory
and the company having nothing to do with it was preposterous.
(38:42):
So the fact that they just got to settle for
ten thousand UM per woman was actually kind of a coup.
But one of the things that the UM five initial
five Radium girls were fighting for was to UM to
to create awareness that like, this is dangerous and there's
other other women out there in the country and in
the world who were doing the same thing. Eating radium
(39:05):
paint every day and we want this to stop. And
it actually did have that effect, that knock on effect,
and not one but chuck as you told me before,
to my estelment to other cases um where companies were
basically forced to to um to settle and eventually radium
paint was driven out of use. Yeah. The other one,
or one of the other two, was the radium Dial
(39:26):
factory that we mentioned earlier in Ottawa, Illinois. And you know,
I don't know if you can rank like which ones
were more gross and dirty and awful, but Radium Dial
they actually did know what was going on the whole time.
For years. They had been uh testing their employees. They
had doctors coming in and they were giving them annual
(39:47):
physicals and they were recording radiation levels and they just
never told them. Basically, I think before they went and
filed that lawsuit, they were just suppressing information. Bearing everything
they could. They did, they'd even did autopsies and then
tampered with those autopsies. I think that's what you were
mentioning earlier, was that the other company did that too,
(40:09):
And they also lucked out by having an amazing lawyer too.
They were led by two women Katherine Wolf Donahue and
Charlotte Nevans Purcel kind of took the lead for the
lawsuit against Um Radium dial And this is you know,
years after this had made like the national press, the
US radium lawsuit like it was, everybody was talking about it,
(40:31):
and for years some companies managed to avoid any kind
of culpability, and finally Donahue and UM and Purcell Um,
with the help of their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, filed lawsuit
against Radium dial Um. They tried some underhanded stuff themselves
in addition to the whole autopsy thing, but once they
(40:52):
were found out, they decided to shut down and then
reopen in New York as a different company. And they said, oh, yeah,
that other company is terrible, but it doesn't exist anymore.
We're a new company now, so forget that lawsuit. And
they were they were ruled against and were held accountable. Still. Yeah,
and obviously, like you mentioned, because of all of this,
(41:15):
it was a very big deal for this country as
far as work workers rights, safety in the workplace. UM.
It kind of directly led. It took a long time,
but it kind of directly led to the UM to
the forming of OSHA which was a big deal. I
think it directly led in to the food, drug and
(41:36):
cosmetic act um. And of course this was for the
public at large, so we weren't ingesting stuff like that
in our cosmetics. But it also protected workers who are
putting that stuff in the cosmetics years years after the
public was protected, for sure. But yeah, it definitely had
like a real, real impact and a real effect on
on the world. Um. One of the things I saw
(41:57):
though about Radium Dial Corporation its headquarters. It was finally
demolished in nineteen sixty eight in Ottawa, Illinois, and the
the town used the like rubble as backfill and landfill
around the town. So now there's sixteen radioactive super fun
sites around poor little Ottawa, Illinois. Um that the e
(42:21):
p A Is dealing with cleaning up and it's causing
all sorts of problems for them for the residents of
the town. So it was like this one big problem
and then they spread it out all over town when
they used the rubble, You're not super fun super fun
is that there's a really important D on the end
of that, and it really overpronounced that d agreed. Do
(42:44):
you got anything else about the Radium girls. I don't.
I mean the movies on Netflix. You can check it out.
It's uh, it's a little late to endorse it now. Well,
I mean it's not terrible. I think on Rotten Tomatoes
that have like a seventy something, but it just critically
wasn't what review in um also not by me? Nice see,
I guess you. Um. Well, since Chuck said also not
(43:06):
by me, of course everyone, that means it's time for
listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a Nashvillian's response to
the Grand ol Opry Show. Hey, guys, just want to
give you a shout out about how much this native
Nashvillian enjoyed your episode about the Grand ole Opry. I
grew up hearing about the rieman's perfect acoustics and stories
(43:28):
of country stars drinking at Tutsie's bar behind the opera
until it was time to go on stage, and running
through the aligning back doors. My first job was actually
at opery Land Theme Park. Oh wow, I wonder if
we met. It was at the water ride in the
flume Zoom. I think I do remember you, Camille. Immediately
across us was the Porter Wagner stage that Mr Wagner
(43:50):
himself performed every Friday and now live in Chicago. And honestly,
it's a little hard to visit Nashville since it's become
a destination hotspot for bachelor and bachelorette parties. I didn't
know that, did you know? Didn't either? No, it makes
sense though, I mean, I know that's where you had
your bachelor party. I'll never forget that night. Sure, Nashville,
(44:10):
it's crazy. Uh. Plus, skyrocketing rents and new developments have
pushed out a lot of locals and mom and pop businesses.
Future episode recommendation repercussions of being an it city, but
listening to your episode reminded me of the quirky little
city I grew up in. Plus I learned some cool
facts about the opera I didn't know a longtime fan,
(44:30):
that is Camille McCarthy as high praise coming from a
o G nashvilleon you know Yeah. And Camille also responded
when I told her it was gonna be a listener
mail with a big woohoo. You guys are awesome. I
just snucked out your Venus episode while grocery shopping. Fantastic. Um, Well,
(44:51):
thanks a lot, Camille, appreciate that. I hope you've got
some good groceries. I hope you wore a mask while
you want grocery shopping. And I hope you're vaccinated. Nice
full circle there. Yeah. If you want to get in
touch with me, Chuck, Jerry, Chuck's COVID whatever, you can
write us all an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
(45:11):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. COVID Bryant. Do you want me to
to intro you like that? Chuck? Well, I guess the
(00:23):
cats out of the bag. Yeah, we wanted to start
this episode off with the p s A. I have
COVID everybody, and uh, the reason I'm making this so
public is a couple of reasons. One to remind everyone
that we're not out of the woods yet. I'm vaccinated fully, Um,
this is almost likely the delta variant. There's no way
(00:46):
to prove that because I've done a lot of research there.
They're only testing for variants and like specific places than
using statistics to like blow that out to the whole mhmm.
But it is the it just like this week it
was breaking news that it dropped from about the vaccine
effective to against the delta variant. Yeah, I mean that
(01:09):
would that alone would make me suspect that's what it is. Yeah,
And it's the most dominant strain. It's most likely to
bust the vaccine. Uh. I went out of town over
the weekend with friends and like of that group have
COVID now so and they were vaxed. So, oh my god,
it is no joke. Everyone, We're not out of the woods.
Please keep taking it seriously. Please get vaccinated if you haven't,
(01:33):
And if you can use this, I know we're probably
preaching to the choir mainly, but if you can use
this example to try and convince someone you love to
get vaccinated that is hesitant, then that's why I'm saying this. Well, Chuck,
I know Jerry would never come on and say this,
but we're very very glad that you're doing okay, and
we love you very much. We're very proud of you.
(01:56):
Jerry doesn't express herself emotionally like that, not like you do.
Know I'm well known for that kind of thing. But
the good news and the final reason I mentioned it
is is also get vaccinated because it is doing at
least part of its job, and that I had a
couple of days of feeling pretty bad with a cold
and have had four days now and feeling pretty good,
(02:18):
and it is it is doing its job and keeping
it very mild. And uh, I took off a couple
of categories where if I wasn't vaccinated, it may not
be so mild. Yeah, you know that. That's why you're
l u c k y. You ain't got no alum
bi you lucky? All right, Well, now we can talk
about some not so lucky young women. That's true. I'm
(02:43):
hats off to you for that. P. S A too.
By the way, as I never finished, I never finished, Chuck,
there's Jerry Jerome Roland over there. Stuff you should not.
That's right. So now you can take over my former
duties of introing the episode. Well, I mean, it's just funny.
This is another are not funny. But I feel like
we're diving more and more into sort of the horrors
(03:05):
of not only just the workplace. But I feel like
we've covered a lot more over the past couple of years,
these situations in America's history where corporations have tried to
just bury things that made them look bad at the
expense and the lives of people that work for them. Yeah,
we've been examining how terrible life is without government regulations.
(03:29):
That's right. Another p s A. It's true. And and
like you said, we're talking about some unfortunate women who
um were gravely mistreated in part because of like the
place and time that they occupied. But also because they
were women, and because there were again no workplace safety
(03:50):
laws or anything like that. Um. But they despite you know,
everything that was stacked against them, including things like their gender. Um.
They they basically rose up and and established some of
the first successful lawsuits against employers for basically workplace abuse
(04:10):
or at the very least workplace um dereliction of duty
of the employer to look out for workers safety. I
think that's the technical way to put it. Yeah, and
you know, we're talking about the Radium Girls, and uh,
there was a movie about this. It's not we we
loved the hundreds of emails about the Ghost of how
(04:33):
do you pronounce it again? The Brotherhood of the Beast,
Brotherhood of the Wolf. That was the name of the movie.
And apparently I'm the only ship. Yeah, the only person
who has never seen that movie. Yeah. Same here, same here,
Like I think we are the only two. I don't.
I can't remember getting more emails about a single thing
than that one. Yeah, they're literally still coming in and
(04:54):
I uh, I do remember once I saw the trailer,
was like, oh, I know that movie a little bit,
but I didn't know this worry. But there was a
Radium Girls movie from three years ago that I sort
of half watched today. Um, it's I don't want to
I don't want to disparage anyone because filmmakers tried to
get the word out about an important event in history.
(05:16):
But I'll just say that the Roger Ebert dot com
website gave it one and a half stars. And that's
the only thing I'll say out of how many stars, Wow,
it was not very You got a one and a
half percent? That is wow. Yeah, I I I did
not watch that one. I haven't read the book yet either.
But um, one of the problems with taking up something
(05:38):
like this is, like it was the same thing with
Henriett Alas when we did our episode of Kila Cells,
where it's it's really hard to kind of dig past
the wall of journalism surrounding like the release of a
popular book and anything that is written in that book,
and that books take on the story. All of that
stuff basically be ums it like that's it, that's that's
(06:03):
just that, that's this person said this and this person
played this role, and you know it just becomes like
the story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Fortunately for Radium Girls. And I'm not taking away from
Kate Moore's book at all. Um, from everything I've seen,
it was extremely well researched and like it did a
really great job of bringing this to the to the
Forefront team. Um. But fortunately there's also like a lot
(06:26):
of scholarship that was written and researched before that that
still exists on the internet, so you can kind of
like get into some other details too. Besides, well, the
book said this, and the book said that, and then
also fortunately we had our buddy Dave Ruse help us
out with some research too, and Dave hates books, he does,
(06:46):
He's always burning books now. David, in fact, is the
one that said we should definitely mention Kate Moore's seventeen
book The Radium Girls, that we should have a sound
effect for Colin's. Now, what if we had, like, um,
one of those in studio chorus as they go colon,
they're colon. Be great? Okay, we need a barbershop quartet, Yeah,
(07:10):
that'd be good. The Radium Girls in search sound effect
The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Yes, but not one,
but two punts the Dark Story America's Shining Women. So
the whole thing about Radium and the Radium Girls, and
that's what the press dubbed them. They also, I believe,
(07:33):
called themselves the Society of the Living Dead, which is
some pretty serious gallows humored considering like the state in
shape that they were in. Um. They they were. Um.
They kind of came out of this era where Radium,
like the nineteen teens, the early nineties, the first the
(07:54):
first Radium Girls are actually two sets, as we'll see,
but they came out as era where three Radium was
there three. Yeah, there was another factory that we're not
even gonna have time to talk about. Okay, well, let's
say there's what what decade was that one. I think
it was the same decade. I think it was just
another factory that you know, we just can't do a
two hour show, I got you. So they well we're
(08:16):
well on our way already. So um. But they existed
in a in an era where radium was seen as
this thing that was just this amazing cure, all tonic,
a wonder of nature that was um put in all
sorts of different products from cigarettes to condoms to there's
a water called Rata thor that was irradiated water, that
(08:39):
radioactive water that you would drink to get the radioactivity
in your body, because it was you know, thought to
give you um like health, energy, vitalization, cure all sorts
of diseases. It said that it bathed the stomach and
liquid sunshine and all of this was pretty new stuff
because it wasn't um more than two decades before, uh
(09:02):
that Marie Curry and Pierre Cury Um discovered radium in
the first place. Back. Yeah, I mean they discovered it,
and I think they even named it. I think Latin
radius means ray, and they knew that it emitted rays
of energy even at that time, and you know, or
very early on, they started using radiation to try and
(09:24):
help treat cancer, Like hey, let's put this in a
lead box and cut a hole in it and then
put that whole over the human body, like aiming it
towards where a tumor might be. Like very obviously rudimentary stuff,
and you have to make up boop boopo sound the
whole time. That was kind of one of the roles
of the technician at the time, that's right, Uh. And
(09:45):
you should have seen the audition tapes. Some people played
zero rhythm. It would be like, Pep'm sorry, you're well qualified,
but uh so Cury. Actually she died um in four
from a plastic anemia, which is a bone marrow disorder
caused by radiation exposure. So they knew that it was
(10:09):
dangerous and uh but it was still like like you said,
it was in the you know, it was known as
a cure for the living dead in that ratath or water,
and I mean basically used for everything from gout to fatigue.
And it was just one of those crazy times in
American history where now we look back and we're like,
this is just nuts. But back then they didn't know well.
(10:32):
So there were two tacks. From what I could tell,
there was the beginnings of um academic scholarship, and both
of the curies had some sort of suspicion, and there
was this idea that there was easily you could be
exposed to too much. You didn't want to have too
much radium, but a little bit was good for you.
But then there was also this academic tack that was like, no,
(10:53):
this stuff might not be good at all, like we
should really be careful with this. But the popular, the
popular idea of it read in the newspapers, or you know,
maybe even what your doctor thought about it. Um all
came from radium research that was almost exclusively underwritten and
in a lot of cases carried out by companies that
(11:14):
made their money off of radium. Like they were just
touting this stuff as an amazing wonder element basically um
and and so there was like almost these two overlapping
worlds that weren't connected at the time in our understanding
of radium in like the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties, right,
So one of the other kind of cool and interesting
(11:35):
things about radium is that it can make things glow
in the dark. And glow in the dark is very
sort of like who cares now, it's still kind of fun,
But in the nineteen twenties, glow in the dark was
a very big deal. It was basically the future and
kind of space age. And if you had a glow
in the dark watch or a glow in the dark clock,
(11:59):
then you felt cool basically because you could see that
thing in the dark. And so of course these companies
wanted to start painting watch faces and clocks with radium,
and they've got young women and sometimes even girls as
young as like fourteen years old to do this stuff. Yeah,
I think the first company at first they were working
(12:19):
on military clocks and military dials like you might put
in an airplane or something. And the first company I
think that was established to do this was United States
Radium back in nineteen sixteen in New Jersey, Orange, New Jersey,
I think. And like you said, they hired young girls,
very very young girls. Um. I think the oldest one
I saw by far was twenty eight, but for the
(12:39):
most part they were in their teens to early early twenties.
And this was like a really big deal job like
that was very highly paying. I think they were in
the women who painted radium or watch dials with radium paint.
We're in the top five percent of earner is in
(13:00):
America at the time. This is a factory job. Yeah.
And then also its prestigious to from what I saw, Yeah,
the movies and you know, God, I don't know if
it's accurate or not. I'm gonna say what the movie said.
The movie said that they were paid a penny per face,
and a high earner could crank out two day, So
that's about to two dollars a day. Okay, so that's
(13:22):
like a million dollars today. I think that's also what
the movie said, Well a million dollars double that, and
that's about what a gram of radium cost. Uh yeah,
and today's dollars that is, I think it's like a
hundred grand a graham in the nineties for a graham
of radium. So they were they were they were themselves
highly paid, but they also, um, we're working with what
(13:46):
was at the time the most expensive material on Earth um,
and it makes sense that it would be so expensive,
Like radium is really rare. It's super radioactive, but it's
really um. It occurs in very small amounts, which kind
of let you realize how radioactive it is. That you know,
it's a daughter isotope of uranium. Whereas uranium decays, one
(14:07):
of the things that it becomes is is radium UM
and in uranium or I think the curies when they
first um discovered radium, they they found that after they
took uranium out of this or pitch blend, which we
talked about in the uranium mining episode, that the pitch
blend was still radioactive, So like what else is in here?
(14:28):
And out of ten tons of uranium or they managed
to extract one milligram, So it would make sense, especially
at the time, that it would cost a couple million
dollars for a single gram of that stuff. Yeah, and
so these girls and young women were, uh, this stuff
was getting in their hair, it was getting on their clothes. Um.
(14:48):
It was sort of a badge of honor because you
would go out that night dancing or something and you
would glow a little bit. Uh. They would even purposely
put it on their teeth. Sometimes they were called ghost girls,
and it was it was. It wasn't a fad in
that it was widespread because only a select few like
(15:09):
had their hands on it. But I think that's one
of the reason the girls like these jobs is because
they could go out and like attract attention because they
had this glow in their hair and on their dresses. Yeah.
I think also people knew that they were working with radium,
and radium at the time was like um, Missy Elliott
mixed with ecstasy back in the late nineties, like as
(15:31):
cool as it got, you know what I mean? Goodness, thanks,
I'm just trying out some new stuff. How's it going.
It's good. In fact, I think maybe we should take
a break. I need to re examine that analogy so
I can really fully grasp it. All right, you just
let it sink a buddy, So, Chuck, I gotta say
(16:11):
before we start back again, you don't seem like you
have COVID. Are you faking? I'm not faking. Uh, I
am a little spacey though. You're doing great. I mean
you've researched an episode of stuff you should know, probably
the most challenging podcast on the planet, and you're presenting
it like just like an ace. So hats off to
you again. Well, thanks man, you got it. So um.
(16:35):
You were saying before that the radium girls were covered
in um radioactive dust, and they were because they would
mix their own paint, uh, And they worked with a
specific kind of paint called un Dark. It was a
proprietary blend where they would mix them um. They would
basically mix it with water and a little bit of
solvent and create their own paint from this radium dust.
(16:56):
So radium dust was like all over the place, which
is bad enough. You know, you can get pretty radioactive
for me exposed radium radium dust like that, but it
was far far worse in those working conditions because they
were actually ingesting the radium through the paint as well. Yeah.
I mean this is where if you think this already
(17:16):
sounds like a workplace violation, this is where it just
gets bonkers because they would actually, you know, if you're
painting one millimeter wide number on a watch, uh, and
I think the watch faces themselves were like three and
a half centimeters, you have to have a tiny little
point on the end of that paint brush. And painters
know one way you can achieve this is something called
(17:38):
lip pointing, which is when you dip the the brush
and the paint, in this case radium, and then you
put it in your mouth and just sort of press
it down with your lips to make that point finer.
And they were doing this with radium. They were literally ingesting,
like orally ingesting radium in their mouths, which means orally
(17:59):
and in inviting cancer into their bodies unknowingly, yes, which
is some pretty um. I mean, that's not good, like
when you're ingesting the paint itself. Apparently, there was a
guy who worked for Prudential, the insurance company back in
(18:19):
published a paper. His name is fred Hoffman, Frederick Hoffman,
and he calculated that, um, the radium girls who who
painted these watch faces. Because of that lip pointing technique,
they were ingesting something like one and three quarter grahams
of this paint every day. It's a lot of money
had to lip point so much. It is a lot
of money. From the viewpoint of the of the factory owners,
(18:42):
you'd think they would have been like, no, we gotta
stop that, because that is a lot of paint. But
that's also a lot of radium that they were taking
into And the big problem with that is not just
that you know, it's getting inside of you now and
it's burning a hole right through you. It's not really
doing that. Radium is a an alkali earth metal, and
(19:02):
it just so happens that calcium is also an alkali
earth metal into your bones. They're they're the same thing.
Your body doesn't differentiate between the two, and we our
bodies are set up to divert calcium basically from the
bloodstream right to the bones to help build strong bones,
you know, um, And we do the same thing with
radium to our bodies too. So when you ingest radium,
(19:25):
it enters your blood stream and it goes right to
your bones and it sets about screwing you up big time.
From that point on. Yeah, And apparently some of these
young women were saying, you know, they're asking questions. Early on,
they were saying, like this, it's bad for you. Can
it hurt you? Um? And the you know, the US
Radium Corporation was I mean, they started covering up very
(19:46):
early what was going on. They were doing their own
research and they said and of course the people that
were making that radium water did the same thing. They
would have They would hire out these private companies to
do this research basically and say everything's fine, and said,
you know, ingesting a little bit is just fine. It
will pull a rose in your cheek and it's great.
And I guess they just sort of full stop there.
(20:09):
They didn't talk much about how much ingesting a graham
every time you did that over time would be like
over a period of years. Um. I think in nineteen
sixteen they put out their own publication UM from the
Radium Publishing Company that said, uh, the physiological action of
radium sounds not unlike a fairy tale, right, which is weird.
(20:33):
And they said that the red blood cell count surges, um,
so you you will actually kind of seem a little healthier.
I couldn't find that anywhere. From what I saw you, Um,
it causes hemo license, which is like the rupturing of
red blood cells. But um, this is the kind of
stuff that like these publications were peddling and doctors in
(20:53):
the public we're just taking it wholesale. Um. And that
was where that idea that Radium was good for you
came from, was from publications from people like the Radium
Publishing Company. There was just a lot of credulity at
the time, I guess, um, which is weird because this
is also like one of the most avaricious periods in
(21:15):
American history as well. What does that mean? It means
that like people were praying on other people for for
profit and money, that like that you would do anything
for a dollar, you know, avarice. Okay, makes sense. In fact,
I will, man, I'll let that one slide. And I
don't know if I've said this or not. I know
(21:36):
Jerry wouldn't, but we're really glad you're doing that. Uh.
And it's funny in that factory, they didn't say anything
about the fact that, like, oh, you know, can this
be dangerous? Because I've noticed all the men that are
working around Radium are wearing these big lead smocks and aprons,
and uh, they're handling this stuff with ivory tipped tongs.
What's when we're putting this in our mouth? And they're like,
(21:58):
don't worry about that. Yeah, And it wasn't so at
at Us Radium in Orange, New Jersey. It was it's
it was part of the corporate culture to basically just
treat it really cavalierly. Like even the head chemist, um
Edwin Lehman, who would pay dearly for his cavalierness, was
(22:20):
recorded by an investigator who will talk about in a
little bit um as as basically just handling blumps of
radium or or like radi like radium powder without any
kind of gloves, no protection, no lead apron anything, and
just kind of just you know, scoffing at the idea
that that it was it was, you know, dangerous. So
you know, some people there knew that it was dangerous
(22:43):
and treated it so. But the corporate culture in that
company and in particular was that, you know, don't be
don't be ridiculous, who cares, Stop stop talking, stop asking
questions kind of thing. Yeah, So this next part I'm
going to issue a trigger warning because it's certainly got
me with my tooth fears. So if you have dental
fears and tooth fears, uh, just be warned. Uh. This
(23:07):
is from Kate Moore's book and it's about the very
first I think the first young woman to fall ill
at the U s r C. Her name was Molly.
I don't know if it's Maggia or Maggia. And this
is she was twenty four years old. She said she
felt like she was about ninety. Um, she had this really,
I mean she ached all over, but she had this
(23:28):
pain and her lower jaw specifically, and then eventually went
to the dentist, had these um, these abscesses that were
just oozing in her mouth, and her dentist tried to
pull some of her teeth that were rotting, and a
part of her jaw literally came out. And it says
in in the book he removed it not by an operation,
(23:50):
but merely by putting his fingers in the mouth and
lifting it out. Uh. And I think a few days
later took out her entire lower jaw the same way,
just pulled it out of her mouth. Yes, that's horrifying.
And if you have what's known as dentophobia, you're probably
on the floor right now. It may never go see
a dentist again. It got me as well, man, when
(24:13):
I was just like, this is not this is so wrong.
The crazy thing is is Molly Magia. She she lived
for um I believe another year or so um with
this increasing abscess and like the radium was sitting in
her bones in this particular case, in her jaw and
her teeth um and just decaying the tissue around it,
(24:38):
the bone around it, and she just basically rotted from
radiation poisoning from the inside of her jaw out. She
suffered from abscesses and eventually died from an abscess. The
this abscess apparently your whole the whole left side of
her face. The different abscesses grew into one mega abscess
and it finally reached her jugular vein and just ate
(25:00):
away at her jugular vein and she could no longer
pump um, uh, pump pump blood from her heart. Yeah.
That see now I sound like I have COVID the
I mean, that is horrific as you can imagine. And
it gets worse in that when her doctors were asked
what their best guess was of the cause of death,
(25:21):
they blamed it on syphilis. The company jumps on this
and says, and this was a big part of the movie.
They basically start saying that these girls are are spreading
syphilis around each other and that's what they're sick from.
I think in the movie they called it v D
of course, but um, it was you know, one part
to sort of shame them into being quiet, and to
(25:44):
say that in another part to just obviously, you know,
take the blame as far away from radium as possible. Men. Yeah,
for real, so all you know, not to say in
the in the doctor's defense, but they did. No one
knew what what radium poisoning was at the time, right,
(26:06):
So it's not like syphilis wasn't an entirely you know,
just bonkers diagnosis. But there was another thing I saw
that that um, that they considered too, that just didn't
make sense but had kind of come and gone before
among match stick makers, UM, which was something called fossey
jaw or phosphorus jaw, where you're you're like, if you
(26:28):
were exposed to white white phosphorus, which matchmakers were, when
you're making the head of a match. Um, it basically
gets um absorbed into your jaw and rots your jaw.
So they had kind of seen something like this before,
but not since like the early nineteenth century. It was
much more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and they didn't
(26:49):
think that these these women were working with phosphorus anyway,
So it was kind of baffling. But yeah, the idea
that that you know, even if the doctor did naively
or innocent, you know, say it was syphilis or something
like that, the company very much jumped on that kind
of thing to use it to paint that unflattering picture
(27:10):
of the women who would go on to litigate this company.
And it was totally that kind of a company and
it was run by those kind of people for sure.
US dial was yes. So twelve uh, and up to
this point, twelve of them died. Think about fifty of
them were ill at this point, and they are still
(27:31):
full steam ahead. They don't haul production at all. They
don't even call for an investigation until nineteen when it
leaks out to the press a little bit and they
start to get, you know, some sort of bad press
about what might be going on. So they commissioned an
independent investigation that found out that there was definitely connection
going on and that their exposure to radium is leading
(27:53):
to these illnesses and deaths. And they buried it and
got their own, uh not dependent commission together they investigated
and came back and said, oh, no, no, no, these
young ladies are suffering from a hysterical condition brought on
by coincidence. Yeah, and that was actually not even like
a panel's opinion. That was um Arthur Rhoder, the president
(28:17):
of us DIAL, that was his opinion. Yeah, that was
his opinion of the whole thing, and that the independent
investigation was a legitimately independent investigation. It was led by
Dr Cecil Drinker and his wife, Dr Katherine Drinker, who
are both Harvard Harvard public health professors. And when they
came up with these findings like yeah, this is this.
(28:40):
These women are all dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning
from eating this paint because of this stupid lip pointing technique, UM,
and the company did bury it. Not only UM did
they bury it. It's even worse than that. They took
the Drinker's report and altered it so that it said
that every girl is in perfect condition and then submitted
(29:02):
it with the Drinker's name on it to the new
Jersey Labor Department UM and like the drinkers had no idea.
They also told the drinkers if they published their initial report,
they would sue them that they've been working confidentially and UM,
like I was saying, like it was just that kind
of company. They were just they would engage in dirty tricks.
They would do some of the most underhanded stuff you
(29:23):
can imagine, like they I've got one more anecdote, Chuck,
this is gonna knock your socks off. They hired a
UM industrial toxicologist named Frederick Flynn from Colombia to basically
pose as a doctor to examine one of the UM
the dial painters UM and basically tell her that her
(29:44):
health was fine. She was in fine shape. And they
had a VP from U S. Di'll sit in and
make it seem like he was a colleague of this
person who she thought was a doctor who emphatically agreed
and backed up his position. That's the kind of stuff
us dial did. Reprehensible, agreed, Chuck. All right, so we
(30:05):
should probably take another break and we'll talk about how
everything changed a little bit right after this. Alright, So
(30:34):
everything changed when a man got sick, and that's that's
basically the way it went. Ut six year old chemist
at U s r C died of anemia and the
Essex County Health Examiner, guy little figure in pretty prominently
here going forward, Dr Harrison Martlin got involved and you
(30:57):
know this is this is what it took. It took
a man dying for them to sit up and pay attention. Um.
He launched an investigation. He it was. It was very sneaky. Actually,
he actually secretly recruited the technical director from U s
r C as a radiation expert, and his name was
this is one of the best names we've ever said
(31:17):
on the show, Dr sabin A von Sakaki m hm.
And they took autopsied tissue from uh, some of the
bone from these young women who had died or I'm
sorry from the original chemists, and they analyzed it and
they said, yeah, he's he is basically glowing with radiation. Yeah.
I have to say also, um, Dr von so Chalky
(31:41):
or he Um was even more than just the technical director.
He was the co founder of US Radium and he
actually created the radium paint undark that the company used.
So the idea of him basically turning on the company
in order to get to the to the bottom of
you know, what was going on. You know, I think
(32:02):
that's pretty commendable in that sense. It is um he
got he in March, Markland got a Geiger counter. I
think it was sort of an early crude version basically,
and they started going around to the houses and in
the hospitals where some of these young women were and
everything was radioactive. Um. They tested employees at the plant
(32:23):
that even weren't sick, they were radioactive. Basically, everyone that
worked there was radioactive, including uh Von Sakaki himself. He
breathed into the thing and I think he registered the
highest radioactive level of everybody and died within a few
years from from jaw cancer. Yeah, at age forty. And
(32:44):
the from what I saw also, if you took a
Geiger counter to the grave site of um these people
who worked at these factories still today, the Geiger counter
would measure set off. It would be set off by
the radioactivity coming from six six ft of earth separating
you and in the remains and that nuts, dude. It
will do that for one thousand years. Wow. And supposedly
(33:09):
the bodies are still glowing underground. I saw that one
woman who worked at another one we'll talk about um
Radium Dial company. She was exhumed to be examined UM
for I think a lawsuit later on, and they found
that she was so radioactive that when they reburied her,
they buried her in a leadline coffin. Yeah, I mean
(33:32):
this is super radioactive, right. I think we've established that
it's just hard to wrap your mind around how radioactive
these people were, and it's crazy that they even live.
Some of them live for you know, a few more years,
like like um, Molly Magia, she died pretty quickly. The
woman whose jaw came out, she she died within a
(33:53):
couple of years. Some women lasted four or five, six,
even I think even seven years possibly. And the amount
of radiation they were exposed to and the effects that
it had on their body made from the time they
got sick to the time they died just basically like
a living hell. Um and the fact that they're still
radioactive today it really kind of drives home like how
(34:15):
how painful that must have been for them, because apparently
bone pain is not it's not like regular pain at all,
Like you know, if your muscle hurts or joint hurts,
you can just kind of like move your arm or
something and starts to feel a little bit better. With
bone pain, you can't do that. Nothing makes it feel better.
It's just like constant pain. Uh. And that's what you
get when you have radium in your bones. So five
(34:38):
of these women got together that we're still living obviously,
and went to court, or they didn't go to court
right away. It took a long time. It took a
long time for them to get enough money together to
hire attorneys because there wasn't anyone initially he would take
these cases pro bono um and so it took years
to raise the money to do this. And uh. One
(35:00):
of the woman's name was Grace Fryar. She was basically
the leader of the factory workers. And she had to
wear a back brace because her spine had basically rotted
out from the inside and was crushed. She had twenty
at least twenty surgeries on her jaw. Another woman's name
was Albina Larisse. She had to still bursts and couldn't walk.
(35:24):
Another woman was Katherine schalb Um. She I think her
cousin died was another fellow worker there. And so they
were like we have to do something here. Um. They
were you know, they had all these medical bills, they
couldn't even basically pay rent. And finally, after a couple
of years, managed to find an attorney who would take
(35:45):
it on pro bono, and um, you know they did.
They knew they didn't have long to live at this point,
and it's not like they wanted some windfall of money.
They just wanted to get by until they died, and
they wanted to make sure that this didn't happen again. Yeah,
and again. This is like new stuff basically where workers
are like, these were unsafe working conditions. We're gonna see
(36:06):
our employer. This is pretty like groundbreaking. So initially the
women asked for I think two fifty thou a piece
um each for all five of them and their lawyer,
UM Raymond Barry. He apparently was a really good lawyer
and really kind of fought the good fight for him. UM.
And one of the ways that they were ultimately successful,
(36:29):
because it's kind of an understatement to say that US
Radium fought this lawsuit rather than settling UM, was that
they recruited the press, basically, and in particular the editor
of the New York World, The guy named Walter Littman,
UM took up this cause, and like you know, at
the time in the New York newspapers were like the
(36:49):
most important media organizations in the world, and the New
York World was like one of the bigger ones. So
it was like, you know, it was having like all
of the twenty four hour networks on your side, drumming
up public support for your cause, and that really helped them.
But even in the end they didn't get anything even
remotely close to that quarter of a million they were
(37:11):
asking for. So what the Radium Corporation did at first
was they said, you know, in New Jersey, the law
says that we only have to pay you anything if
it's within the first two years of your exposure. And
because it took so long for them to raise this money,
it was beyond that point, which is just a pretty
vile thing to do obviously. Um. Eventually they settled for
(37:34):
ten thousand dollars each plus five i'm sorry, six hundred
dollars a year for when they were alive, which was
only a few years for each of them. I think
within five years all of them had passed away. Um.
It was later exposed that the judge in the case
was a stakeholder in U S r C. Which is
really pretty dirty obviously. Uh. And then I think by
(37:57):
fifty one UM, thirty years later, forty one of those
original painters had died from different cancers. Yeah, not a
single one of the original five litigants UM from the
lawsuit UM made it past age thirty eight. And that's
like you have, by the way, a point one percent
(38:19):
lifetime risk of developing bone cancer. Bone cancer is really rare, rare,
Like you can get cancer in your bones if you
have a different cancer that spreads to your bones. But
to start out with bone cancer like many of these
women did, it's incredibly rare. UM. So the idea of
a cluster of them all happening in this one factory
and the company having nothing to do with it was preposterous.
(38:42):
So the fact that they just got to settle for
ten thousand UM per woman was actually kind of a coup.
But one of the things that the UM five initial
five Radium girls were fighting for was to UM to
to create awareness that like, this is dangerous and there's
other other women out there in the country and in
the world who were doing the same thing. Eating radium
(39:05):
paint every day and we want this to stop. And
it actually did have that effect, that knock on effect,
and not one but chuck as you told me before,
to my estelment to other cases um where companies were
basically forced to to um to settle and eventually radium
paint was driven out of use. Yeah. The other one,
or one of the other two, was the radium Dial
(39:26):
factory that we mentioned earlier in Ottawa, Illinois. And you know,
I don't know if you can rank like which ones
were more gross and dirty and awful, but Radium Dial
they actually did know what was going on the whole time.
For years. They had been uh testing their employees. They
had doctors coming in and they were giving them annual
(39:47):
physicals and they were recording radiation levels and they just
never told them. Basically, I think before they went and
filed that lawsuit, they were just suppressing information. Bearing everything
they could. They did, they'd even did autopsies and then
tampered with those autopsies. I think that's what you were
mentioning earlier, was that the other company did that too,
(40:09):
And they also lucked out by having an amazing lawyer too.
They were led by two women Katherine Wolf Donahue and
Charlotte Nevans Purcel kind of took the lead for the
lawsuit against Um Radium dial And this is you know,
years after this had made like the national press, the
US radium lawsuit like it was, everybody was talking about it,
(40:31):
and for years some companies managed to avoid any kind
of culpability, and finally Donahue and UM and Purcell Um,
with the help of their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, filed lawsuit
against Radium dial Um. They tried some underhanded stuff themselves
in addition to the whole autopsy thing, but once they
(40:52):
were found out, they decided to shut down and then
reopen in New York as a different company. And they said, oh, yeah,
that other company is terrible, but it doesn't exist anymore.
We're a new company now, so forget that lawsuit. And
they were they were ruled against and were held accountable. Still. Yeah,
and obviously, like you mentioned, because of all of this,
(41:15):
it was a very big deal for this country as
far as work workers rights, safety in the workplace. UM.
It kind of directly led. It took a long time,
but it kind of directly led to the UM to
the forming of OSHA which was a big deal. I
think it directly led in to the food, drug and
(41:36):
cosmetic act um. And of course this was for the
public at large, so we weren't ingesting stuff like that
in our cosmetics. But it also protected workers who are
putting that stuff in the cosmetics years years after the
public was protected, for sure. But yeah, it definitely had
like a real, real impact and a real effect on
on the world. Um. One of the things I saw
(41:57):
though about Radium Dial Corporation its headquarters. It was finally
demolished in nineteen sixty eight in Ottawa, Illinois, and the
the town used the like rubble as backfill and landfill
around the town. So now there's sixteen radioactive super fun
sites around poor little Ottawa, Illinois. Um that the e
(42:21):
p A Is dealing with cleaning up and it's causing
all sorts of problems for them for the residents of
the town. So it was like this one big problem
and then they spread it out all over town when
they used the rubble, You're not super fun super fun
is that there's a really important D on the end
of that, and it really overpronounced that d agreed. Do
(42:44):
you got anything else about the Radium girls. I don't.
I mean the movies on Netflix. You can check it out.
It's uh, it's a little late to endorse it now. Well,
I mean it's not terrible. I think on Rotten Tomatoes
that have like a seventy something, but it just critically
wasn't what review in um also not by me? Nice see,
I guess you. Um. Well, since Chuck said also not
(43:06):
by me, of course everyone, that means it's time for
listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a Nashvillian's response to
the Grand ol Opry Show. Hey, guys, just want to
give you a shout out about how much this native
Nashvillian enjoyed your episode about the Grand ole Opry. I
grew up hearing about the rieman's perfect acoustics and stories
(43:28):
of country stars drinking at Tutsie's bar behind the opera
until it was time to go on stage, and running
through the aligning back doors. My first job was actually
at opery Land Theme Park. Oh wow, I wonder if
we met. It was at the water ride in the
flume Zoom. I think I do remember you, Camille. Immediately
across us was the Porter Wagner stage that Mr Wagner
(43:50):
himself performed every Friday and now live in Chicago. And honestly,
it's a little hard to visit Nashville since it's become
a destination hotspot for bachelor and bachelorette parties. I didn't
know that, did you know? Didn't either? No, it makes
sense though, I mean, I know that's where you had
your bachelor party. I'll never forget that night. Sure, Nashville,
(44:10):
it's crazy. Uh. Plus, skyrocketing rents and new developments have
pushed out a lot of locals and mom and pop businesses.
Future episode recommendation repercussions of being an it city, but
listening to your episode reminded me of the quirky little
city I grew up in. Plus I learned some cool
facts about the opera I didn't know a longtime fan,
(44:30):
that is Camille McCarthy as high praise coming from a
o G nashvilleon you know Yeah. And Camille also responded
when I told her it was gonna be a listener
mail with a big woohoo. You guys are awesome. I
just snucked out your Venus episode while grocery shopping. Fantastic. Um, Well,
(44:51):
thanks a lot, Camille, appreciate that. I hope you've got
some good groceries. I hope you wore a mask while
you want grocery shopping. And I hope you're vaccinated. Nice
full circle there. Yeah. If you want to get in
touch with me, Chuck, Jerry, Chuck's COVID whatever, you can
write us all an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
(45:11):
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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