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