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The Radium Girls · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: There's Charles W. COVID Bryant. Do you want me to
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: to intro you like that? Chuck? Well, I guess the
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: cats out of the bag. Yeah, we wanted to start
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: this episode off with the p s A. I have
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: COVID everybody, and uh, the reason I'm making this so
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: public is a couple of reasons. One to remind everyone
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: that we're not out of the woods yet. I'm vaccinated fully, Um,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: this is almost likely the delta variant. There's no way
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: to prove that because I've done a lot of research there.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: They're only testing for variants and like specific places than
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: using statistics to like blow that out to the whole mhmm.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: But it is the it just like this week it
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: was breaking news that it dropped from about the vaccine
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: effective to against the delta variant. Yeah, I mean that
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: would that alone would make me suspect that's what it is. Yeah,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And it's the most dominant strain. It's most likely to
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: bust the vaccine. Uh. I went out of town over
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: the weekend with friends and like of that group have
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: COVID now so and they were vaxed. So, oh my god,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: it is no joke. Everyone, We're not out of the woods.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Please keep taking it seriously. Please get vaccinated if you haven't,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: And if you can use this, I know we're probably
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: preaching to the choir mainly, but if you can use
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: this example to try and convince someone you love to
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: get vaccinated that is hesitant, then that's why I'm saying this. Well, Chuck,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I know Jerry would never come on and say this,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: but we're very very glad that you're doing okay, and
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: we love you very much. We're very proud of you.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Jerry doesn't express herself emotionally like that, not like you do.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Know I'm well known for that kind of thing. But
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: the good news and the final reason I mentioned it
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: is is also get vaccinated because it is doing at
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: least part of its job, and that I had a
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: couple of days of feeling pretty bad with a cold
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: and have had four days now and feeling pretty good,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: and it is it is doing its job and keeping
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: it very mild. And uh, I took off a couple
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: of categories where if I wasn't vaccinated, it may not
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: be so mild. Yeah, you know that. That's why you're
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: l u c k y. You ain't got no alum
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: bi you lucky? All right, Well, now we can talk
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: about some not so lucky young women. That's true. I'm
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: hats off to you for that. P. S A too.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: By the way, as I never finished, I never finished, Chuck,
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: there's Jerry Jerome Roland over there. Stuff you should not.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: That's right. So now you can take over my former
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: duties of introing the episode. Well, I mean, it's just funny.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: This is another are not funny. But I feel like
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: we're diving more and more into sort of the horrors
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: of not only just the workplace. But I feel like
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: we've covered a lot more over the past couple of years,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: these situations in America's history where corporations have tried to
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: just bury things that made them look bad at the
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: expense and the lives of people that work for them. Yeah,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: we've been examining how terrible life is without government regulations.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: That's right. Another p s A. It's true. And and
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: like you said, we're talking about some unfortunate women who
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: um were gravely mistreated in part because of like the
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: place and time that they occupied. But also because they
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: were women, and because there were again no workplace safety
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: laws or anything like that. Um. But they despite you know,
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: everything that was stacked against them, including things like their gender. Um.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: They they basically rose up and and established some of
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: the first successful lawsuits against employers for basically workplace abuse
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: or at the very least workplace um dereliction of duty
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: of the employer to look out for workers safety. I
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: think that's the technical way to put it. Yeah, and
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: you know, we're talking about the Radium Girls, and uh,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: there was a movie about this. It's not we we
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: loved the hundreds of emails about the Ghost of how
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: do you pronounce it again? The Brotherhood of the Beast,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Brotherhood of the Wolf. That was the name of the movie.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: And apparently I'm the only ship. Yeah, the only person
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: who has never seen that movie. Yeah. Same here, same here,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Like I think we are the only two. I don't.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: I can't remember getting more emails about a single thing
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: than that one. Yeah, they're literally still coming in and
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: I uh, I do remember once I saw the trailer,
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: was like, oh, I know that movie a little bit,
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: but I didn't know this worry. But there was a
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Radium Girls movie from three years ago that I sort
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: of half watched today. Um, it's I don't want to
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: I don't want to disparage anyone because filmmakers tried to
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: get the word out about an important event in history.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: But I'll just say that the Roger Ebert dot com
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: website gave it one and a half stars. And that's
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the only thing I'll say out of how many stars, Wow,
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: it was not very You got a one and a
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: half percent? That is wow. Yeah, I I I did
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: not watch that one. I haven't read the book yet either.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: But um, one of the problems with taking up something
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: like this is, like it was the same thing with
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: Henriett Alas when we did our episode of Kila Cells,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: where it's it's really hard to kind of dig past
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: the wall of journalism surrounding like the release of a
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: popular book and anything that is written in that book,
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: and that books take on the story. All of that
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: stuff basically be ums it like that's it, that's that's
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: just that, that's this person said this and this person
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: played this role, and you know it just becomes like
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: the story, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Fortunately for Radium Girls. And I'm not taking away from
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Kate Moore's book at all. Um, from everything I've seen,
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: it was extremely well researched and like it did a
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: really great job of bringing this to the to the
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Forefront team. Um. But fortunately there's also like a lot
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: of scholarship that was written and researched before that that
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: still exists on the internet, so you can kind of
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: like get into some other details too. Besides, well, the
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: book said this, and the book said that, and then
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: also fortunately we had our buddy Dave Ruse help us
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: out with some research too, and Dave hates books, he does,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: He's always burning books now. David, in fact, is the
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: one that said we should definitely mention Kate Moore's seventeen
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: book The Radium Girls, that we should have a sound
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: effect for Colin's. Now, what if we had, like, um,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: one of those in studio chorus as they go colon,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: they're colon. Be great? Okay, we need a barbershop quartet, Yeah,
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: that'd be good. The Radium Girls in search sound effect
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Yes, but not one,
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: but two punts the Dark Story America's Shining Women. So
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: the whole thing about Radium and the Radium Girls, and
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: that's what the press dubbed them. They also, I believe,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: called themselves the Society of the Living Dead, which is
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: some pretty serious gallows humored considering like the state in
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: shape that they were in. Um. They they were. Um.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: They kind of came out of this era where Radium,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: like the nineteen teens, the early nineties, the first the
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: first Radium Girls are actually two sets, as we'll see,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: but they came out as era where three Radium was
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: there three. Yeah, there was another factory that we're not
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: even gonna have time to talk about. Okay, well, let's
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: say there's what what decade was that one. I think
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: it was the same decade. I think it was just
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: another factory that you know, we just can't do a
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: two hour show, I got you. So they well we're
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: well on our way already. So um. But they existed
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: in a in an era where radium was seen as
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: this thing that was just this amazing cure, all tonic,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: a wonder of nature that was um put in all
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: sorts of different products from cigarettes to condoms to there's
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: a water called Rata thor that was irradiated water, that
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: radioactive water that you would drink to get the radioactivity
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: in your body, because it was you know, thought to
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: give you um like health, energy, vitalization, cure all sorts
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: of diseases. It said that it bathed the stomach and
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: liquid sunshine and all of this was pretty new stuff
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: because it wasn't um more than two decades before, uh
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: that Marie Curry and Pierre Cury Um discovered radium in
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: the first place. Back. Yeah, I mean they discovered it,
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: and I think they even named it. I think Latin
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: radius means ray, and they knew that it emitted rays
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: of energy even at that time, and you know, or
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: very early on, they started using radiation to try and
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: help treat cancer, Like hey, let's put this in a
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: lead box and cut a hole in it and then
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: put that whole over the human body, like aiming it
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: towards where a tumor might be. Like very obviously rudimentary stuff,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: and you have to make up boop boopo sound the
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: whole time. That was kind of one of the roles
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: of the technician at the time, that's right, Uh. And
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: you should have seen the audition tapes. Some people played
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: zero rhythm. It would be like, Pep'm sorry, you're well qualified,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: but uh so Cury. Actually she died um in four
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: from a plastic anemia, which is a bone marrow disorder
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: caused by radiation exposure. So they knew that it was
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: dangerous and uh but it was still like like you said,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: it was in the you know, it was known as
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: a cure for the living dead in that ratath or water,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: and I mean basically used for everything from gout to fatigue.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: And it was just one of those crazy times in
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: American history where now we look back and we're like,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: this is just nuts. But back then they didn't know well.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: So there were two tacks. From what I could tell,
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: there was the beginnings of um academic scholarship, and both
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: of the curies had some sort of suspicion, and there
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: was this idea that there was easily you could be
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: exposed to too much. You didn't want to have too
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: much radium, but a little bit was good for you.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: But then there was also this academic tack that was like, no,
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: this stuff might not be good at all, like we
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: should really be careful with this. But the popular, the
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: popular idea of it read in the newspapers, or you know,
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: maybe even what your doctor thought about it. Um all
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: came from radium research that was almost exclusively underwritten and
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: in a lot of cases carried out by companies that
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: made their money off of radium. Like they were just
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: touting this stuff as an amazing wonder element basically um
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: and and so there was like almost these two overlapping
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: worlds that weren't connected at the time in our understanding
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: of radium in like the nineteen teens and nineteen twenties, right,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: So one of the other kind of cool and interesting
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: things about radium is that it can make things glow
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: in the dark. And glow in the dark is very
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: sort of like who cares now, it's still kind of fun,
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: But in the nineteen twenties, glow in the dark was
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: a very big deal. It was basically the future and
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: kind of space age. And if you had a glow
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: in the dark watch or a glow in the dark clock,
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: then you felt cool basically because you could see that
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: thing in the dark. And so of course these companies
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: wanted to start painting watch faces and clocks with radium,
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: and they've got young women and sometimes even girls as
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: young as like fourteen years old to do this stuff. Yeah,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: I think the first company at first they were working
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: on military clocks and military dials like you might put
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: in an airplane or something. And the first company I
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: think that was established to do this was United States
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: Radium back in nineteen sixteen in New Jersey, Orange, New Jersey,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: I think. And like you said, they hired young girls,
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: very very young girls. Um. I think the oldest one
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: I saw by far was twenty eight, but for the
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: most part they were in their teens to early early twenties.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: And this was like a really big deal job like
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: that was very highly paying. I think they were in
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: the women who painted radium or watch dials with radium paint.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: We're in the top five percent of earner is in
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: America at the time. This is a factory job. Yeah.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: And then also its prestigious to from what I saw, Yeah,
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: the movies and you know, God, I don't know if
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: it's accurate or not. I'm gonna say what the movie said.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: The movie said that they were paid a penny per face,
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: and a high earner could crank out two day, So
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: that's about to two dollars a day. Okay, so that's
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: like a million dollars today. I think that's also what
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: the movie said, Well a million dollars double that, and
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: that's about what a gram of radium cost. Uh yeah,
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: and today's dollars that is, I think it's like a
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: hundred grand a graham in the nineties for a graham
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: of radium. So they were they were they were themselves
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: highly paid, but they also, um, we're working with what
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: was at the time the most expensive material on Earth um,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: and it makes sense that it would be so expensive,
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: Like radium is really rare. It's super radioactive, but it's
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: really um. It occurs in very small amounts, which kind
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: of let you realize how radioactive it is. That you know,
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: it's a daughter isotope of uranium. Whereas uranium decays, one
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: of the things that it becomes is is radium UM
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: and in uranium or I think the curies when they
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: first um discovered radium, they they found that after they
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: took uranium out of this or pitch blend, which we
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: talked about in the uranium mining episode, that the pitch
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: blend was still radioactive, So like what else is in here?
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And out of ten tons of uranium or they managed
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: to extract one milligram, So it would make sense, especially
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: at the time, that it would cost a couple million
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: dollars for a single gram of that stuff. Yeah, and
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: so these girls and young women were, uh, this stuff
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: was getting in their hair, it was getting on their clothes. Um.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: It was sort of a badge of honor because you
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: would go out that night dancing or something and you
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: would glow a little bit. Uh. They would even purposely
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: put it on their teeth. Sometimes they were called ghost girls,
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: and it was it was. It wasn't a fad in
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: that it was widespread because only a select few like
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: had their hands on it. But I think that's one
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: of the reason the girls like these jobs is because
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: they could go out and like attract attention because they
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: had this glow in their hair and on their dresses. Yeah.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: I think also people knew that they were working with radium,
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: and radium at the time was like um, Missy Elliott
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: mixed with ecstasy back in the late nineties, like as
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: cool as it got, you know what I mean? Goodness, thanks,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: I'm just trying out some new stuff. How's it going.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: It's good. In fact, I think maybe we should take
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: a break. I need to re examine that analogy so
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: I can really fully grasp it. All right, you just
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: let it sink a buddy, So, Chuck, I gotta say
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: before we start back again, you don't seem like you
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: have COVID. Are you faking? I'm not faking. Uh, I
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: am a little spacey though. You're doing great. I mean
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: you've researched an episode of stuff you should know, probably
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the most challenging podcast on the planet, and you're presenting
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: it like just like an ace. So hats off to
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: you again. Well, thanks man, you got it. So um.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: You were saying before that the radium girls were covered
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: in um radioactive dust, and they were because they would
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: mix their own paint, uh, And they worked with a
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: specific kind of paint called un Dark. It was a
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: proprietary blend where they would mix them um. They would
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: basically mix it with water and a little bit of
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: solvent and create their own paint from this radium dust.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: So radium dust was like all over the place, which
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: is bad enough. You know, you can get pretty radioactive
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: for me exposed radium radium dust like that, but it
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: was far far worse in those working conditions because they
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: were actually ingesting the radium through the paint as well. Yeah.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: I mean this is where if you think this already
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: sounds like a workplace violation, this is where it just
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: gets bonkers because they would actually, you know, if you're
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: painting one millimeter wide number on a watch, uh, and
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: I think the watch faces themselves were like three and
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: a half centimeters, you have to have a tiny little
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: point on the end of that paint brush. And painters
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: know one way you can achieve this is something called
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: lip pointing, which is when you dip the the brush
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: and the paint, in this case radium, and then you
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: put it in your mouth and just sort of press
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: it down with your lips to make that point finer.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: And they were doing this with radium. They were literally ingesting,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: like orally ingesting radium in their mouths, which means orally
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: and in inviting cancer into their bodies unknowingly, yes, which
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: is some pretty um. I mean, that's not good, like
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: when you're ingesting the paint itself. Apparently, there was a
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: guy who worked for Prudential, the insurance company back in
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: published a paper. His name is fred Hoffman, Frederick Hoffman,
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: and he calculated that, um, the radium girls who who
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: painted these watch faces. Because of that lip pointing technique,
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: they were ingesting something like one and three quarter grahams
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: of this paint every day. It's a lot of money
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: had to lip point so much. It is a lot
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: of money. From the viewpoint of the of the factory owners,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: you'd think they would have been like, no, we gotta
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: stop that, because that is a lot of paint. But
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: that's also a lot of radium that they were taking
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: into And the big problem with that is not just
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: that you know, it's getting inside of you now and
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: it's burning a hole right through you. It's not really
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: doing that. Radium is a an alkali earth metal, and
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: it just so happens that calcium is also an alkali
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: earth metal into your bones. They're they're the same thing.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Your body doesn't differentiate between the two, and we our
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: bodies are set up to divert calcium basically from the
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: bloodstream right to the bones to help build strong bones,
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: you know, um, And we do the same thing with
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: radium to our bodies too. So when you ingest radium,
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: it enters your blood stream and it goes right to
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: your bones and it sets about screwing you up big time.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: From that point on. Yeah, And apparently some of these
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: young women were saying, you know, they're asking questions. Early on,
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: they were saying, like this, it's bad for you. Can
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: it hurt you? Um? And the you know, the US
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: Radium Corporation was I mean, they started covering up very
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: early what was going on. They were doing their own
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: research and they said and of course the people that
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: were making that radium water did the same thing. They
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: would have They would hire out these private companies to
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: do this research basically and say everything's fine, and said,
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: you know, ingesting a little bit is just fine. It
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: will pull a rose in your cheek and it's great.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: And I guess they just sort of full stop there.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: They didn't talk much about how much ingesting a graham
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: every time you did that over time would be like
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: over a period of years. Um. I think in nineteen
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: sixteen they put out their own publication UM from the
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Radium Publishing Company that said, uh, the physiological action of
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: radium sounds not unlike a fairy tale, right, which is weird.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: And they said that the red blood cell count surges, um,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: so you you will actually kind of seem a little healthier.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: I couldn't find that anywhere. From what I saw you, Um,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: it causes hemo license, which is like the rupturing of
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: red blood cells. But um, this is the kind of
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: stuff that like these publications were peddling and doctors in
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: the public we're just taking it wholesale. Um. And that
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: was where that idea that Radium was good for you
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: came from, was from publications from people like the Radium
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Publishing Company. There was just a lot of credulity at
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: the time, I guess, um, which is weird because this
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: is also like one of the most avaricious periods in
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: American history as well. What does that mean? It means
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: that like people were praying on other people for for
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: profit and money, that like that you would do anything
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: for a dollar, you know, avarice. Okay, makes sense. In fact,
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: I will, man, I'll let that one slide. And I
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: don't know if I've said this or not. I know
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Jerry wouldn't, but we're really glad you're doing that. Uh.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: And it's funny in that factory, they didn't say anything
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: about the fact that, like, oh, you know, can this
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: be dangerous? Because I've noticed all the men that are
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: working around Radium are wearing these big lead smocks and aprons,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: and uh, they're handling this stuff with ivory tipped tongs.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: What's when we're putting this in our mouth? And they're like,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: don't worry about that. Yeah, And it wasn't so at
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: at Us Radium in Orange, New Jersey. It was it's
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: it was part of the corporate culture to basically just
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: treat it really cavalierly. Like even the head chemist, um
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Edwin Lehman, who would pay dearly for his cavalierness, was
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: recorded by an investigator who will talk about in a
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: little bit um as as basically just handling blumps of
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: radium or or like radi like radium powder without any
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: kind of gloves, no protection, no lead apron anything, and
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: just kind of just you know, scoffing at the idea
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: that that it was it was, you know, dangerous. So
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: you know, some people there knew that it was dangerous
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: and treated it so. But the corporate culture in that
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: company and in particular was that, you know, don't be
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: don't be ridiculous, who cares, Stop stop talking, stop asking
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: questions kind of thing. Yeah, So this next part I'm
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: going to issue a trigger warning because it's certainly got
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: me with my tooth fears. So if you have dental
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: fears and tooth fears, uh, just be warned. Uh. This
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: is from Kate Moore's book and it's about the very
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: first I think the first young woman to fall ill
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: at the U s r C. Her name was Molly.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it's Maggia or Maggia. And this
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: is she was twenty four years old. She said she
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: felt like she was about ninety. Um, she had this really,
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: I mean she ached all over, but she had this
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: pain and her lower jaw specifically, and then eventually went
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: to the dentist, had these um, these abscesses that were
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: just oozing in her mouth, and her dentist tried to
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: pull some of her teeth that were rotting, and a
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: part of her jaw literally came out. And it says
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: in in the book he removed it not by an operation,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: but merely by putting his fingers in the mouth and
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: lifting it out. Uh. And I think a few days
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: later took out her entire lower jaw the same way,
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: just pulled it out of her mouth. Yes, that's horrifying.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: And if you have what's known as dentophobia, you're probably
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: on the floor right now. It may never go see
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: a dentist again. It got me as well, man, when
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: I was just like, this is not this is so wrong.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: The crazy thing is is Molly Magia. She she lived
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: for um I believe another year or so um with
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: this increasing abscess and like the radium was sitting in
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: her bones in this particular case, in her jaw and
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: her teeth um and just decaying the tissue around it,
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: the bone around it, and she just basically rotted from
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: radiation poisoning from the inside of her jaw out. She
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: suffered from abscesses and eventually died from an abscess. The
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: this abscess apparently your whole the whole left side of
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: her face. The different abscesses grew into one mega abscess
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: and it finally reached her jugular vein and just ate
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: away at her jugular vein and she could no longer
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: pump um, uh, pump pump blood from her heart. Yeah.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: That see now I sound like I have COVID the
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, that is horrific as you can imagine. And
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: it gets worse in that when her doctors were asked
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: what their best guess was of the cause of death,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: they blamed it on syphilis. The company jumps on this
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: and says, and this was a big part of the movie.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: They basically start saying that these girls are are spreading
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: syphilis around each other and that's what they're sick from.
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: I think in the movie they called it v D
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: of course, but um, it was you know, one part
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: to sort of shame them into being quiet, and to
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: say that in another part to just obviously, you know,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: take the blame as far away from radium as possible. Men. Yeah,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: for real, so all you know, not to say in
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: the in the doctor's defense, but they did. No one
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: knew what what radium poisoning was at the time, right,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: So it's not like syphilis wasn't an entirely you know,
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: just bonkers diagnosis. But there was another thing I saw
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: that that um, that they considered too, that just didn't
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: make sense but had kind of come and gone before
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: among match stick makers, UM, which was something called fossey
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: jaw or phosphorus jaw, where you're you're like, if you
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: were exposed to white white phosphorus, which matchmakers were, when
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: you're making the head of a match. Um, it basically
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: gets um absorbed into your jaw and rots your jaw.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: So they had kind of seen something like this before,
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: but not since like the early nineteenth century. It was
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: much more prevalent in the eighteenth century, and they didn't
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: think that these these women were working with phosphorus anyway,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: So it was kind of baffling. But yeah, the idea
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: that that you know, even if the doctor did naively
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: or innocent, you know, say it was syphilis or something
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: like that, the company very much jumped on that kind
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: of thing to use it to paint that unflattering picture
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: of the women who would go on to litigate this company.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: And it was totally that kind of a company and
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: it was run by those kind of people for sure.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: US dial was yes. So twelve uh, and up to
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: this point, twelve of them died. Think about fifty of
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: them were ill at this point, and they are still
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: full steam ahead. They don't haul production at all. They
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: don't even call for an investigation until nineteen when it
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: leaks out to the press a little bit and they
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: start to get, you know, some sort of bad press
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: about what might be going on. So they commissioned an
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: independent investigation that found out that there was definitely connection
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: going on and that their exposure to radium is leading
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: to these illnesses and deaths. And they buried it and
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: got their own, uh not dependent commission together they investigated
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: and came back and said, oh, no, no, no, these
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: young ladies are suffering from a hysterical condition brought on
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: by coincidence. Yeah, and that was actually not even like
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: a panel's opinion. That was um Arthur Rhoder, the president
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: of us DIAL, that was his opinion. Yeah, that was
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: his opinion of the whole thing, and that the independent
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: investigation was a legitimately independent investigation. It was led by
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Dr Cecil Drinker and his wife, Dr Katherine Drinker, who
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: are both Harvard Harvard public health professors. And when they
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: came up with these findings like yeah, this is this.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: These women are all dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: from eating this paint because of this stupid lip pointing technique, UM,
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: and the company did bury it. Not only UM did
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: they bury it. It's even worse than that. They took
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: the Drinker's report and altered it so that it said
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: that every girl is in perfect condition and then submitted
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: it with the Drinker's name on it to the new
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: Jersey Labor Department UM and like the drinkers had no idea.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: They also told the drinkers if they published their initial report,
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: they would sue them that they've been working confidentially and UM,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: like I was saying, like it was just that kind
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: of company. They were just they would engage in dirty tricks.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: They would do some of the most underhanded stuff you
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: can imagine, like they I've got one more anecdote, Chuck,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: this is gonna knock your socks off. They hired a
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: UM industrial toxicologist named Frederick Flynn from Colombia to basically
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: pose as a doctor to examine one of the UM
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: the dial painters UM and basically tell her that her
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: health was fine. She was in fine shape. And they
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: had a VP from U S. Di'll sit in and
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: make it seem like he was a colleague of this
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: person who she thought was a doctor who emphatically agreed
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: and backed up his position. That's the kind of stuff
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: us dial did. Reprehensible, agreed, Chuck. All right, so we
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: should probably take another break and we'll talk about how
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: everything changed a little bit right after this. Alright, So
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: everything changed when a man got sick, and that's that's
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: basically the way it went. Ut six year old chemist
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: at U s r C died of anemia and the
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Essex County Health Examiner, guy little figure in pretty prominently
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: here going forward, Dr Harrison Martlin got involved and you
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: know this is this is what it took. It took
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: a man dying for them to sit up and pay attention. Um.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: He launched an investigation. He it was. It was very sneaky. Actually,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: he actually secretly recruited the technical director from U s
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: r C as a radiation expert, and his name was
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: this is one of the best names we've ever said
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: on the show, Dr sabin A von Sakaki m hm.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: And they took autopsied tissue from uh, some of the
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: bone from these young women who had died or I'm
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: sorry from the original chemists, and they analyzed it and
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: they said, yeah, he's he is basically glowing with radiation. Yeah.
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: I have to say also, um, Dr von so Chalky
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: or he Um was even more than just the technical director.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: He was the co founder of US Radium and he
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: actually created the radium paint undark that the company used.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: So the idea of him basically turning on the company
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: in order to get to the to the bottom of
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: you know, what was going on. You know, I think
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: that's pretty commendable in that sense. It is um he
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: got he in March, Markland got a Geiger counter. I
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: think it was sort of an early crude version basically,
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: and they started going around to the houses and in
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: the hospitals where some of these young women were and
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: everything was radioactive. Um. They tested employees at the plant
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: that even weren't sick, they were radioactive. Basically, everyone that
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: worked there was radioactive, including uh Von Sakaki himself. He
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: breathed into the thing and I think he registered the
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: highest radioactive level of everybody and died within a few
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: years from from jaw cancer. Yeah, at age forty. And
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the from what I saw also, if you took a
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Geiger counter to the grave site of um these people
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: who worked at these factories still today, the Geiger counter
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: would measure set off. It would be set off by
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the radioactivity coming from six six ft of earth separating
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: you and in the remains and that nuts, dude. It
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: will do that for one thousand years. Wow. And supposedly
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: the bodies are still glowing underground. I saw that one
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: woman who worked at another one we'll talk about um
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Radium Dial company. She was exhumed to be examined UM
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: for I think a lawsuit later on, and they found
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: that she was so radioactive that when they reburied her,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: they buried her in a leadline coffin. Yeah, I mean
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: this is super radioactive, right. I think we've established that
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: it's just hard to wrap your mind around how radioactive
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: these people were, and it's crazy that they even live.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: Some of them live for you know, a few more years,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: like like um, Molly Magia, she died pretty quickly. The
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: woman whose jaw came out, she she died within a
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: couple of years. Some women lasted four or five, six,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: even I think even seven years possibly. And the amount
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: of radiation they were exposed to and the effects that
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: it had on their body made from the time they
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: got sick to the time they died just basically like
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: a living hell. Um and the fact that they're still
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: radioactive today it really kind of drives home like how
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: how painful that must have been for them, because apparently
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: bone pain is not it's not like regular pain at all,
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Like you know, if your muscle hurts or joint hurts,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: you can just kind of like move your arm or
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: something and starts to feel a little bit better. With
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: bone pain, you can't do that. Nothing makes it feel better.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: It's just like constant pain. Uh. And that's what you
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: get when you have radium in your bones. So five
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: of these women got together that we're still living obviously,
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: and went to court, or they didn't go to court
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: right away. It took a long time. It took a
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: long time for them to get enough money together to
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: hire attorneys because there wasn't anyone initially he would take
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: these cases pro bono um and so it took years
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: to raise the money to do this. And uh. One
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: of the woman's name was Grace Fryar. She was basically
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: the leader of the factory workers. And she had to
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: wear a back brace because her spine had basically rotted
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: out from the inside and was crushed. She had twenty
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: at least twenty surgeries on her jaw. Another woman's name
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: was Albina Larisse. She had to still bursts and couldn't walk.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Another woman was Katherine schalb Um. She I think her
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: cousin died was another fellow worker there. And so they
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: were like we have to do something here. Um. They
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: were you know, they had all these medical bills, they
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: couldn't even basically pay rent. And finally, after a couple
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: of years, managed to find an attorney who would take
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: it on pro bono, and um, you know they did.
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: They knew they didn't have long to live at this point,
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: and it's not like they wanted some windfall of money.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: They just wanted to get by until they died, and
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: they wanted to make sure that this didn't happen again. Yeah,
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: and again. This is like new stuff basically where workers
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: are like, these were unsafe working conditions. We're gonna see
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: our employer. This is pretty like groundbreaking. So initially the
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: women asked for I think two fifty thou a piece
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: um each for all five of them and their lawyer,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: UM Raymond Barry. He apparently was a really good lawyer
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: and really kind of fought the good fight for him. UM.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: And one of the ways that they were ultimately successful,
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: because it's kind of an understatement to say that US
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: Radium fought this lawsuit rather than settling UM, was that
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: they recruited the press, basically, and in particular the editor
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: of the New York World, The guy named Walter Littman,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: UM took up this cause, and like you know, at
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: the time in the New York newspapers were like the
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: most important media organizations in the world, and the New
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: York World was like one of the bigger ones. So
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: it was like, you know, it was having like all
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: of the twenty four hour networks on your side, drumming
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: up public support for your cause, and that really helped them.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: But even in the end they didn't get anything even
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: remotely close to that quarter of a million they were
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: asking for. So what the Radium Corporation did at first
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: was they said, you know, in New Jersey, the law
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: says that we only have to pay you anything if
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: it's within the first two years of your exposure. And
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: because it took so long for them to raise this money,
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: it was beyond that point, which is just a pretty
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: vile thing to do obviously. Um. Eventually they settled for
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars each plus five i'm sorry, six hundred
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: dollars a year for when they were alive, which was
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: only a few years for each of them. I think
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: within five years all of them had passed away. Um.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: It was later exposed that the judge in the case
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: was a stakeholder in U S r C. Which is
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: really pretty dirty obviously. Uh. And then I think by
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: fifty one UM, thirty years later, forty one of those
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: original painters had died from different cancers. Yeah, not a
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: single one of the original five litigants UM from the
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: lawsuit UM made it past age thirty eight. And that's
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: like you have, by the way, a point one percent
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: lifetime risk of developing bone cancer. Bone cancer is really rare, rare,
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: Like you can get cancer in your bones if you
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: have a different cancer that spreads to your bones. But
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: to start out with bone cancer like many of these
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: women did, it's incredibly rare. UM. So the idea of
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: a cluster of them all happening in this one factory
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: and the company having nothing to do with it was preposterous.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: So the fact that they just got to settle for
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: ten thousand UM per woman was actually kind of a coup.
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: But one of the things that the UM five initial
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: five Radium girls were fighting for was to UM to
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: to create awareness that like, this is dangerous and there's
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: other other women out there in the country and in
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: the world who were doing the same thing. Eating radium
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: paint every day and we want this to stop. And
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: it actually did have that effect, that knock on effect,
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: and not one but chuck as you told me before,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: to my estelment to other cases um where companies were
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: basically forced to to um to settle and eventually radium
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: paint was driven out of use. Yeah. The other one,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: or one of the other two, was the radium Dial
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: factory that we mentioned earlier in Ottawa, Illinois. And you know,
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you can rank like which ones
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: were more gross and dirty and awful, but Radium Dial
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: they actually did know what was going on the whole time.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: For years. They had been uh testing their employees. They
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: had doctors coming in and they were giving them annual
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: physicals and they were recording radiation levels and they just
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: never told them. Basically, I think before they went and
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: filed that lawsuit, they were just suppressing information. Bearing everything
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: they could. They did, they'd even did autopsies and then
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: tampered with those autopsies. I think that's what you were
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: mentioning earlier, was that the other company did that too,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: And they also lucked out by having an amazing lawyer too.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: They were led by two women Katherine Wolf Donahue and
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: Charlotte Nevans Purcel kind of took the lead for the
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: lawsuit against Um Radium dial And this is you know,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: years after this had made like the national press, the
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: US radium lawsuit like it was, everybody was talking about it,
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: and for years some companies managed to avoid any kind
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: of culpability, and finally Donahue and UM and Purcell Um,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: with the help of their lawyer, Leonard Grossman, filed lawsuit
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: against Radium dial Um. They tried some underhanded stuff themselves
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: in addition to the whole autopsy thing, but once they
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: were found out, they decided to shut down and then
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: reopen in New York as a different company. And they said, oh, yeah,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: that other company is terrible, but it doesn't exist anymore.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: We're a new company now, so forget that lawsuit. And
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: they were they were ruled against and were held accountable. Still. Yeah,
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: and obviously, like you mentioned, because of all of this,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: it was a very big deal for this country as
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: far as work workers rights, safety in the workplace. UM.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: It kind of directly led. It took a long time,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: but it kind of directly led to the UM to
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: the forming of OSHA which was a big deal. I
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: think it directly led in to the food, drug and
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: cosmetic act um. And of course this was for the
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: public at large, so we weren't ingesting stuff like that
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: in our cosmetics. But it also protected workers who are
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: putting that stuff in the cosmetics years years after the
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: public was protected, for sure. But yeah, it definitely had
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: like a real, real impact and a real effect on
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: on the world. Um. One of the things I saw
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: though about Radium Dial Corporation its headquarters. It was finally
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: demolished in nineteen sixty eight in Ottawa, Illinois, and the
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: the town used the like rubble as backfill and landfill
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: around the town. So now there's sixteen radioactive super fun
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: sites around poor little Ottawa, Illinois. Um that the e
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: p A Is dealing with cleaning up and it's causing
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: all sorts of problems for them for the residents of
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: the town. So it was like this one big problem
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: and then they spread it out all over town when
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: they used the rubble, You're not super fun super fun
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: is that there's a really important D on the end
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: of that, and it really overpronounced that d agreed. Do
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: you got anything else about the Radium girls. I don't.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: I mean the movies on Netflix. You can check it out.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: It's uh, it's a little late to endorse it now. Well,
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: I mean it's not terrible. I think on Rotten Tomatoes
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: that have like a seventy something, but it just critically
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: wasn't what review in um also not by me? Nice see,
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: I guess you. Um. Well, since Chuck said also not
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: by me, of course everyone, that means it's time for
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a Nashvillian's response to
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: the Grand ol Opry Show. Hey, guys, just want to
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: give you a shout out about how much this native
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: Nashvillian enjoyed your episode about the Grand ole Opry. I
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: grew up hearing about the rieman's perfect acoustics and stories
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: of country stars drinking at Tutsie's bar behind the opera
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: until it was time to go on stage, and running
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: through the aligning back doors. My first job was actually
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: at opery Land Theme Park. Oh wow, I wonder if
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: we met. It was at the water ride in the
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: flume Zoom. I think I do remember you, Camille. Immediately
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: across us was the Porter Wagner stage that Mr Wagner
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: himself performed every Friday and now live in Chicago. And honestly,
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: it's a little hard to visit Nashville since it's become
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: a destination hotspot for bachelor and bachelorette parties. I didn't
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: know that, did you know? Didn't either? No, it makes
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: sense though, I mean, I know that's where you had
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: your bachelor party. I'll never forget that night. Sure, Nashville,
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: it's crazy. Uh. Plus, skyrocketing rents and new developments have
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: pushed out a lot of locals and mom and pop businesses.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: Future episode recommendation repercussions of being an it city, but
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: listening to your episode reminded me of the quirky little
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: city I grew up in. Plus I learned some cool
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: facts about the opera I didn't know a longtime fan,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: that is Camille McCarthy as high praise coming from a
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: o G nashvilleon you know Yeah. And Camille also responded
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: when I told her it was gonna be a listener
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: mail with a big woohoo. You guys are awesome. I
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: just snucked out your Venus episode while grocery shopping. Fantastic. Um, Well,
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: thanks a lot, Camille, appreciate that. I hope you've got
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: some good groceries. I hope you wore a mask while
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: you want grocery shopping. And I hope you're vaccinated. Nice
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: full circle there. Yeah. If you want to get in
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: touch with me, Chuck, Jerry, Chuck's COVID whatever, you can
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: write us all an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.