- [Blair] Hello everybody, and
welcome back to the channel.
My name is Blair, or the iilluminatii,
and today I'm going over
another strange event in history
that's interested me for quite a while.
And this one is about the radium girls.
This is most certainly
a case of a business
putting people in danger,
though it's not the story
we typically hear on this channel.
The radiation poisoning
that led to their name,
the radium girls, happened
almost 100 years ago
in the 1920s, but it's still
a topic that's remembered
to this day in books and music
and one that I at least
still find fascinating.
So let's dive right in and take a look at
how this radiation poisoning happened
and how long-lasting
effects it really had.
(energetic music)
So let's start by discussing
what exactly radium is.
Radium is extracted from carnotite ore
and is used to create luminescent paints.
It can be used in everyday products,
from wristwatches to toothpaste,
before its negative health effects
were obviously discovered.
Polish in French chemists
Marie and Pierre Curie
were the first to discover radium in 1898
and learned that by itself,
radium in high enough
concentrations will glow blue.
So the point is, it makes
things do the glowy glow.
The invention of radioluminescent
paint can be attributed
to William J. Hammer, who
mixed radium with zinc sulfite
in 1902 and applied the
paint to various items,
including watches and clock dials.
In a case of bad judgment,
he failed to patent the idea.
Recognizing a good opportunity,
a gemologist at Tiffany & Company
by the name of George Kunz did patent it.
Kunz and Charles Baskerville, a chemist,
made their paint by mixing
radium barium carbonate
with zinc sulfide in linseed oil.
At the time, at least in the U.S.,
radioluminescent paint
saw little application.
It stayed in the bottle, but in Europe,
especially in Switzerland,
things were different.
Quoting Ross Mullner, "There
were so many radium painters
in that country that it was
common to recognize them
on the street, even on the darkest nights,
because of the glow around them:
their hair sparkled almost like a halo."
In the U.S., the first company to produce
radioluminescent paint was the
Radium Luminous Material
Corporation in Newark, New Jersey.
It was founded in 1914
by Sabin von Sochocky
and George Willis, who
were both physicians.
Their operations expanded tremendously
when the United States entered
World War I, and in 1917,
they moved from Newark
to Orange, New Jersey.
They also got into the business
of mining and producing radium.
In 1921, they changed their name to
the U.S. Radium Corporation.
Radium had only been
discovered 13 years before
it was even used in paint.
And even though it seemed obvious
it would be dangerous now,
hearing that the radium painters
had hair sparkling like a halo,
it just didn't clearly worry
those in the early 1900s.
Radium was new, interesting,
and let's be real.
Some of these watches probably looked like
some cool scifi futuristic shit back then.
The consequences weren't well-known,
so any safety measures or
understanding of radium
sort of fell by the
wayside in favor of making
these new types of paints.
(energetic music)
The U.S. Radium Corporation employed
hundreds of women at their
factory in Orange, New Jersey.
The paint was marketed for
house numbers, pistol sights,
light switch plates, and creepily enough,
eyes for toy dolls.
And I'm sorry, but I don't
know who wants a doll
with glow-in-the-dark eyes.
That sounds like nightmare
fuel, but, you know, hey,
I guess that appealed to
people somehow back then.
Now here's where the
issue of exposure begins.
The U.S. Radium Corporation
wasn't fully aware
of the dangers of radium,
but they figured it would do
hardly any harm to the public
if there was just a bit
on some creepy-ass doll.
They weren't exactly wrong.
It's not as if the entire
U.S. got radiation poisoning.
A coat of it on a watch, a
doll, or on a light switch
wasn't enough to start doing
serious harm to people,
but they kind of forgot about
the workers in that equation.
Few companies at the time
were willing to employ women,
and the pay was much higher
than most alternatives.
So the company had little
trouble finding employees
to occupy the rows and rows of desks.
They were required to paint delicate lines
with fine tipped-brushes,
applying the Undark,
the name of the paint, to the tiny numbers
and indicator hands of wristwatches.
After a few strokes, a brush
tended to lose its shape.
So the women's managers encouraged them
to use their lips and
tongues to keep the tips
of the camel hairbrushes sharp and clean.
The glowing paint was
completely flavorless,
and the supervisors assured
them that rosy cheeks
would be the only physical side effect
to swallowing the radium-laced pigment.
Cause for concern was further
reduced by the fact that
radium was being marketed
as a medical elixir
for treating all manners of ailments.
Now, normally this is where I'd say,
I really can't blame U.S. Radium.
They didn't know, and this
was a horrible tragedy,
but here's the thing.
The owners and the scientists
did start to understand the hazards.
And they took precautions
because they were aware
that Undark, the paint,
was almost a million times
more active than uranium.
Apparently they even told people
that the medical community
was becoming aware
of injurious effects of radium.
Scientists realized
they unleashed a menace,
but these women, some as young as 15
according to "The New York Times,"
were painting their fingernails with it,
completely oblivious to how
dangerous this truly was.
If I go and buy a wristwatch,
I trust that it's not
painted with something fatal,
same with a creepy doll.
If someone asks me to handle
a paint and doesn't give me
a mask or tongs like these
scientists were using,
then I'd trust it was
probably safe to handle.
It's really just an issue of
how little was disclosed here.
This really could have
been easily prevented,
but selling interesting
glow-in-the-dark watches
were at the front of U.S. Radium's mind,
not the workers' safety.
(energetic music)
By the 1920s, health problems
and even deaths began.
It started with fatigue, anemia,
and trouble with their teeth.
When dentists tried to
extract the bad teeth,
they were horrified to
find jawbones so diseased
that chunks of bone came out as well.
The extraction sites didn't
heal and infection set in.
In many cases, the women's
bodies were actually radioactive
because radium had been
absorbed by their bones.
Government researchers studied
live and dead dial painters
and use the data to calculate
safe exposure levels
for future generations of workers.
By 1923, five young women
from the Orange plant
had died from a condition
that came to be known
as radium jaw.
The same thing had begun
happening to dial painters
in Connecticut and Illinois.
As more time passed,
some of the women developed bone cancers.
What makes radium so dangerous is that
it forms chemical bonds
in the same way as calcium
and the body can mistake it for calcium
and absorb it into the bones.
Then it can bombard the cells
with radiation at close range,
which may cause bone tumors
or bone marrow damage
that can give rise to anemia or leukemia.
How many women were sickened
by working with radium is unknown.
Medical experts blamed bone disease
and bone and head cancers on radium,
though other tumors, like breast cancer,
that developed later in life
were virtually impossible to trace.
Of 1600 women listed in government records
as having worked with radium before 1927,
86 had cancers that were
probably linked to it.
By 1929, 23 other women had died
from non-cancerous
diseases caused by radium.
And this is just by the '20s,
within about a 10-year span
of the factory opening.
And it sounds absolutely horrifying.
One of the earliest cases
was that of Grace Fryer.
Grace was a bank teller when
her teeth began to loosen
and fall out for seemingly no reason.
The physician she visited saw not only
serious bone decay on her jawbone,
but that it was honeycombed
with small holes
and in random pattern,
reminiscent of moth-eaten fabric.
Three years after these
problems began in 1925,
her doctor suggested it could be linked
to her former job with U.S. Radium.
So Grace, looking for answers,
decided to have a specialist examine her
and asked Frederick Flynn
from Columbia University.
Also, just as an aside,
his name is spelled differently
between my sources here,
but it's the same story being told
and generally the same name.
Anyway, strangely, he said
she was in perfect health.
Her teeth were falling out of her head,
but Flynn said she was fine.
It turns out that's because Flynn
hadn't gone to medical school at all.
He acquired a PhD, but
wasn't a real doctor.
He was working with these companies,
including the Waterbury Clock Company,
to sweep everything under the rug.
By the summer of 1926,
Frederick Flynn found two cases
of radium poisoning at Waterbury Clock.
He continued to tell the radium girls
they were perfectly healthy.
He told Katherine Moore eight times
she didn't have a trace
of radium in her body.
She died from radium poisoning.
In 1926, Flynn published an
article in a medical journal
concluding, "An industrial
hazard does not exist
in the painting of luminous dials."
Not until 1928 did Frederick
Flynn find five girls
who might have had radium poisoning.
Flynn pretended concern.
He convinced the radium girls
to accept company settlements
that freed it from further liability.
With no lawyers representing them,
the young, unsophisticated radium girls
had no hope of justice.
Between 1926 and 1936,
Waterbury Clock quietly paid out
$90,000 for settlement,
support, and medical costs
for 16 radium girls.
One family received a paltry
$43.75 as compensation
for the death of one
of their radium girls.
Flynn and Waterbury Clock were assholes.
It's plain and simple.
If U.S. Radium realized "Holy shit,
this is a dangerous substance"
and took quick action,
I don't think I'd be
exactly fuming right now.
People make mistakes.
Companies make mistakes.
And when they aren't aware
of the dangers of radium,
I can't expect them to
take proper precautions
in the first place.
But once they learned it wasn't safe
and ignored those concerns
and even swept deaths under the rug,
mm-mm, not acceptable any more.
To make things even worse
and even more infuriating,
U.S. Radium often blamed
these mysterious deaths
on syphilis and STDs to undermine
the reputation of these
women and absolutely ignored
the report of Cecil Drinker.
They hired Cecil, a Harvard
physiology professor,
to study the working conditions.
And he reported that "Dust
samples collected in the workroom
from various locations and from chairs
not used by the workers were
all luminous in the dark room.
Their hair, faces, hands,
arms, necks, the dresses,
the underclothes, even the corsets
of the dial painters were luminous.
One of the girls showed luminous spots
on her legs and thighs.
The back of another was
luminous almost to the waist."
U.S. Radium dismissed the report,
knowing their factory
was actually dangerous.
It was published later in 1925,
when Drinker's colleague Alice Hamilton
insisted he make his findings public.
But imagine how many deaths
could have been avoided
if people knew sooner,
if only U.S. Radium hadn't
squashed this report
and blamed these women's deaths on an STD.
It's absolutely disturbing
how many women had to suffer
and die and fight to be noticed and heard
when years prior, U.S.
Radium was perfectly aware
what would happen.
(energetic music)
Grace Fryer and four
other women, Edna Hussman,
Katherine Schaub, Quinta MacDonald,
and Albina Larice became the
faces of the radium girls.
It took Grace two years to find a lawyer
willing to stand up for them.
And even when the lawsuit began,
U.S. Radium made every attempt
possible to delay the case
in the hopes that the
plaintiffs would soon be dead.
They actually said their own witnesses
were going to Europe for
the summer on vacation
and that's why they postponed
the case for several months.
Really fucking holding
themselves accountable
for their actions, aren't they?
When in January, 1928, the
case finally came to trial,
none of the five women were strong enough
to raise her arm to take oath
and two of the women were bedridden.
With the trial marketing
worldwide headlines,
Marie Curie weighed in, stating,
"I would be only too happy
to give any aid that I could,
but there is absolutely no means
of destroying the substance
once it enters the human body."
When U.S. Radium convinced the trial judge
for yet another delay,
famed journalist Walter Lippmann wrote,
"One of the most damnable
travesties of justice
that has ever come to our attention.
It is an outrage that the company
should attempt to keep
these women from suing.
There is no possible
excuse for such a delay.
These women are dying.
If ever a case called
for prompt adjudication,
it is the case of five crippled women
who are fighting for a
few miserable dollars
to ease their last days on Earth."
In an almost unbelievable act of hubris,
U.S. Radium's president
Clarence Lee stated,
"We unfortunately gave
work to a great many people
who were physically unfit
to procure employment
in other lines of industry.
Cripples and persons similarly
incapacitated were engaged.
What was then considered an
act of kindness on our part
has since been turned against us,"
and just the fucking
nerve of their president,
the absolute nerve, claiming
that they were already crippled
before they began working for them.
It goes beyond
disrespectful and insulting,
what U.S. Radium did to these women,
and the lawsuit, it's
just as rage-inducing.
When they settled, it was
for $10,000 plus $600 a year,
as long as they continued to
suffer from radium poisoning.
And yeah, as if some
magical cure was just gonna
come along and undo the
holes in their bones.
According to my inflation
calculator, by the way,
this means the women were given
$150,000 by today's rates.
Then $9,000 a year.
$9,000 a year is below the poverty line.
And since these women couldn't even
raise their hands in the courtroom,
it's not as if they could
find a job elsewhere.
U.S. Radium should have been paying them
to live out the rest of
their lives in luxury
after what they'd done to them.
Unsurprisingly, all five
of the famous radium girls
passed away by the 1930s,
and Marie Curie herself,
the one who discovered
radium, died in 1934.
Her decades of exposure
left her chronically ill,
nearly blind from cataracts,
and ultimately caused her death
from either severe anemia or leukemia.
Before the women died, however,
two of the radium girls
offered themselves up
to scientific experiments
in the hope to find a cure.
After all, for the other radium girls,
the two-year statute of
limitations had run out,
and approximately 4,000
radium dial painters
worked under U.S. Radium alone.
They weren't the only radium
painting business at the time,
but without a doubt, they were the worst.
The last Radium Girl, Mae Keane,
died recently on March 1st,
2014 at the age of 107.
Apparently her bosses weren't
satisfied with her work
as a dial painter and she
had been quickly fired.
So I guess that's one skill
that it really pays to not have,
at least in those days.
(energetic music)
The radium girls' story, though
absolutely heartbreaking,
had a lasting impact.
It was only after the case
of the New Jersey women
was legitimized in a courtroom setting,
a formal structure for news gathering,
did the larger media outlets
pick up on the story,
accelerating the issue.
The out-of-court
settlements were discovered
and Alice Hamilton,
the one who insisted Drinker
publish his findings,
became an incredible advocate
for the radium girls.
She wrote to Walter Lippmann,
the editor of the "New
York World" newspaper,
and asked for his help.
It was because of her that he said
those famous words we mentioned earlier,
referring to the case as "a
damnable travesty of justice,
there is no possible
excuse for such a delay.
These women are dying.
If ever a case called
for prompt adjudication,
it is the case of five crippled women
who are fighting for a
few miserable dollars
to ease their last days on Earth."
It took so much effort
on Alice Hamilton, Grace,
and Lippmann's parts to shift this case
in favor of the victims.
It's actually disgusting how
U.S. Radium treated these women
throughout the entire process,
but just as awful as the lies they told
to try and cover it up.
Raymond Berry, the young Newark Jersey
that took Grace's case on
contingency, Alice Hamilton,
and the national president
of the Consumers' League,
Florence Kelly, took on the mantle
of ensuring this couldn't happen again.
Florence Kelly said she was haunted by
the cold-blooded murder in industry
that took place in the radium case.
She led state chapters
on the Consumers' League
in checking on other radium dial plants,
including those in
Pennsylvania and Illinois.
In New York City, the medical
examiners for New York
and New Jersey met with
Hamilton, Kelly, and Berry.
The group agreed on a
strategy for proposing
new general conference on
radium factory safety standards
to general surgeon Hugh Cummings
of the U.S. Public Health Service.
The medical examiners signed a letter
proposing the conference
and the "New York World"
supported it editorially.
Kelly and her colleague Josephine
Goldmark visited Lippmann
and Goldmark wrote this
account of the meeting.
"The day we visited
him in his small office
high up in the dome of
the old World building
was not wholly propitious
for detailing our plans.
The political campaign
of 1928 was in full swing
and just at that moment
when we reached his office,
Mr. Lippman, as I recollect,
was receiving the first wires
from the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago.
He listened to us with
great interest nevertheless,
and promised his full
aid as soon as the letter
to the surgeon general had been sent.
But he counseled delay.
As Kelly put it, Lippmann
agreed to help us
in every way possible,
but warned us that we
should injure our case
if we attempted to present
it publicly before July 4th,
after the close of the second
presidential convention."
Endorsements followed, even
from Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt
and the surgeon general.
Soon other public health
officials began stepping forward,
all because Alice Hamilton insisted
her colleague publish his findings.
Grace's lawyer didn't give up
on the case after it was over
and Lippmann wanted to spread the word.
These people ensured that the radium girls
had their stories told and
conditions were changed.
In 1938, the Food and Drug Cosmetic Act
outlawed deceptive
packaging that made Radithor
and other radium-based
products marketable.
Bye-bye, Radium Brand Creamery Butter.
Bye-bye, radioactive jockstrap.
Thanks for making deceptive
packaging illegal.
The law also banned a
cosmetic called Lash Lure
that was known to make
women go blind, and Koremlu,
a depilatory that contained
chemicals known in rat poison
that left countless paralyzed.
Though those last two
weren't radium related,
just an interesting ripple effect.
Radium was still used on
clock and watched dials
until the '60s, but it
was with safer techniques.
Eventually by 1968, it was phased out,
and though radium is still in
some products we use today,
the amounts are not harmful
and it's not deliberate.
Now almost everything
we know about radiation
inside the human body we owe
thanks to the radium girls.
They helped shape our laws
as well as scientific understanding.
Although their deaths
are a horrible tragedy,
at least they were not completely in vain.
(energetic music)
The story of the radium girls
is alive and well in the media.
Kate Moore was interviewed
by "The New York Times"
just a few years back in 2017
because she published
a book about her story.
She'd heard of a play
called "These Shining Lives"
back in 2015, written by Melanie Marnich,
and said she felt a
sense of responsibility
to pass on this piece of history.
What Kate said was the most
surprising thing she'd learned
while researching their
story was the company files,
their memos, and how
deep the corruption ran.
"They knew what was happening," she said,
"and they were killing these girls,
not only the ones they had already killed,
but the ones who were still working.
The surprising thing
was, during my research,
I went to the LaSalle County
Historical Museum in Illinois,
which had a terrific collection
of the radium girls' letters.
I'm leafing through this file
in the back of this tiny museum,
and I not only find
letters between the girls,
but also one of the most moving things.
Pearl Payne, who was clearly
a very intelligent woman,
though she had to leave
school when she was 13,
had written - for posterity,
really - what happened to her,
detailing fully about
her medical conditions.
She had problems with her
wounds, so she bled a lot.
She talked about bleeding
for 87 days straight
and doctors didn't know
what was wrong with her.
I was sitting there with tears
streaming down my cheeks,
reading it aloud.
I don't know if it was surprising,
but it was just heartbreaking and special
to discover this treasure
trove of material
and to know I could use it to
bring these girls to life."
There's many other books
about this as well,
from historian Claudia
Clark to Michael A. Martone.
Even Kurt Vonnegut made a
reference to the radium girls
in his 1979 novel "Jailbird."
And there's also a movie
that's set to be released
this past April, although
it's obviously been delayed
because of the pandemic.
So when it comes out, I
definitely want to see it.
But seriously though, it's incredible
the influence that this
story has had on our lives
without some of us even knowing about it.
And this piece of history
has always fascinated me.
It is an absolute tragedy what
happened to the radium girls
and I hope their story
can continue to live on
for years to come.
So with all of that being said,
that's where I'm going
to end today's video.
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making it to another video.
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see you in the next one.
Bye!
(energetic music)
