← Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More
Radium Girls: The True Story That Changed Workplace Safety Laws
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In the early 20th century, a glowing new element promised progress, prosperity, and even health. It lit watch dials, captivated the public, and symbolized the cutting edge of science. But behind that glow was a hidden danger that slowly poisoned the very workers who brought it to life. Their suffering would expose corporate negligence, transform workplace safety laws, and forever change how we think of industrial safety. Learn more about the Radium Girls on on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Audible. It's time to believe in the Hail Mary, one of the most talked about science fiction adventures of the decade. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is now on the big screen, and there's never been a better moment to experience the audiobook that started it all. Ryland Grace is humanity's last hope. Alone in space with no memory of how he got there, he must solve an impossible scientific mystery before the Earth is wiped out forever. What follows is a smart, thrilling, and surprisingly emotional journey that blends hard science with non stop suspense. Fans favorite narrator Ray Porter delivers an unforgettable performance, balancing humor, heart and escalating tension as the stakes grow higher with every chapter. Part scientific puzzle, part interstellar adventure, Project Hail Mary is a story about curiosity, ingenuity and survival against impossible odds. Now that the blockbuster movie has finally arrived in theaters, there's never been a better time to start listening to the universally acclaimed audiobook Project Hail Mary. Listen. Watch Save the World. Start listening today@audible.com Hailmary this episode is sponsored by Fast Growing Trees. Spring is here and that means it's time for planting and landscaping. And if you want to make things easy on yourself, check out fastgrowingtrees.com Fast growing trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery, with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. They have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and houseplants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on selected plants, and listeners to my show get 20% off their first purchase when using the code daily at checkout. That's an additional 20% off. Better plants and better growing at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code daily at checkout. Fastgrowingtrees.com code daily now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use daily to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Radium is the 88th element on the periodic table. It was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, who were studying uranium ores. They isolated it from pitchblende and identified it as a highly radioactive element that emitted heat and light spontaneously. Radium's most striking attributes are its intense radioactivity and its ability to glow in the dark. A property which at the time made it seem almost magical. In the very early days of research surrounding radioactive elements, scientists knew what it did and developed a theory for how it worked. But they had little to no clue how it affected the human body. Within 20 years of Radium's discovery, companies began using it commercially. Founded in 1914, the United States Radium Corporation, or USRC, operated as a radium processing company in the United States. The primary mission of the USRC was to extract and purify trace amounts of radium from carnotite, a radioactive, hazardous mineral that primarily contained potassium and uranium. Radium became common in manufacturing, even in products like toothpaste and cosmetics. Companies, not knowing any better, were promoting radium as a health additive. One of the biggest uses of radium was in luminous paints. These glow in the dark paints were used to illuminate watch faces and instruments. USRC was one of the major suppliers of radiant luminescent watches, which the military used to tell time in the battlefield. Radium was the perfect element for the paint, as it was long lasting and could glow for literally thousands of years. As USRC opened plans to manufacture these watches, they hired young women, later known as the radium girls. Believing that their small hands were best suited for painting precise watch faces, they opened three factories in the United States. The first began operating in 1917 in Orange, New Jersey, and the other two opened in the 1920s. One in Waterbury, Connecticut, and the other in Ottawa, Illinois. The women at the factory were paid a penny and a half per completed watch dial. This meant that the women, on average, earned a daily wage of about $3.75, which is the equivalent today to about $95, adjusted for inflation. To make that much money, they needed to paint 250 watch dials per shift. The women were assigned various radium tasks and were told that it was safe. But scientists and managers at the factory avoided radium exposure altogether. The chemists who worked at the plant wore masks, only touched the element with tongs and used a lead screen to protect themselves from the radiation. At the same time, medical literature was beginning to report the adverse effects of radium. So it made sense for the experts to take safety precautions. But this was in stark contrast with the exposure. The women painting the dials Faced every day. Because the women were told that the element was completely safe, they had no problem interacting with the radium infused paint. The women painted the watch faces inside of a small crucible, A container for substances heated to high temperatures like metal. Inside the crucible, the women painted the watch faces with camel hair paintbrushes, which were small brushes with soft bristles made from natural hair. To ensure the watch dials were of the highest quality, the UNRC supervisors encouraged the women to maintain the shape of their brush point by molding it with their lips. This technique was called lip dip paint. The technique was highly effective in keeping the brush tip sharp. Furthermore, because the women were never notified of radium side effects, they often played with the paint. They used the luminescent paints to adorn their nails, faces, teeth, and other body parts for fun, unaware of the risks. Unsurprisingly, the side effects for these women were severe. Constant exposure to radium was dangerous and they were heavily contaminated. The lip dip paint technique meant that these women, no matter how careful, were inevitably ingesting the hazardous material. When leaving the factory, the women were often glowing from the amount of radium on their skin and clothes. If you remember back to my episode on radiation, strong alpha emitters like radium are relatively easy to block. However, the one thing you never, ever want to do is ingest it. And that is exactly what the women at the UNRC facility were doing every single day. By the early 1920s, the results of the radium exposure were already being seen. The first group to realize the danger was dentists. Many of the patients who visited the dentist reported problems with their teeth, mouth and jaws. Women developed loose teeth, ulcers, lesions, and noticed that tooth extraction sites never healed. The women also developed conditions like anemia and were significantly more prone to bone fracturing. They experienced issues with their menstrual cycles, and some women became sterile, and many developed cancer from the exposure. One of the best known side effects was a condition now known as radium jaw. This saw the women develop radium deposits in their bones, which decayed the upper and lower jawbones, leading to necrosis of the skin, muscles and bones in the area. In other words, their jaw literally died. Many women, unaware that their health was worsening, sought medical help, but much of it was unreliable. USRC had a contact with Columbia University's industrial toxicologist, Frederick Flynn. Flynn, along with many of the doctors to whom the patients were referred, lacked medical training and had no license to practice medicine. This meant that many of the medical examinations for the women were nothing more than a ruse and a way to control the information about the dangers of radium from ever getting to them. USRC and other watch companies also requested that medical professionals such as doctors and dentists not release their findings on the dangers of radium. Many of the medical doctors complied with this request for a period of time. In 1922, the first documented death from radium poisoning at a USRC factory occurred. Amelia Molly Maggia had suffered toothaches and ulcers early on, followed by necrosis of the jaw, which needed to be removed, and ultimately resulted in her death that year. By 1924, 50 more women at the New Jersey plant had died from similar conditions. The high illness rate led USRC to investigate their New Jersey factory. The investigations led to shocking results. They found an environment that held shockingly large amounts of loose radium throughout, with absolutely no protection for their workers. The chief investigators, Cecil Kent Drinker and Catherine Rotan from the Harvard School of Public Health, were convinced that the illnesses the factory was facing were caused by radium and reported this to the USRC president, Arthur Roeder. Roeder dismissed these findings, attributing his employees health issues to outside infections. At the company's insistence. Medical professionals similarly blamed syphilis for the illnesses and deaths. Syphilis was likely chosen due to how notorious it was at the time. The sexually transmitted disease was often used to smear women's reputations. USRC attempted to evade responsibility for the illnesses and deaths by exploiting the stereotype of the women that they hired as unfit to work elsewhere. Roeder tried to shift the blame to the women, painting them as irresponsible and at fault, rather than acknowledging the company's culpability. Drinker had planned to publish his findings on the radium contamination, but was threatened by ROTOR himself. However, it came to light that ROTOR had been fabricating reports to the New Jersey Department of Labor to paint the USRC in a better light. And with rotor's reputation in tatters, Drinker had no problem publishing the report. After the New Jersey Labor Commission reviewed Drinker's report, it mandated safety measures resulting in the factory's closure in 1925. A pathologist named Harrison Martland conclusively proved that the girls were dying from radium poisoning acquired during their work painting watch faces. While the radium industry attempted to discredit Martland's findings, the affected women were furious. Many knew that they were living on borrowed time, but wanted to make a difference for themselves and their colleagues who had worked with the substance. A worker by the name of Grace Fryer and several other women spearheaded a lawsuit against the company. The case struggled to find legal representation for two years until Raymond Berry took it on in 1927. The ensuing legal drama, coupled with the shocking details of the factory's abuse and resulting damages, quickly made it into a major national news story. Due to the slow pace of the legal system, the women who sued the company were often compelled to settle out of court, as many only had months to live. The first court appearance in these lengthy legal battles didn't take place until 1928. That year, five of the factory workers, Grace Fryer, Edna Mussman, Quintina McDonald, Kathryn Schwab, and Labina Laris, made it to court. Two of them were bedridden, and none of them was able to even raise their hand to take the oath in court. The five became dubbed the Radium Girls by the media, with many newspapers describing the women as being the living dead. Despite initially denying culpability, USRC eventually settled the lawsuit out of court with the Radium Girl. The terms of the settlement included a $10,000 payment to each woman plus an annual annuity of $600. Furthermore, the company was required to cover all associated medical and legal expenses. Tragically, all five of the women were dead before the end of 1933. Despite settling out of court, the legal battles between Radium Companies and Radium Girls continued. And it's important to note that USRC was not the only company involved in these legal troubles. Notably, the Radium Dial Company used the same technique as USRC and saw the exact same side effects. Those at Radium Dial eventually heard about the lawsuits in New Jersey, but were told by the company that those involved had infections and that radium was not the cause. They were told the material was safe and were promised that they could return to work. After learning more about the impact of radium and being inspired by the earlier Radium Girls lawsuits, multiple legal cases against Radium Dial were filed in Illinois starting in 1927. Between 1927 and the mid-1930s, the factory workers lost lawsuit after lawsuit. However, in 1936, something changed. That year, Illinois passed the Illinois Occupational Diseases Act. Part of the act required that employers cover cases of industrial poisoning. This act was a direct result of the Radium Girls case. After the law passed, multiple Radium Girls, led by Catherine Donahue, filed lawsuit against Radium Dial. The lawsuit found Radium Dial guilty and ordered them to pay the women $10,000 in compensation. The Radium Girls case holds a deep significance as a landmark legal precedent. It represents one of the earliest successful instances where a corporation was held liable for injuries sustained by its own employees. The case helped pave the way for more workers to sue to protect their own health and safety, which in turn led companies to create stronger protections and regulations for their workers, something everyone still benefits from today. In particular, the Radium Girls lawsuit was instrumental in establishing the Occupational Disease labor law and the U.S. occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. The Radium Girls has been the subject of a 2016 book by the author Kate Moore, a 2018 film, and even a stage play. These have brought the story of the Radium Girls to wider audiences, emphasizing both the human tragedy and and the legal impact. The Legacy of the Radium Girls serves as a cautionary tale about industrial safety and illustrates that even the faintest glow can sometimes cast a very long shadow. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kieffer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Olivia Ashe. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. This is where everything happens that's outside of the show. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.