In 1917, a New Jersey company began hiring young women to paint luminous marks on the faces of watches and clocks. As time went on, they began to exhibit alarming symptoms, and a struggle ensued to establish the cause. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Radium Girls, a landmark case in labor safety.

We'll also consider some resurrected yeast and puzzle over a posthumous journey.

Intro:

Joseph Underwood was posting phony appeals for money in 1833.

The earliest known written reference to baseball appeared in England.

Sources for our feature on the Radium Girls:

Claudia Clark, Radium Girls : Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, 1997.

Ross M. Mullner, Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy, 1999.

Robert R. Johnson, Romancing the Atom: Nuclear Infatuation From the Radium Girls to Fukushima, 2012.

Dolly Setton, "The Radium Girls: The Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark," Natural History 129:1 (December 2020/January 2021), 47-47.

Robert D. LaMarsh, "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women," Professional Safety 64:2 (February 2019), 47.

Angela N.H. Creager, "Radiation, Cancer, and Mutation in the Atomic Age," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 45:1 (February 2015), 14-48.

Robert Souhami, "Claudia Clark, Radium Girls," Medical History 42:4 (1998), 529-530.

Ainissa Ramirez, "A Visit With One of the Last 'Radium Girls,'" MRS Bulletin 44:11 (2019), 903-904.

"Medicine: Radium Women," Time, Aug. 11, 1930.

"Poison Paintbrush," Time, June 4, 1928.

"Workers From Factory May Get Federal Honors," Asbury Park Press, June 27, 2021.

John Williams, "Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Kate Moore's 'The Radium Girls,'" New York Times, April 30, 2017.

Jack Brubaker, "Those 'Radium Girls' of Lancaster," [Lancaster, Pa.] Inte...

358-The Radium Girls

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