September 15, 2018 • 23 mins
Today we revisit an episode from prior hosts Sarah and Deblina. Between in 1917, hundreds of women got jobs applying radium-treated paint to various products. Many experienced severe health problems. Five former workers decided to sue the U.S. Radium corporation, and faced a campaign of misinformation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today's classic is a much requested listener favorite.
It's the Radium Girls and this episode came out in
September from PASS hosts Sarah and Bablina, and it was
rerun about a year later, and since that time, the
Radium Girls have made headlines a couple of other times.
One of the last surviving Radium Girls, May Keen, died
(00:25):
at the age of a hundred and seven, and Mabel
May Williams, another of the last Radium Girls, died in
at the age of a hundred and four. So let's
get to it. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History
Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(00:50):
to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chok reboarding and I'm scared
out and we're just gearing up for our long Labor
Day weekend. But by the time this episode airs, that
will already have passed and a labor related memorial should
have been unveiled in a town called Ottawa, Illinois. And
the memorial, which was unveiled Friday, September two, is a
statue of a woman holding flowers in one hand and
(01:12):
paint brushes in the other and it's meant to symbolize
the women who worked for the Ottawa based Luminous Processes
factory and there they painted watch and clock dials in
the early twentieth century. And they were women who ended
up getting serious radiation poisoning as a result of their jobs.
And I'm not sure how much national media attention this
memorial and it's unveiling are going to receive. It was
(01:34):
conceived of by a young lady named Madeline Pillar, who
actually came up with this idea for the memorial after
doing a junior high history project. How about that. Yeah,
her dad is a sculptor, and she did this project
and kind of couldn't get this woman out of her
head and proposed the idea of doing a memorial to them.
And they raised all this money. But we're not sure.
(01:55):
I haven't seen that many news stories about it. I
just randomly kind of stumbled upon it. But the story
of the women who came to be known as the
Radium Girls actually became a media sensation in the nineties
and the nineteen thirties. Yeah, they certainly deserve a monument.
And it wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because
workers a factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really
(02:16):
in the same boat. In fact, it was a story
coming out of New Jersey that first brought this issue,
this radium poisoning issue, to the public's attention in the
first place. And that's the story that we're going to
focus on today in the podcast, And we're gonna just
sort of take a look at the historical circumstances in
working conditions that led to these women getting radiation poisoning
(02:40):
in the first place, because you're probably gonna wonder pretty
quickly how something like this could happen. Yeah, and we're
also going to take a look at how they came
to be known as the Radium Girls and their struggle
for justice that led to some workplace reforms in the end,
so kind of try to put a positive spin on
what is ultimately a very sad story. But before we
can talk about the Radium Girl, so we need to
(03:00):
take a closer look at the element that's at the
heart of their story, and that is, of course radium,
literally the element very good pun to blainess. So we're
going to be talking about radium, of course, but that
also gives us the chance to talk about one of
our most frequently requested podcast subjects Polish born scientists and
Nobel Prize winner Marie Curry. And this isn't a podcast
(03:23):
on her, it's not a profile on her, but she
is an important character in it, mostly because she discovered
radium in eighteen and radioactivity was still pretty new at
that time. It was not well understood. The German physicist
Wilhelm Konrad ren Gen had just discovered X rays back
in and just a few weeks after that discovery, and
(03:46):
rebekr l had identified radioactivity during experiments with uranium salts.
So when Marie Carey made her discovery, all of this
stuff was kind of floating around and kind of new science,
and people were really fascinated by it, and Curie was
one of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerrel's
findings because not that much attention were given to them
at the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend,
(04:09):
which was which is a shiny tar like byproduct of mining.
That eventually led she and her husband Pierre to isolate
two new chemical elements, polonium and the one we're focusing
on today, which is radium. It was radioactive, it seemed
to pulse with spontaneous energy. And the other cool thing
about radium was that it glowed in the dark. Yeah,
(04:30):
that certainly seemed to be a selling point for it,
as we'll see, But by this time people had started
to realize that even though radiation was invisible, it did
have strong powers. They could cause injury. Scientists were exposed
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss. So clearly this element could do something. But
(04:51):
this also cluded physicians into the possibilities that radiation held
for treating cancer. Something that's powerful could potentially fight something
that was hurting people as well as burn them or
injure them. Yeah, So it was that potential, and along
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
(05:14):
much from the get go, people thought it could cure
everything from arthritis to diabetes, not just cancer, and an
entire radium industry grew out of that belief. Some form
of the word radium was actually incorporated into a lot
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or
it was funny, Yeah, but a lot of products had
(05:34):
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic, bath salts, lotions,
heating pads, and male pouches. Do you know what male pouches?
Because you told me that it's it's your job to
tell listeners they were condoms, So those also contained radium
or some but radium or raid on laced water was
(05:56):
probably one of the most widely touted products, and it
was called with sunshine because people thought that this was
some sort of magical elixir that could like extend your
youth and make you healthy. And one brand in particular
was called Rata Thor. You read about this a lot.
It was a popular brand of radioactive water, and doctors
would give it to patients as a tonic. Really doesn't
sound good. It doesn't. It doesn't sound good to us now,
(06:19):
but maybe it would have back then. I don't know,
And you and I were talking about it. It makes
you kind of concerned. What are we drinking or consuming
now that will sound as horrible and ridiculous as radium
laced tonic in the future. I mean, gosh, yeah, I
kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should, But
but radium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
(06:40):
To write in nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
pure metal, and Marie Cury was involved with that as well,
And soon after American electrical engineer William J. Hammer created
a radium treated paint which had the trade name Undark,
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific inst events
and things like that. It was expensive to do, but
(07:02):
it became really significant during World War One, especially when
people realize the advantage of applying this to military instruments.
You're in a dark trench and you can actually read
your watch or read your instrument exactly. So that's where
our story about the Radium girls really begins. So between
nineteen seventeen and nineteen nine, hundreds of young women got
(07:24):
jobs applying radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks,
and compass spaces in factories in states like Illinois and
New Jersey, Connecticut, uh, even Long Island factories were owned
by a big corporation, even though they were in different
parts of the country. It was the US Radium Corporation.
(07:45):
And for the young women getting these jobs, it seems
like a pretty great opportunity, mostly because it paid a
lot better than other factory jobs at the time more
than three times as much. It was about eighteen dollars
per week instead of five dollars per week. They got
paid about a penny and a half per dial they painted,
and they would paint about two fifty dials a day,
(08:06):
so a pretty good job. And the work didn't seem
too treacherous either, at least for the time. The women
sat together at these long tables with racks of dials,
and they would paint the faces sitting next to them
and um mix up this concoction of glue and water
and radium powder into a glowing greenish white paint and
(08:29):
then use their little camel hair brushes to apply the
paint to the dial numbers. So it sounds kind of social,
kind of artistic in a way. A pretty nice job. Yeah.
As they were painting these dial numbers, though, after a
few strokes the brushes, those camel hair brushes they were
using would lose their shape and the women couldn't paint
as accurately. So their supervisors had kind of a solution
(08:52):
for this. They told them to point the brushes with
their lips, and according to an article in the journal
American History, some women later quoted, the bosses are saying, quote,
not to worry if you swallow any radium, it'll make
your cheeks rosy. So Grace Friar was one of seventy
young women who started working at a factory like this
an orange New Jersey in the spring of nineteen seventeen.
(09:14):
Later about the brushes, she said, quote, I think I
pointed mine with my lips about six times to every
watch style. It didn't taste funny, it didn't have any taste,
and I didn't know it was harmful. To add to matters,
the workers really had fun with this, licking the brushes
with the radium on it. They'd paint their nails and
their teeth to sort of amuse each other and surprise
(09:36):
their boyfriends when the lights would go out. Friar even
remembers that after she'd blow her nose, her handkerchief would
glow in the dark with this radium residue. But they
just all have a good laugh about it, go back
to work, keep up licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah,
they didn't have any indication that it was hurting them
(09:57):
in Friar quit the factory to take a better job
as a bank teller, But only two years later she
started having some major problems. Her teeth started falling out
and she developed painful abscesses in her jaw. She got
X rayed and it showed that she had such severe
bone decay. The many doctors and dennis that she went
to to try to figure out what was going on,
(10:19):
they said that they had never seen anything like it.
They've never seen bone decay to that degree. In July nine,
one doctor finally suggested that her problems might have been
caused by her former job as a dial painter. And
I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable. So
it was nineteen two when she started having these symptoms.
It's not till nineteen five when somebody says, this looks
(10:40):
like it's radium poisoning. And it turned out that Friar
wasn't the only former dial maker having issues. I guess
we can just assume that it took that long for
word to spread among the medical community what was going on.
But at the request of the Orange City Health Department,
the National Consumers League, which was an organization that fought
for safe workplaces and reasonable wages and decent working hours,
(11:04):
started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of four radium
factory workers between nineteen and nineteen twenty four. So right
around that time that Friar is realizing what's wrong with her,
other people are realizing something's going on here. Yeah, the
cause of death for these other four radium factory workers
was listed as things like phosphorus poisoning, mouth ulcers, and syphilis.
(11:28):
But the factory workers thought that the paint ingredients did
have something to do with it. So New Jersey Consumer
League chairman Catherine Wiley consulted some experts. She brought in
a statistician, and she went to Harvard and consulted some people,
and she found out when she was talking to people
at Harvard that a few years earlier, physiology professor Cecil
Drinker had been asked to study the working conditions at
(11:51):
US Radium and report back to the company. So somebody
had already been looking into this before it even came
to their attention, and Drinker found out that pretty much
the hire workforce that US Radium was contaminated. They had
strange blood conditions, and several workers had advanced radium necrosis.
So Drinker made suggestions at that point, and as of
(12:11):
June I think that's when his report came out, and
he suggested that they make changes that would protect the workers.
But Arthur Rhoder, who was president of US Radium at
the time, he resisted this, and furthermore, he refused to
give drink Or permission to publish his findings, saying that
Drinker had agreed to confidentiality and that he wasn't allowed to.
(12:38):
So it actually turned out later they found out that
Rhodor had been circulating a false report under Drinker's name.
It was basically his report, but it said, oh, there's
no harm here, there's no problem with the radium that's
used in in the paint, and why he didn't want
Drinker to publish the real report exactly. But to be honest,
Drinker's report wasn't the only thing out there that indicated
(12:59):
that radium was a hazard. There were There was also
scientific and medical literature, some of the dating back as
far as nineteen o six that contained plenty of information
about the hazards of radium, even one of US Radium's
own publications, And that's the part I think is really surprising.
It was distributed to hospitals and doctors offices, and it
contained a section with dozens of references. This report was
(13:22):
called Radium Dangers dash Injurious Effects, and so it was
out there they knew what was going on the entire time,
from the same company encouraging their workers to moisten their brushes. Yeah,
and too, I guess to be fair, we don't know
that the supervisors on the floor actually knew that there
were dangers, but it became pretty clear the company as
a whole did, though, So the consumer leagues wildly tried
(13:45):
to get us Radium to pay for the medical expenses
for Friar and for the other workers who were ill,
but the company insisted that radium was not to blame,
and it went beyond that though, and launched this campaign
of misinformation, and they tried to tarnish the women workers
reputations by saying that the problem wasn't radium, it was
(14:06):
actually that they had syphilis. And in n when Friar
started exploring radium as a cause for her illness, a
Columbia University doctor named Frederick Flynn, who said that he
was referred to her by friends, asked to examine her
and he found her health to be quote as good
as my own. Later, though, Fryar found out that Flynn
(14:28):
wasn't even a medical doctor. He was an industrial toxicologist
on contract with US Radium. So it became pretty clear
that almost from the get go US Radium had been
acting um shady about covering up the effects of the element. Yeah,
and we should say that although Flynn wasn't a doctor,
I mean, as you pointed out earlier, it took a
(14:49):
long time for doctors to kind of you mean, you
mentioned catching on to the fact that these women had
had radium for their teeth falling out had something to
do with it, right, But I think part of it
was also that they didn't want to Radium had so
much promise. They didn't want to admit that maybe this
wonder element that they had found also had some negative
(15:09):
effects because they were afraid it would keep people from
accepting the positive effects that radium could have and just
give it a bad name essentially. Right. So Friar did
decide to sue US Radium in NI, but it took
her two years to find an attorney who was willing
to take her case. On May eighteenth, ninety seven, though
Raymond Barry, who was a young Newark attorney, took the
(15:31):
case on contingency and filed a lawsuit in a New
Jersey court on her behalf, and pretty much right away,
four other women with severe medical problems joined the lawsuit.
Their names were Edma Husman, Catherine Shobe, and two sisters
also Quentin McDonald and Albina Larisse. And as the case
started to grow into a huge media sensation, the press
(15:52):
in the US and Europe soon dubbed the five women
the Radium Girls. So that's where the name comes from.
So the Radium Girls were looking for two hundred and
fifty thou dollars in compensation for medical expenses and pain
for each of them. But first there was this legal
obstacle in New Jersey's law that they had to get by.
It was two year statute of limitations. But the lawyer,
(16:15):
Raymond Barry, argued that the statute applied from the moment
the women learned about the source of their problems, not
from the date they quit working for the factory, since,
as we've discussed, that took quite some time. He also
said that US Radium's campaign of misinformation was the reason
the women weren't informed in the first place, and the
reason why they didn't take legal action within the statute
(16:38):
of limitations. So maybe Radium's fake doctor sort of complicated
matters here. Definitely. Whillas was going on, though, medical examiners
kept looking into the situation. Medical examiners from New Jersey
and New York. They investigated the suspicious deaths of the
plant workers, and in the process, a deceased sister of
two of the Radium girls McDonald Lurie was exhumed on
(17:01):
October sixteenth. Her name was Amelia Maggia, and she had
also worked at the plant, and her bones were found
to be highly radioactive. Her former dentist to tip them
off on it. He actually had removed part of her
jaw soon before she died because it had deteriorated to
that point, and he kind of suspected that radium poisoning
(17:22):
might be part of the issue radiation poisoning, and so
they exhumed the body and found that he was correct. Yeah,
So these investigations, the exhumation and all of that and
the legal maneuverings took up quite a bit of time, obviously,
and in fact, it took up so much time that
the first hearing didn't take place until January, and by
(17:45):
that point the women's health had really deteriorated. Some of
them couldn't even raise their arms to take the oath.
Of the two sisters we mentioned where bedridden Grace Friar
had lost all of her teeth and couldn't sit up
without using a back Braith definitely couldn't walk um. But
the severity of their conditions really affected people in the
(18:08):
courtroom when they did testify. When those who were able
to testify, people in the courtroom were said to have
wept when they when they watched them. Just an example
of one of their testimonies. Edna Husband's testimony included details
about her financial troubles which were caused by the medical
(18:31):
bills that she had, and she said, quote, I cannot
even keep my little house or bungalow. I know I
will not live much longer. For now, I cannot sleep
at night for the pains. So, of course everyone was
fascinated with the story, and it was everywhere. Even Marie
Curie heard about it, and she was really surprised to
learn how the factory workers had been handling radium on
(18:52):
on the job. Referring to the radium girl, she said, quote,
I see no hope for them. My experiments with radium
convinced me that if always In has taken, if the
poison sorry is taken internally, it is practically impossible to
destroy it. So, you know, just an aside here. Many
of you may know this, but Curie herself died in
four of complications resulting from long term radium exposure. Also,
(19:15):
but even then, with with Curie saying that she saw
no hope for them, with the Radium girls visibly deteriorating
and public sympathy pouring in, US Radium didn't hesitate to
try to still delay the legal proceedings as much as
they possibly could, so after a hearing in April, the
judge granted the defense a five month adjournment, and Barry
(19:37):
tried to remind the judge that the women might not
last those five months, not survive until September. And he
even found lawyers with cases that we're going to be
tried in less than a month who were willing to
switch dates with him, but US Radium absolutely refused, said
that their witnesses we're not going to be ready. They
weren't going to be available until that five month window
(19:59):
was is up. Yeah, so what ended ultimately helping them
move the trial up was the power of the press,
in particular Walter Littman of The New York World, and
he helped kind of speed things along. The New York
World was a really influential paper at the time, and
Littmann had written a number of editorials about the Radium Girls.
When he wrote on May tenth, night was particularly scathing.
(20:21):
He called the delay a quote damnable travesty of justice
and said that 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. And those editorials, combined with the public
outrage they caused, and the efforts of Barry and others
altogether helped convince the New Jersey court system to change
(20:44):
the trial day to early June. But just days before
the trial, the Radium Girls ended up settling out of court.
They got ten thousand dollars each, coverage of their medical
expenses and a six hundred dollar annuity until death, so
much less than they were hoping for in the end. Yeah,
but at least it was something before they passed away,
(21:05):
because some of them did start dying from their condition
pretty quickly after that. McDonald died in nineteen twenty nine
at age thirty four, Friar died at age thirty four,
and Shob died at age thirty in nineteen thirty three,
and Husman died in nineteen thirty nine at age thirty seven.
One lived for quite some time after it. Larisse she
(21:28):
died in nineteen forty six at age fifty one. But
it's a really sad story anyway you look at it,
But there is a silver lining the reason why we're
covering this for Labor Day. They did make some strides
for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced, and the Radium
Girls set a precedent in case law for the right
(21:49):
of individual workers to soothe their employers for damages caused
by labor abuse. And of course it made people aware
of the dangers of radium. New tolerance levels were for
workers and for researchers. And as for some of the
products that we talked about earlier, the FTC issued a
cease and desist order against the manufacturer of the product
(22:10):
Rati Thor in which tonic liquid sunshine exactly that magical elick, Sir.
And they found that it contained enough radium to kill
the people who drank it regularly. And of course the
Radium Girls are not forgotten. There have been poems, books,
and plays written about them. And now there's that memorial
to that we mentioned earlier in Illinois. So so we're
(22:32):
speaking from the past. But maybe after this Labor Day
weekend we will go um check out photos of the
unveiling of the memorial and and hope that something like
this does get a little press for for Labor Day weekend.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(22:55):
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We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
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(23:16):
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and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today's classic is a much requested listener favorite.
It's the Radium Girls and this episode came out in
September from PASS hosts Sarah and Bablina, and it was
rerun about a year later, and since that time, the
Radium Girls have made headlines a couple of other times.
One of the last surviving Radium Girls, May Keen, died
(00:25):
at the age of a hundred and seven, and Mabel
May Williams, another of the last Radium Girls, died in
at the age of a hundred and four. So let's
get to it. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History
Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome
(00:50):
to the podcast. I'm Deblina Chok reboarding and I'm scared
out and we're just gearing up for our long Labor
Day weekend. But by the time this episode airs, that
will already have passed and a labor related memorial should
have been unveiled in a town called Ottawa, Illinois. And
the memorial, which was unveiled Friday, September two, is a
statue of a woman holding flowers in one hand and
(01:12):
paint brushes in the other and it's meant to symbolize
the women who worked for the Ottawa based Luminous Processes
factory and there they painted watch and clock dials in
the early twentieth century. And they were women who ended
up getting serious radiation poisoning as a result of their jobs.
And I'm not sure how much national media attention this
memorial and it's unveiling are going to receive. It was
(01:34):
conceived of by a young lady named Madeline Pillar, who
actually came up with this idea for the memorial after
doing a junior high history project. How about that. Yeah,
her dad is a sculptor, and she did this project
and kind of couldn't get this woman out of her
head and proposed the idea of doing a memorial to them.
And they raised all this money. But we're not sure.
(01:55):
I haven't seen that many news stories about it. I
just randomly kind of stumbled upon it. But the story
of the women who came to be known as the
Radium Girls actually became a media sensation in the nineties
and the nineteen thirties. Yeah, they certainly deserve a monument.
And it wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because
workers a factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really
(02:16):
in the same boat. In fact, it was a story
coming out of New Jersey that first brought this issue,
this radium poisoning issue, to the public's attention in the
first place. And that's the story that we're going to
focus on today in the podcast, And we're gonna just
sort of take a look at the historical circumstances in
working conditions that led to these women getting radiation poisoning
(02:40):
in the first place, because you're probably gonna wonder pretty
quickly how something like this could happen. Yeah, and we're
also going to take a look at how they came
to be known as the Radium Girls and their struggle
for justice that led to some workplace reforms in the end,
so kind of try to put a positive spin on
what is ultimately a very sad story. But before we
can talk about the Radium Girl, so we need to
(03:00):
take a closer look at the element that's at the
heart of their story, and that is, of course radium,
literally the element very good pun to blainess. So we're
going to be talking about radium, of course, but that
also gives us the chance to talk about one of
our most frequently requested podcast subjects Polish born scientists and
Nobel Prize winner Marie Curry. And this isn't a podcast
(03:23):
on her, it's not a profile on her, but she
is an important character in it, mostly because she discovered
radium in eighteen and radioactivity was still pretty new at
that time. It was not well understood. The German physicist
Wilhelm Konrad ren Gen had just discovered X rays back
in and just a few weeks after that discovery, and
(03:46):
rebekr l had identified radioactivity during experiments with uranium salts.
So when Marie Carey made her discovery, all of this
stuff was kind of floating around and kind of new science,
and people were really fascinated by it, and Curie was
one of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerrel's
findings because not that much attention were given to them
at the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend,
(04:09):
which was which is a shiny tar like byproduct of mining.
That eventually led she and her husband Pierre to isolate
two new chemical elements, polonium and the one we're focusing
on today, which is radium. It was radioactive, it seemed
to pulse with spontaneous energy. And the other cool thing
about radium was that it glowed in the dark. Yeah,
(04:30):
that certainly seemed to be a selling point for it,
as we'll see, But by this time people had started
to realize that even though radiation was invisible, it did
have strong powers. They could cause injury. Scientists were exposed
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss. So clearly this element could do something. But
(04:51):
this also cluded physicians into the possibilities that radiation held
for treating cancer. Something that's powerful could potentially fight something
that was hurting people as well as burn them or
injure them. Yeah, So it was that potential, and along
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
(05:14):
much from the get go, people thought it could cure
everything from arthritis to diabetes, not just cancer, and an
entire radium industry grew out of that belief. Some form
of the word radium was actually incorporated into a lot
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or
it was funny, Yeah, but a lot of products had
(05:34):
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic, bath salts, lotions,
heating pads, and male pouches. Do you know what male pouches?
Because you told me that it's it's your job to
tell listeners they were condoms, So those also contained radium
or some but radium or raid on laced water was
(05:56):
probably one of the most widely touted products, and it
was called with sunshine because people thought that this was
some sort of magical elixir that could like extend your
youth and make you healthy. And one brand in particular
was called Rata Thor. You read about this a lot.
It was a popular brand of radioactive water, and doctors
would give it to patients as a tonic. Really doesn't
sound good. It doesn't. It doesn't sound good to us now,
(06:19):
but maybe it would have back then. I don't know,
And you and I were talking about it. It makes
you kind of concerned. What are we drinking or consuming
now that will sound as horrible and ridiculous as radium
laced tonic in the future. I mean, gosh, yeah, I
kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should, But
but radium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
(06:40):
To write in nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
pure metal, and Marie Cury was involved with that as well,
And soon after American electrical engineer William J. Hammer created
a radium treated paint which had the trade name Undark,
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific inst events
and things like that. It was expensive to do, but
(07:02):
it became really significant during World War One, especially when
people realize the advantage of applying this to military instruments.
You're in a dark trench and you can actually read
your watch or read your instrument exactly. So that's where
our story about the Radium girls really begins. So between
nineteen seventeen and nineteen nine, hundreds of young women got
(07:24):
jobs applying radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks,
and compass spaces in factories in states like Illinois and
New Jersey, Connecticut, uh, even Long Island factories were owned
by a big corporation, even though they were in different
parts of the country. It was the US Radium Corporation.
(07:45):
And for the young women getting these jobs, it seems
like a pretty great opportunity, mostly because it paid a
lot better than other factory jobs at the time more
than three times as much. It was about eighteen dollars
per week instead of five dollars per week. They got
paid about a penny and a half per dial they painted,
and they would paint about two fifty dials a day,
(08:06):
so a pretty good job. And the work didn't seem
too treacherous either, at least for the time. The women
sat together at these long tables with racks of dials,
and they would paint the faces sitting next to them
and um mix up this concoction of glue and water
and radium powder into a glowing greenish white paint and
(08:29):
then use their little camel hair brushes to apply the
paint to the dial numbers. So it sounds kind of social,
kind of artistic in a way. A pretty nice job. Yeah.
As they were painting these dial numbers, though, after a
few strokes the brushes, those camel hair brushes they were
using would lose their shape and the women couldn't paint
as accurately. So their supervisors had kind of a solution
(08:52):
for this. They told them to point the brushes with
their lips, and according to an article in the journal
American History, some women later quoted, the bosses are saying, quote,
not to worry if you swallow any radium, it'll make
your cheeks rosy. So Grace Friar was one of seventy
young women who started working at a factory like this
an orange New Jersey in the spring of nineteen seventeen.
(09:14):
Later about the brushes, she said, quote, I think I
pointed mine with my lips about six times to every
watch style. It didn't taste funny, it didn't have any taste,
and I didn't know it was harmful. To add to matters,
the workers really had fun with this, licking the brushes
with the radium on it. They'd paint their nails and
their teeth to sort of amuse each other and surprise
(09:36):
their boyfriends when the lights would go out. Friar even
remembers that after she'd blow her nose, her handkerchief would
glow in the dark with this radium residue. But they
just all have a good laugh about it, go back
to work, keep up licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah,
they didn't have any indication that it was hurting them
(09:57):
in Friar quit the factory to take a better job
as a bank teller, But only two years later she
started having some major problems. Her teeth started falling out
and she developed painful abscesses in her jaw. She got
X rayed and it showed that she had such severe
bone decay. The many doctors and dennis that she went
to to try to figure out what was going on,
(10:19):
they said that they had never seen anything like it.
They've never seen bone decay to that degree. In July nine,
one doctor finally suggested that her problems might have been
caused by her former job as a dial painter. And
I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable. So
it was nineteen two when she started having these symptoms.
It's not till nineteen five when somebody says, this looks
(10:40):
like it's radium poisoning. And it turned out that Friar
wasn't the only former dial maker having issues. I guess
we can just assume that it took that long for
word to spread among the medical community what was going on.
But at the request of the Orange City Health Department,
the National Consumers League, which was an organization that fought
for safe workplaces and reasonable wages and decent working hours,
(11:04):
started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of four radium
factory workers between nineteen and nineteen twenty four. So right
around that time that Friar is realizing what's wrong with her,
other people are realizing something's going on here. Yeah, the
cause of death for these other four radium factory workers
was listed as things like phosphorus poisoning, mouth ulcers, and syphilis.
(11:28):
But the factory workers thought that the paint ingredients did
have something to do with it. So New Jersey Consumer
League chairman Catherine Wiley consulted some experts. She brought in
a statistician, and she went to Harvard and consulted some people,
and she found out when she was talking to people
at Harvard that a few years earlier, physiology professor Cecil
Drinker had been asked to study the working conditions at
(11:51):
US Radium and report back to the company. So somebody
had already been looking into this before it even came
to their attention, and Drinker found out that pretty much
the hire workforce that US Radium was contaminated. They had
strange blood conditions, and several workers had advanced radium necrosis.
So Drinker made suggestions at that point, and as of
(12:11):
June I think that's when his report came out, and
he suggested that they make changes that would protect the workers.
But Arthur Rhoder, who was president of US Radium at
the time, he resisted this, and furthermore, he refused to
give drink Or permission to publish his findings, saying that
Drinker had agreed to confidentiality and that he wasn't allowed to.
(12:38):
So it actually turned out later they found out that
Rhodor had been circulating a false report under Drinker's name.
It was basically his report, but it said, oh, there's
no harm here, there's no problem with the radium that's
used in in the paint, and why he didn't want
Drinker to publish the real report exactly. But to be honest,
Drinker's report wasn't the only thing out there that indicated
(12:59):
that radium was a hazard. There were There was also
scientific and medical literature, some of the dating back as
far as nineteen o six that contained plenty of information
about the hazards of radium, even one of US Radium's
own publications, And that's the part I think is really surprising.
It was distributed to hospitals and doctors offices, and it
contained a section with dozens of references. This report was
(13:22):
called Radium Dangers dash Injurious Effects, and so it was
out there they knew what was going on the entire time,
from the same company encouraging their workers to moisten their brushes. Yeah,
and too, I guess to be fair, we don't know
that the supervisors on the floor actually knew that there
were dangers, but it became pretty clear the company as
a whole did, though, So the consumer leagues wildly tried
(13:45):
to get us Radium to pay for the medical expenses
for Friar and for the other workers who were ill,
but the company insisted that radium was not to blame,
and it went beyond that though, and launched this campaign
of misinformation, and they tried to tarnish the women workers
reputations by saying that the problem wasn't radium, it was
(14:06):
actually that they had syphilis. And in n when Friar
started exploring radium as a cause for her illness, a
Columbia University doctor named Frederick Flynn, who said that he
was referred to her by friends, asked to examine her
and he found her health to be quote as good
as my own. Later, though, Fryar found out that Flynn
(14:28):
wasn't even a medical doctor. He was an industrial toxicologist
on contract with US Radium. So it became pretty clear
that almost from the get go US Radium had been
acting um shady about covering up the effects of the element. Yeah,
and we should say that although Flynn wasn't a doctor,
I mean, as you pointed out earlier, it took a
(14:49):
long time for doctors to kind of you mean, you
mentioned catching on to the fact that these women had
had radium for their teeth falling out had something to
do with it, right, But I think part of it
was also that they didn't want to Radium had so
much promise. They didn't want to admit that maybe this
wonder element that they had found also had some negative
(15:09):
effects because they were afraid it would keep people from
accepting the positive effects that radium could have and just
give it a bad name essentially. Right. So Friar did
decide to sue US Radium in NI, but it took
her two years to find an attorney who was willing
to take her case. On May eighteenth, ninety seven, though
Raymond Barry, who was a young Newark attorney, took the
(15:31):
case on contingency and filed a lawsuit in a New
Jersey court on her behalf, and pretty much right away,
four other women with severe medical problems joined the lawsuit.
Their names were Edma Husman, Catherine Shobe, and two sisters
also Quentin McDonald and Albina Larisse. And as the case
started to grow into a huge media sensation, the press
(15:52):
in the US and Europe soon dubbed the five women
the Radium Girls. So that's where the name comes from.
So the Radium Girls were looking for two hundred and
fifty thou dollars in compensation for medical expenses and pain
for each of them. But first there was this legal
obstacle in New Jersey's law that they had to get by.
It was two year statute of limitations. But the lawyer,
(16:15):
Raymond Barry, argued that the statute applied from the moment
the women learned about the source of their problems, not
from the date they quit working for the factory, since,
as we've discussed, that took quite some time. He also
said that US Radium's campaign of misinformation was the reason
the women weren't informed in the first place, and the
reason why they didn't take legal action within the statute
(16:38):
of limitations. So maybe Radium's fake doctor sort of complicated
matters here. Definitely. Whillas was going on, though, medical examiners
kept looking into the situation. Medical examiners from New Jersey
and New York. They investigated the suspicious deaths of the
plant workers, and in the process, a deceased sister of
two of the Radium girls McDonald Lurie was exhumed on
(17:01):
October sixteenth. Her name was Amelia Maggia, and she had
also worked at the plant, and her bones were found
to be highly radioactive. Her former dentist to tip them
off on it. He actually had removed part of her
jaw soon before she died because it had deteriorated to
that point, and he kind of suspected that radium poisoning
(17:22):
might be part of the issue radiation poisoning, and so
they exhumed the body and found that he was correct. Yeah,
So these investigations, the exhumation and all of that and
the legal maneuverings took up quite a bit of time, obviously,
and in fact, it took up so much time that
the first hearing didn't take place until January, and by
(17:45):
that point the women's health had really deteriorated. Some of
them couldn't even raise their arms to take the oath.
Of the two sisters we mentioned where bedridden Grace Friar
had lost all of her teeth and couldn't sit up
without using a back Braith definitely couldn't walk um. But
the severity of their conditions really affected people in the
(18:08):
courtroom when they did testify. When those who were able
to testify, people in the courtroom were said to have
wept when they when they watched them. Just an example
of one of their testimonies. Edna Husband's testimony included details
about her financial troubles which were caused by the medical
(18:31):
bills that she had, and she said, quote, I cannot
even keep my little house or bungalow. I know I
will not live much longer. For now, I cannot sleep
at night for the pains. So, of course everyone was
fascinated with the story, and it was everywhere. Even Marie
Curie heard about it, and she was really surprised to
learn how the factory workers had been handling radium on
(18:52):
on the job. Referring to the radium girl, she said, quote,
I see no hope for them. My experiments with radium
convinced me that if always In has taken, if the
poison sorry is taken internally, it is practically impossible to
destroy it. So, you know, just an aside here. Many
of you may know this, but Curie herself died in
four of complications resulting from long term radium exposure. Also,
(19:15):
but even then, with with Curie saying that she saw
no hope for them, with the Radium girls visibly deteriorating
and public sympathy pouring in, US Radium didn't hesitate to
try to still delay the legal proceedings as much as
they possibly could, so after a hearing in April, the
judge granted the defense a five month adjournment, and Barry
(19:37):
tried to remind the judge that the women might not
last those five months, not survive until September. And he
even found lawyers with cases that we're going to be
tried in less than a month who were willing to
switch dates with him, but US Radium absolutely refused, said
that their witnesses we're not going to be ready. They
weren't going to be available until that five month window
(19:59):
was is up. Yeah, so what ended ultimately helping them
move the trial up was the power of the press,
in particular Walter Littman of The New York World, and
he helped kind of speed things along. The New York
World was a really influential paper at the time, and
Littmann had written a number of editorials about the Radium Girls.
When he wrote on May tenth, night was particularly scathing.
(20:21):
He called the delay a quote damnable travesty of justice
and said that 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. And those editorials, combined with the public
outrage they caused, and the efforts of Barry and others
altogether helped convince the New Jersey court system to change
(20:44):
the trial day to early June. But just days before
the trial, the Radium Girls ended up settling out of court.
They got ten thousand dollars each, coverage of their medical
expenses and a six hundred dollar annuity until death, so
much less than they were hoping for in the end. Yeah,
but at least it was something before they passed away,
(21:05):
because some of them did start dying from their condition
pretty quickly after that. McDonald died in nineteen twenty nine
at age thirty four, Friar died at age thirty four,
and Shob died at age thirty in nineteen thirty three,
and Husman died in nineteen thirty nine at age thirty seven.
One lived for quite some time after it. Larisse she
(21:28):
died in nineteen forty six at age fifty one. But
it's a really sad story anyway you look at it,
But there is a silver lining the reason why we're
covering this for Labor Day. They did make some strides
for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced, and the Radium
Girls set a precedent in case law for the right
(21:49):
of individual workers to soothe their employers for damages caused
by labor abuse. And of course it made people aware
of the dangers of radium. New tolerance levels were for
workers and for researchers. And as for some of the
products that we talked about earlier, the FTC issued a
cease and desist order against the manufacturer of the product
(22:10):
Rati Thor in which tonic liquid sunshine exactly that magical elick, Sir.
And they found that it contained enough radium to kill
the people who drank it regularly. And of course the
Radium Girls are not forgotten. There have been poems, books,
and plays written about them. And now there's that memorial
to that we mentioned earlier in Illinois. So so we're
(22:32):
speaking from the past. But maybe after this Labor Day
weekend we will go um check out photos of the
unveiling of the memorial and and hope that something like
this does get a little press for for Labor Day weekend.
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
(22:55):
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here is our current contact information.
We are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
(23:16):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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