September 3, 2012 • 30 mins
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 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblin,
a chalk reparding and I'm fair Dowdy, and we're just
steering up for our long Labor Day weekend. But by
the time this episode airs, that will already have passed
(00:23):
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 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 tent twentieth century.
(00:46):
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 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
(01:08):
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. 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
(01:31):
wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because workers at
factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really 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
(01:52):
today in the podcast. And we're gonna just sort of
take a look at the historical circumstances and working conditions
that d to these women getting radiation poisoning 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
(02:13):
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 Girls, we need to 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, punned bliness. So we're going to be
talking about radium, of course, but that also gives us
(02:34):
the chance to talk about one of our most frequently
requested podcast subjects, Polish born scientists and Nobel Prize winner
Marie Curie. And this isn't a podcast on her, it's
not a profile on her, but she is an important
character in it, mostly because she discovered radium in eight
and radioactivity was still pretty new at that time. It
(02:58):
was not well understood. The German and physicists Wilhelm Konrad
ren Gen had just discovered X rays back in and
just a few weeks after that discovery and 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
(03:20):
people were really fascinated by it, and Jerry was one
of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerel's findings,
because not that much attention were given to them at
the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend, 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
(03:43):
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,
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
(04:07):
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss, so clearly this element could do something. But
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
(04:30):
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
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
(04:50):
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or not.
That was funny, Yeah, but a lot of products had
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic bath salts, lotions,
heating pads, and male pouches. Explain, do you know what
a male pouches? Now? Because you told me, but it's
it's your job to tell listeners. They were condoms. So
(05:13):
those also contained radium or some radium, but radium or
raid on laced water was probably one of the most
widely touted products, and it was called liquid 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
(05:35):
of radioactive water and doctors would give it to patients
as a tonic. Really doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound
good to us now, 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,
(05:56):
I kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should,
but but medium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
To write. In nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
pure metal and Marie Curry 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,
(06:18):
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific instruments and
things like that. It was expensive to do, but 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 instruments exactly. So that's where our
(06:39):
story about the radium girls really begins. So, between nineteen
seventeen and nineteen hundreds of young women got jobs applying
radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks, and
compass spaces in factories in states like Illinois and New Jersey, Connecticut.
Even Long Island factories were owned by a big corporation,
(07:03):
even though they were in different parts of the country.
It was the US Radium Corporation. 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
(07:24):
a half per dial they painted, and they would paint
about two d fifty dials a day, 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
(07:45):
up this concoction of glue and water and radium powder
into a glowing greenish white paint and 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
(08:05):
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 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 their bosses as saying, quote, not
to worry if you swallow any radium, it'll make your
(08:27):
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 ninete. Later, about
the brushes, she said, quote, I think I pointed mine
with my lips about six times to every watch dial.
It didn't taste funny, it didn't have any taste, and
I didn't know it was harmful. To add to matters,
(08:49):
the workers really had fun with this, licking the brushes
with the radium on it. They'd paint their nails and
their teeth to through amuse each other and surprise their
boy friends 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
(09:10):
just all have a good laugh about it, go back
to work, keep licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah,
they didn't have any indication that it was hurting them.
In nineteen twenty, 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.
(09:33):
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, they said that they'd never seen anything like it.
They they've never seen bone decay to that degree. In
July n one doctor finally suggested that her problems might
have been caused by her former job as a dial painter.
(09:54):
And I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable.
So when it was nineteen two when she started having
these stempt not till nineteen five when somebody says, this
looks 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
(10:15):
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, started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of
four radium factory workers between nineteen two and nineteen twenty four.
So right around that time that Friar is realizing what's
(10:38):
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. But the factory workers thought that the paint
ingredients did have something to do with it. So New
Jersey Consumer League chairman Katherine Wiley alded some experts. She
(11:00):
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 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
(11:21):
pretty much the entire 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 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
(11:42):
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. So it actually turned out later they
found out that Rhodor had been circulating a false report
under Drinkers and him. It was basically his report, but
it said, oh, there's no harm here, there's no problem
(12:04):
with the radium that's used in the paint, and why
he didn't want a drinker to publish the real report exactly.
But to be honest, Drinker's report wasn't the only thing
out there that indicated 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
(12:25):
one of US Radium's own publications, And that's the part
I think is really surprising. It was distributed to hospitals
and doctor's offices, and it contained a section with dozens
of references. This report was 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
(12:48):
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 that company at the whole did, though,
so the consumer leagues wildly try. I had 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
(13:10):
went beyond that though, and launched this campaign of misinformation.
They tried to tarnish the women workers reputations by saying
that the problem wasn't radium, it was actually that they
had syphilis. And in nine when Friar started exploring radium
as a cause for her illness, a Columbia University doctor
(13:31):
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 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
(13:52):
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 long time for
doctors to kind of you mean, you mentioned catching on
to the fact that these women had had radium with it, right,
(14:14):
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 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 eventually. Right, So, Friar did decide to sue US
(14:35):
Radium in nineteen, 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 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 Hussman,
(14:57):
Catherine Shobe, and two sisters also Quentu McDonald and Albina Larisse.
And as the case started to grow into a huge
media sensation, the press in the US and Europe student
dubbed the five women the Radium Girls. So that's where
the name comes from. So the Radium Girls were looking
for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in compensation for medical
(15:18):
expenses in 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, 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
(15:38):
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 of limitations. So maybe Radium's fake doctor sort
of complicated matters here definitely. While this was going on, though,
(16:02):
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 and Laurie,
was exhumed on October sixteenth, n Her name was Amelia Maggia,
and she had also worked at the plant, and her
(16:23):
bones were found to be highly radioactive. Her former dentists
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 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 exclamation and all
(16:47):
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 that point the women's health had
really deteriorated. Some of them couldn't even raise their arms
to take the oath. The two sisters we mentioned where bedridden.
(17:10):
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 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. Yeah. Just
(17:31):
an example of one of their testimonies, Edna Husband's testimony
included details about her financial troubles, which were caused by
the medical 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.
(17:54):
Even Marie Curie heard about it, and she was really
surprised to learn how the factory workers had been handling
radium on 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 a poison is taken,
if the poison sorry is taken internally, it is practically
impossible to destroy it. So, you know, just an aside here.
(18:16):
Many of you may know this, but Curie herself died
in nineteen thirty four of complications resulting from long term
radium exposure. Also, 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
(18:36):
as much as they possibly could, so after a hearing
in April, the judge granted the defense of five month adjournment,
and Barry 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 as
(18:59):
the refused that that their witnesses were not going to
be ready. They weren't going to be available until that
five month window was was 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
(19:21):
the time, and Littmann had written a number of editorials
about the Radium girls. When he wrote on May tenth
nine was particularly skating. 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,
(19:44):
combined with the public outrage they caused, and the efforts
of Barry and others altogether helped convince the New Jersey
court system to change 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
(20:05):
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, 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
(20:26):
thirty in nineteen thirty three, and Huffman died in nineteen
thirty nine at age thirty seven. One lived for quite
some time after Laris, she 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
(20:48):
did make some strides for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced,
and the Radium Girls set a precedent in case law
for the right of individual workers to soothe their lawyers
for damages caused by labor abuse. And of course it
made people aware of the dangers of radium. New tolerance
levels were set for workers and for researchers. And as
(21:11):
for some of the products that we talked about earlier,
the FTC issued a cease and desist order against the
manufacturer of the product Rati thor in 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
(21:32):
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 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. Yes, but we're not quite finished
(21:55):
with labor related topics. We have done a few of
this year, and one kind of touched on some of
those things. The Leo Frank trial episode, we received a
lot of mail on, so we want to share some
of that with you in our Listener Male segment. Now. So,
one of the things we asked of our listeners after
the Leo Frank trial episode is, first of all, if
(22:17):
they had heard of Leo Frank, and if so, then
how they learned about him. Did they learn about Leo
Frank in history class? Because Sarah had and I hadn't,
and she grew up in Georgia and I had not,
So we wondered if it was a totally Georgia's specific story,
and we got back some interesting responses. We got back
a lot of responses, and most people, I think, especially
people who weren't from Georgia's said that they had never
(22:38):
heard of Leo Frank before, or they hadn't learned about
him in class. A few people had heard about him,
quite a few people, but they heard about him from
kind of a surprising source. And this letter from Grace
that I have here kind of indicates that or tells
us a little bit more about that. She says, Hey, guys,
I just listened to the podcast on Leo Frank and
the whole time I wanted to burst out into song.
(22:58):
Why because our school recently did a production of Parade.
It's a musical about the trial of Leo Frank. Like
you said in the podcast, a lot of historians think
that Leo was innocent and that was the stance. The
play took two If you ever get a chance to
see it, it's a great production, written by Jason Robert Brown. Also,
I'm from Melbourne, Australia, and if I hadn't done Parade
or listened to this podcast, it is very unlikely that
(23:19):
I would have found out about such an interesting piece
of Georgian history. So we also got some mail about
another artistic interpretation of the Leo Frank story. This one
is from Marika and she wrote, Hey, ladies, I knew
about Mary Fagan and Leo Frank, but not from history class.
I learned about the case because I am a Lana
Turner fan. The movie They Won't Forget is considered to
(23:41):
be one of the best films of the nineteen thirties
and it is based on the Leo Frank case. Lana
Turner plays Mary Clay. The Murdered Girl and it was
her very first film appearance. Claude Raines and Edward Norris
also star So how about that a Lana Turner movie
and a musical. So just like the Radium Girls that
(24:03):
we just talked about, they have some dramatic interpretation. Absolutely.
So those were some positive responses that we got from
people um or some neutral responses, and we also got
a few critical responses of the episode, and we wanted
to share one of those two that brought up some
interesting points and and kind of respond to that a
little bit and just put it out there for you
guys to think about. This is from John in Florida,
(24:25):
and he says, I found the podcast on Leo Frank
to be disturbing on a few levels. I get that
this is about a miscarriage of justice, but I don't
get the Jewish aspect. People are subject to prejudice every
day all over the world. Once you add the element
of a victim's religion, you separate them from the fabric
of society and it becomes more about the prejudice than
the injustice. You could not have worked any harder of
(24:48):
painting a wonderful picture of Leo Frank in reality he
was engaged in child labor. To say he was using
children and women for light duty sounds like it is
from a pr firm for the Frank family. How out Mary?
What were her working conditions? We did hear a lot
about Frank's degrees and his work as a leader in
the industry. Why did Mary have to get her check
from Frank? Do you have to get your check from
(25:10):
the founder of how Staff Works? I found this to
be a one sided and very cold report. I felt
no compassion for Mary, and I felt I was being
told to feel compassion for Frank. Sorry, but in the
real world, I do not trust people who hire women
and children to save a few cents. When we see
this now, we bring it to the media's attention and
boycott the products. Why is Mr Frank excused from this
(25:31):
kind of inspection because it happened a hundred years ago?
Exploitation of workers is exploitation of workers. Mary was exploited
as a worker. Why was she not safe in her
own workplace? What was the effect of the death on
her family? Was there prejudice because she was irish? We
did hear about Frank's final request as we get away
from child labor. We forget the injustice and the abuses
(25:52):
forced on workers. It took the federal government to step
in and stop people like Frank from exploiting children. Do
you really think he had Mary's interest in? Sayfety at heart,
I love your podcast on history. Please don't let it
become revisionist history. Thank you. All right, So, obviously there's
a lot to address in this letter, right, definitely, Yeah,
I mean, first, we wanted to start out by saying
(26:13):
that the podcast, as the title indicates, was to focus
on the Leo Frank trial, and as John mentioned, it
was mostly about the miscarriage of justice there, and so
that's why I think Leo Frank got more more more
of the focus in in the podcast. And and the
murder itself is so horrific and unequivocally wrong that kind
(26:38):
of speaks through itself in a way. Yeah, I mean,
and I think because Mary was so young and she
was the murder victim, and because of the press of
the trial has gotten, we really don't know that much
about her. We know that she was thirteen, that she
was young, that she was beautiful, that she was a
sweet girl, she went to church, that she was Catholic,
I mean, we know all these things about her, that
she worked in the factory, putting the little eraser is
(27:00):
in the middle case scenes at the end of the pencil.
That's what she did, but we don't really know that
much more to answer John's questions well, and consequently her
story and her role in history, and not just the
way we've presented it, but the way it is presented
is as the murder victim, and that's terrible. That's part
of the injustice of her life, that that's all she
(27:21):
got to be. Yeah, and that's one reason that we
pointed out exactly how much money she made. You know,
we talked about her collecting a dollar twenty five that week,
and it was our intention by doing that to point
out how very little she died for and how tragic
her life was and her death. But beyond that, the
(27:41):
podcast did move into more of a discussion of the
trial and of Leo Frank and as we indicated at
the end of that episode, more most sources do kind
of assume that he was not guilty of her murder,
and so maybe that is why that side of the
story came through more. But we did try to emphasize
at the end when we mentioned that he had received
(28:01):
the posthumous pardon that a lot of people have said
that this doesn't mean that he is exonerated for the crime.
Nobody really knows it is. And yeah, no one knows
what happened to Mary Fagan. And you know, maybe someday
we'll have more information, maybe not, um, but at this
point we can only give you as much information that
we have, and we can say that we always try
(28:23):
to give you a balanced story and that's always our goal,
but maybe it doesn't always turn out that way. Maybe
sometimes it's a little more emphasis on one person than
another character in a story that we're telling, and you know,
we're we apologize for that. We we always hope that
we can tell something that's a balanced story. But thank
you John for that email. We always love to get
(28:44):
really honest responses from our listeners and here what you
guys are thinking and hopefully kindly put, like, yeah, this
one was really kindly put and it was really thoughtful
and we appreciated it, and um, you know, please send
us more of those. We do read them. So I
hope this shows you guys that. But are we are
at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. If
(29:05):
you want to send us anything else about this or
any other podcasts, or react to any of the listener mails,
or tell us more about Leo Frank or US Radium
or the Radium Girls, anything, please write us. You can
also look us up on Facebook. You can like us
there if you actually like us, that is, and you
can look us up on Twitter at MISS Industry. And
if you want to learn a little bit more about
(29:28):
radium and radiation, we do have an article called how
nuclear radiation Works. Then you can find it by searching
for nuclear radiation at www dot how stuff work dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com in
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblin,
a chalk reparding and I'm fair Dowdy, and we're just
steering up for our long Labor Day weekend. But by
the time this episode airs, that will already have passed
(00:23):
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 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 tent twentieth century.
(00:46):
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 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
(01:08):
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. 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
(01:31):
wasn't just an Illinois based story either, because workers at
factories in Connecticut and New Jersey were really 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
(01:52):
today in the podcast. And we're gonna just sort of
take a look at the historical circumstances and working conditions
that d to these women getting radiation poisoning 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
(02:13):
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 Girls, we need to 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, punned bliness. So we're going to be
talking about radium, of course, but that also gives us
(02:34):
the chance to talk about one of our most frequently
requested podcast subjects, Polish born scientists and Nobel Prize winner
Marie Curie. And this isn't a podcast on her, it's
not a profile on her, but she is an important
character in it, mostly because she discovered radium in eight
and radioactivity was still pretty new at that time. It
(02:58):
was not well understood. The German and physicists Wilhelm Konrad
ren Gen had just discovered X rays back in and
just a few weeks after that discovery and 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
(03:20):
people were really fascinated by it, and Jerry was one
of them. She was really fascinated, especially by Beckerel's findings,
because not that much attention were given to them at
the time. So she started experimenting with pitch blend, 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
(03:43):
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,
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
(04:07):
to enlarge doses and they suffered from skin burns and
hair loss, so clearly this element could do something. But
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
(04:30):
with those kind of magical glowy properties that it had
that gave it this reputation as a wonder substance. Pretty
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
(04:50):
of brand names, whether the products actually contained radium or not.
That was funny, Yeah, but a lot of products had
radium added in them, including toothpaste, hair tonic bath salts, lotions,
heating pads, and male pouches. Explain, do you know what
a male pouches? Now? Because you told me, but it's
it's your job to tell listeners. They were condoms. So
(05:13):
those also contained radium or some radium, but radium or
raid on laced water was probably one of the most
widely touted products, and it was called liquid 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
(05:35):
of radioactive water and doctors would give it to patients
as a tonic. Really doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound
good to us now, 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,
(05:56):
I kind of don't want to know. Maybe I should,
but but medium's use went beyond just personal and health products.
To write. In nineteen o two, radium was isolated into
pure metal and Marie Curry 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,
(06:18):
that when applied to things, would make them glow in
the dark. So this was used on scientific instruments and
things like that. It was expensive to do, but 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 instruments exactly. So that's where our
(06:39):
story about the radium girls really begins. So, between nineteen
seventeen and nineteen hundreds of young women got jobs applying
radium treated paint too watches, to aircraft controls, clocks, and
compass spaces in factories in states like Illinois and New Jersey, Connecticut.
Even Long Island factories were owned by a big corporation,
(07:03):
even though they were in different parts of the country.
It was the US Radium Corporation. 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
(07:24):
a half per dial they painted, and they would paint
about two d fifty dials a day, 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
(07:45):
up this concoction of glue and water and radium powder
into a glowing greenish white paint and 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
(08:05):
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 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 their bosses as saying, quote, not
to worry if you swallow any radium, it'll make your
(08:27):
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 ninete. Later, about
the brushes, she said, quote, I think I pointed mine
with my lips about six times to every watch dial.
It didn't taste funny, it didn't have any taste, and
I didn't know it was harmful. To add to matters,
(08:49):
the workers really had fun with this, licking the brushes
with the radium on it. They'd paint their nails and
their teeth to through amuse each other and surprise their
boy friends 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
(09:10):
just all have a good laugh about it, go back
to work, keep licking those brushes and and keep painting. Yeah,
they didn't have any indication that it was hurting them.
In nineteen twenty, 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.
(09:33):
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, they said that they'd never seen anything like it.
They they've never seen bone decay to that degree. In
July n one doctor finally suggested that her problems might
have been caused by her former job as a dial painter.
(09:54):
And I think the delay there is is pretty remarkable.
So when it was nineteen two when she started having
these stempt not till nineteen five when somebody says, this
looks 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
(10:15):
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, started an investigation on these suspicious deaths of
four radium factory workers between nineteen two and nineteen twenty four.
So right around that time that Friar is realizing what's
(10:38):
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. But the factory workers thought that the paint
ingredients did have something to do with it. So New
Jersey Consumer League chairman Katherine Wiley alded some experts. She
(11:00):
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 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
(11:21):
pretty much the entire 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 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
(11:42):
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. So it actually turned out later they
found out that Rhodor had been circulating a false report
under Drinkers and him. It was basically his report, but
it said, oh, there's no harm here, there's no problem
(12:04):
with the radium that's used in the paint, and why
he didn't want a drinker to publish the real report exactly.
But to be honest, Drinker's report wasn't the only thing
out there that indicated 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
(12:25):
one of US Radium's own publications, And that's the part
I think is really surprising. It was distributed to hospitals
and doctor's offices, and it contained a section with dozens
of references. This report was 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
(12:48):
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 that company at the whole did, though,
so the consumer leagues wildly try. I had 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
(13:10):
went beyond that though, and launched this campaign of misinformation.
They tried to tarnish the women workers reputations by saying
that the problem wasn't radium, it was actually that they
had syphilis. And in nine when Friar started exploring radium
as a cause for her illness, a Columbia University doctor
(13:31):
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 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
(13:52):
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 long time for
doctors to kind of you mean, you mentioned catching on
to the fact that these women had had radium with it, right,
(14:14):
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 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 eventually. Right, So, Friar did decide to sue US
(14:35):
Radium in nineteen, 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 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 Hussman,
(14:57):
Catherine Shobe, and two sisters also Quentu McDonald and Albina Larisse.
And as the case started to grow into a huge
media sensation, the press in the US and Europe student
dubbed the five women the Radium Girls. So that's where
the name comes from. So the Radium Girls were looking
for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in compensation for medical
(15:18):
expenses in 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, 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
(15:38):
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 of limitations. So maybe Radium's fake doctor sort
of complicated matters here definitely. While this was going on, though,
(16:02):
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 and Laurie,
was exhumed on October sixteenth, n Her name was Amelia Maggia,
and she had also worked at the plant, and her
(16:23):
bones were found to be highly radioactive. Her former dentists
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 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 exclamation and all
(16:47):
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 that point the women's health had
really deteriorated. Some of them couldn't even raise their arms
to take the oath. The two sisters we mentioned where bedridden.
(17:10):
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 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. Yeah. Just
(17:31):
an example of one of their testimonies, Edna Husband's testimony
included details about her financial troubles, which were caused by
the medical 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.
(17:54):
Even Marie Curie heard about it, and she was really
surprised to learn how the factory workers had been handling
radium on 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 a poison is taken,
if the poison sorry is taken internally, it is practically
impossible to destroy it. So, you know, just an aside here.
(18:16):
Many of you may know this, but Curie herself died
in nineteen thirty four of complications resulting from long term
radium exposure. Also, 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
(18:36):
as much as they possibly could, so after a hearing
in April, the judge granted the defense of five month adjournment,
and Barry 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 as
(18:59):
the refused that that their witnesses were not going to
be ready. They weren't going to be available until that
five month window was was 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
(19:21):
the time, and Littmann had written a number of editorials
about the Radium girls. When he wrote on May tenth
nine was particularly skating. 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,
(19:44):
combined with the public outrage they caused, and the efforts
of Barry and others altogether helped convince the New Jersey
court system to change 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
(20:05):
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, 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
(20:26):
thirty in nineteen thirty three, and Huffman died in nineteen
thirty nine at age thirty seven. One lived for quite
some time after Laris, she 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
(20:48):
did make some strides for workers. Industry safety standards were enhanced,
and the Radium Girls set a precedent in case law
for the right of individual workers to soothe their lawyers
for damages caused by labor abuse. And of course it
made people aware of the dangers of radium. New tolerance
levels were set for workers and for researchers. And as
(21:11):
for some of the products that we talked about earlier,
the FTC issued a cease and desist order against the
manufacturer of the product Rati thor in 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
(21:32):
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 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. Yes, but we're not quite finished
(21:55):
with labor related topics. We have done a few of
this year, and one kind of touched on some of
those things. The Leo Frank trial episode, we received a
lot of mail on, so we want to share some
of that with you in our Listener Male segment. Now. So,
one of the things we asked of our listeners after
the Leo Frank trial episode is, first of all, if
(22:17):
they had heard of Leo Frank, and if so, then
how they learned about him. Did they learn about Leo
Frank in history class? Because Sarah had and I hadn't,
and she grew up in Georgia and I had not,
So we wondered if it was a totally Georgia's specific story,
and we got back some interesting responses. We got back
a lot of responses, and most people, I think, especially
people who weren't from Georgia's said that they had never
(22:38):
heard of Leo Frank before, or they hadn't learned about
him in class. A few people had heard about him,
quite a few people, but they heard about him from
kind of a surprising source. And this letter from Grace
that I have here kind of indicates that or tells
us a little bit more about that. She says, Hey, guys,
I just listened to the podcast on Leo Frank and
the whole time I wanted to burst out into song.
(22:58):
Why because our school recently did a production of Parade.
It's a musical about the trial of Leo Frank. Like
you said in the podcast, a lot of historians think
that Leo was innocent and that was the stance. The
play took two If you ever get a chance to
see it, it's a great production, written by Jason Robert Brown. Also,
I'm from Melbourne, Australia, and if I hadn't done Parade
or listened to this podcast, it is very unlikely that
(23:19):
I would have found out about such an interesting piece
of Georgian history. So we also got some mail about
another artistic interpretation of the Leo Frank story. This one
is from Marika and she wrote, Hey, ladies, I knew
about Mary Fagan and Leo Frank, but not from history class.
I learned about the case because I am a Lana
Turner fan. The movie They Won't Forget is considered to
(23:41):
be one of the best films of the nineteen thirties
and it is based on the Leo Frank case. Lana
Turner plays Mary Clay. The Murdered Girl and it was
her very first film appearance. Claude Raines and Edward Norris
also star So how about that a Lana Turner movie
and a musical. So just like the Radium Girls that
(24:03):
we just talked about, they have some dramatic interpretation. Absolutely.
So those were some positive responses that we got from
people um or some neutral responses, and we also got
a few critical responses of the episode, and we wanted
to share one of those two that brought up some
interesting points and and kind of respond to that a
little bit and just put it out there for you
guys to think about. This is from John in Florida,
(24:25):
and he says, I found the podcast on Leo Frank
to be disturbing on a few levels. I get that
this is about a miscarriage of justice, but I don't
get the Jewish aspect. People are subject to prejudice every
day all over the world. Once you add the element
of a victim's religion, you separate them from the fabric
of society and it becomes more about the prejudice than
the injustice. You could not have worked any harder of
(24:48):
painting a wonderful picture of Leo Frank in reality he
was engaged in child labor. To say he was using
children and women for light duty sounds like it is
from a pr firm for the Frank family. How out Mary?
What were her working conditions? We did hear a lot
about Frank's degrees and his work as a leader in
the industry. Why did Mary have to get her check
from Frank? Do you have to get your check from
(25:10):
the founder of how Staff Works? I found this to
be a one sided and very cold report. I felt
no compassion for Mary, and I felt I was being
told to feel compassion for Frank. Sorry, but in the
real world, I do not trust people who hire women
and children to save a few cents. When we see
this now, we bring it to the media's attention and
boycott the products. Why is Mr Frank excused from this
(25:31):
kind of inspection because it happened a hundred years ago?
Exploitation of workers is exploitation of workers. Mary was exploited
as a worker. Why was she not safe in her
own workplace? What was the effect of the death on
her family? Was there prejudice because she was irish? We
did hear about Frank's final request as we get away
from child labor. We forget the injustice and the abuses
(25:52):
forced on workers. It took the federal government to step
in and stop people like Frank from exploiting children. Do
you really think he had Mary's interest in? Sayfety at heart,
I love your podcast on history. Please don't let it
become revisionist history. Thank you. All right, So, obviously there's
a lot to address in this letter, right, definitely, Yeah,
I mean, first, we wanted to start out by saying
(26:13):
that the podcast, as the title indicates, was to focus
on the Leo Frank trial, and as John mentioned, it
was mostly about the miscarriage of justice there, and so
that's why I think Leo Frank got more more more
of the focus in in the podcast. And and the
murder itself is so horrific and unequivocally wrong that kind
(26:38):
of speaks through itself in a way. Yeah, I mean,
and I think because Mary was so young and she
was the murder victim, and because of the press of
the trial has gotten, we really don't know that much
about her. We know that she was thirteen, that she
was young, that she was beautiful, that she was a
sweet girl, she went to church, that she was Catholic,
I mean, we know all these things about her, that
she worked in the factory, putting the little eraser is
(27:00):
in the middle case scenes at the end of the pencil.
That's what she did, but we don't really know that
much more to answer John's questions well, and consequently her
story and her role in history, and not just the
way we've presented it, but the way it is presented
is as the murder victim, and that's terrible. That's part
of the injustice of her life, that that's all she
(27:21):
got to be. Yeah, and that's one reason that we
pointed out exactly how much money she made. You know,
we talked about her collecting a dollar twenty five that week,
and it was our intention by doing that to point
out how very little she died for and how tragic
her life was and her death. But beyond that, the
(27:41):
podcast did move into more of a discussion of the
trial and of Leo Frank and as we indicated at
the end of that episode, more most sources do kind
of assume that he was not guilty of her murder,
and so maybe that is why that side of the
story came through more. But we did try to emphasize
at the end when we mentioned that he had received
(28:01):
the posthumous pardon that a lot of people have said
that this doesn't mean that he is exonerated for the crime.
Nobody really knows it is. And yeah, no one knows
what happened to Mary Fagan. And you know, maybe someday
we'll have more information, maybe not, um, but at this
point we can only give you as much information that
we have, and we can say that we always try
(28:23):
to give you a balanced story and that's always our goal,
but maybe it doesn't always turn out that way. Maybe
sometimes it's a little more emphasis on one person than
another character in a story that we're telling, and you know,
we're we apologize for that. We we always hope that
we can tell something that's a balanced story. But thank
you John for that email. We always love to get
(28:44):
really honest responses from our listeners and here what you
guys are thinking and hopefully kindly put, like, yeah, this
one was really kindly put and it was really thoughtful
and we appreciated it, and um, you know, please send
us more of those. We do read them. So I
hope this shows you guys that. But are we are
at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. If
(29:05):
you want to send us anything else about this or
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if you want to learn a little bit more about
(29:28):
radium and radiation, we do have an article called how
nuclear radiation Works. Then you can find it by searching
for nuclear radiation at www dot how stuff work dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
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