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Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that remembers to air previously referenced stories way after the fact. With me are my co-hosts Shea, Steve, and your host, Jenn!Ghost Girls
A morbid footnote in the history of the fight for workers’ and women’s rights, from the ‘good ole days’:- https://www.buzzfeed.com/authorkatemoore/the-light-that-does-not-lie
- http://theradiumgirls.com/the-girls/4593781028
- https://www.thehorrorzine.com/Morbid/RadiumGirls/RadiumGirls.html
- https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/radium-girls-kate-moore/515685/
- https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/curies-isolate-radium
- http://theradiumgirls.com/
“She (Mollie) didn’t know what was wrong with her. Her trouble had started with an aching tooth: Her dentist pulled it, but then the next tooth started hurting and also had to be extracted. In the place of the missing teeth, agonizing ulcers sprouted as dark flowers, blooming red and yellow with blood and pus. They seeped constantly and made her breath foul. Then she suffered aching pains in her limbs that were so agonizing they eventually left her unable to walk. The doctor thought it was rheumatism; he sent her home with aspirin. By May 1922, Mollie was desperate. At that point, she had lost most of her teeth and the mysterious infection had spread: Her entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and even some of the bones of her ears were said to be "one large abscess." But worse was to come. When her dentist prodded delicately at her jawbone in her mouth, to his horror and shock, it broke against his fingers. He removed it, "not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out." Only days later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.While poor Mollie was suffering through this nightmare, her former coworkers began to experience similar symptoms of the teeth and jaws, while others began to be afflicted with leg and back pain so intense it practically immobilized them. Dentists and physicians throughout the area were seeing young and otherwise healthy women whose teeth and jaws were literally falling apart or who had swollen and inflamed joints and acute pain with no discernible cause. The connection to their jobs wasn’t made for some time, as many no longer worked at the factories, having married and started families or been laid off when the war came to an end. As the doctors began to suspect an occupational cause, many postulated phosphorus poisoning was the culprit, with the thinking companies were using it in the paint secretly (as of course radium could certainly not be the reason). Exposure to phosphorus does have similar symptoms to radium poisoning, and it was caused by the paint, so doctors were actually on the right track. Meanwhile, time had run out for poor Mollie Maggia. Excerpt:
“On September 12, 1922, the strange infection that had plagued Mollie Maggia for less than a year spread to the tissues of her throat. The disease slowly ate its way through her jugular vein. At 5 p.m. that day, her mouth was flooded with blood as she hemorrhaged so fast that her nurse could not staunch it. She died at the age of 24.”More and more of the Ghost Girls began to fall ill. Many were close friends and maintained contact even after ending employment, so it didn’t take long for them to notice that something terrible was happening and that having worked as a dial painter was the common denominator. As more of their friends sickened and died, the women still healthy enough to do so petitioned their former employers, state officials, The Department of Labor, ANYONE to investigate the use of the paint and its health effects. But sadly as these were women, and most young and unmarried at that, little to nothing was done and they were mainly ignored. Adding to the indignity, due to absolute bafflement and believing she had lied when saying she was a ‘good girl’, Mollie Maggia’s attending physician had ruled her cause of death as syphilis, which the USRC used as proof there was no work correlation and a weapon whenever there was too much prying. (They also hired their own “investigators”, who of course found nothing amiss at the factories and those hysterical women just need to calm down.) It took nearly 2 years before the area doctors and dentists finally began to talk together and compare notes and, seeing an obvious correlation, in early 1924 they themselves began to petition the very same institutions the afflicted workers had been begging for years to pay attention. And guess what happened when Dr. Men got involved…? That’s right, by March(!) of 1924 an independent investigation was pretty much forced on USRC. Excerpt:
“Unlike the company’s own research into radium’s beneficence, this study was independent, and when the expert confirmed the link between the radium and the women’s illnesses, the president of the firm was outraged. Instead of accepting the findings, he paid for new studies that published the opposite conclusion; he also lied to the Department of Labor, which had begun investigating, about the verdict of the original report. Publicly, he denounced the women as trying to "palm off" their illnesses on the firm and decried their attempts to get some financial help for their mounting medical bills.”And so they are practically back to square one. The public still thought radium was the futuristic bees knees, the companies were controlled by soulless monsters with more money than should be legal, and government oversight organizations all had their heads up their collective asses. And the women continued to sicken and die. That may have continued indefinitely if not for an incident which occurred on June 7, 1925: the first male employee of USRC died. And it was not just any male employee. In fact, it was USRC’s chief chemist, Dr. Edward Leman. A man who had “scoffed” at the independent investigators just over a year before was dead at 36 of “pernicious anemia”. Well, shit. A Dr. Man is dead, I guess something needs to be done. At this point the closest thing to a male lead in the story steps in, the brilliant and distinguished Dr. Harrison Martland. He preferred to be called Marty, liked to work in shirtsleeves “sans tie” and enjoyed exercising to very loud bagpipe music played on his phonograph. Oh, and he also devised the tests that proved once and for all it was radium poisoning the women. (Aside, I’d love to talk more about Dr. Marty and his breakthroughs, but I’ve got to start winding this down. READ THE BOOK.) Suffice to say, he took the previously held beliefs that radium was only dangerous when handled in large quantities, externally and shot them right down. Ingested radium was in fact much, much more dangerous (many thousands of times greater), and he also soon realized it was fatal. The body, it turns out, confuses radium for calcium and the ingested radium was absorbed into bones, and once there it was impossible to remove. The women all faced a terrible, certain death sentence. Of course, the radium companies were not going to just accept these findings and lose out on their truckloads of money (it’s at this point I wish to point out that they have been continuing throughout this entire saga to employ young women as dial painters, all the while while trying to stifle the “malicious gossip”). And considering this money they could throw towards discrediting the findings, they may have succeeded. But now is time for the real heroes to take the stage. As Moore writes, “(The radium industry) hadn’t reckoned with the courage and tenacity of the radium girls themselves. They started banding together to fight against the injustice.”
A former dial painter who began work at USRC in 1917 at the age of 18, Grace Fryer soon became known as a courageous leader of their movement. "It is not for myself I care," she commented. "I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example." Grace knew it was too late for herself. By this point her spine had “crushed” upon itself and she was forced to continuously wear a steel back brace. Despite this, or possibly because of it, she “determined to find a lawyer even after countless attorneys turned her down, either disbelieving the women’s claims, running scared from the powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation. At that time, radium poisoning was not a compensable disease...and the women were also stymied by the statute of limitations, which ruled that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most girls did not start to sicken until at least five years after they started work; they were trapped in a vicious legal circle that could seemingly not be squared. But Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account.”It took until 1927, but finally a young lawyer named Raymond Berry accepted the case, with Grace and 4 colleagues as plaintiffs. But in what was possibly (probably?) a tactic by USRC, as time was running out for the remaining women, delaying tactics were rampant. At this point all five named in the case had been given 4 months to live. It was this morbid time limit that forced them to settle out of court, but the publicity had an effect. The legal battle became front page news and made its way to the Illinois company, Radium Luminous Material Corporation, which was of course still allowing their dial painters to continue the same work. It had lied about results of radiation testing and even tried to out evil USRC. “It … placed a full-page ad in the local paper: "If we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would at once have suspended operations." Its actions to hush up the scandal went as far as interfering in the girls’ autopsies when the Illinois workers began to die: Company officials actually stole their radium-riddled bones in their callous cover-up.” (Side note, the bones of the women also glowed and will continue to do so for a very long time. The half life of the particular isotope they were exposed to is 1,600 years) But the Illinois workers nearly rioted and began to resign in droves as the news broke. Finally, just a few years later in the mid-1930s another woman took up leading the legal fight, and in 1938 the Ghost Girls finally won their case. Catherine Donohoe, despite her doctor’s advice, participated in the trial until its end. When she collapsed on the stand in the courtroom she continued her testimony from her literal deathbed, with the lawyers visiting her at home. This evidence helped to finally win some justice for these women, and pave the way for safer conditions for workers coming after. Even safety for scientists. From an interview with Kate Moore in The Atlantic:
“(W)hen the Manhattan Project got started, Glenn Seaborg, who was on the project, wrote in his diary that he thought of the radium girls as he was walking through his laboratory with all its radioactive plutonium, and he didn't want the same thing to happen. He first had to find out if plutonium was similar to radium. Obviously, it did turn out that plutonium is biomedically very similar to radium.”Wrapping up:
The radium girls’ case was one of the first in which an employer was made responsible for the health of the company’s employees. It led to life-saving regulations and, ultimately, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which now operates nationally in the United States to protect workers. Before OSHA was set up, 14,000 people died on the job every year; today, it is just over 4,500. The women also left a legacy to science that has been termed “invaluable.”
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Interested in what we have to say about this story? Good news, it’s available right now to subscribers at Patreon.com/iit! Radiation is fun! Most of you probably haven’t heard the tale of Alfred Carton Gilbert. He was an American athlete, magician, toy-maker, businessman, and giver of cancer. The most famous of his inventions was the Erector Set. Perhaps most notable, however, was the 1950 Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab play-set for children. Gilbert considered toys to be foundational in building a “solid American character” so many of his toys were educationally themed and lead-lined… or, you know, whatever metal was cheaper. So great was his toy-based patriotism that he was named the “man who saved Christmas” during WWI when he convinced the US Council of National Defense not to ban toy sales during Christmas… which was a thing for some reason. Anyway, back on the glowing track. The Atomic Energy Lab was one of many lab-based toys available at the time. Like lab toys now the kits would include everything you needed to do the fun-to-watch science in the hope that you’d later do the hard-to-math science as an adult. Best of all, it was the 1950’s and everything was alite with the glory of radiation! The Atomic Lab, while short-lived - it only sold for 1 year - was considered by many including Gilbert to be the companies best. The US Government particularly loved it as they thought it would aid public understanding of atomic energy and emphasize its constructive aspects - which at the time was much in need of PR rehabilitation. The Lab contained a cloud chamber (or glass ball) that allowed one to watch alpha particles traveling at 12,000 mps, a spinthariscope showing the results of radioactive disintegration on a fluorescent screen, and an electroscope measuring the radioactivity of different substances in the set. Because it shipped with some… yes it did. In 2006, Radar Magazine called the lab set one of “the 10 most dangerous toys of all time, … excluding BB guns, slingshots, throwing stars, and anything else actually intended to cause harm.” So there ya go, the most dangerous toy you could by not specifically designed to shoot your eye out. In fact, it’s ranked number two, second only to lawn darts. Gilbert’s commercials promoted the idea that none of the materials in the kit were dangerous. Just radioactive and unshielded. The instructions encouraged laboratory cleanliness by cautioning users not to break the seals on three of the ore sample jars, for "they tend to flake and crumble and you would run the risk of having radioactive ore spread out in your laboratory. This will raise the level of the background count", thus impairing the results of experiments by distorting the performance of the Geiger counter … and melting your fucking face off. The set sold for $49.99… or current $550 and contained, in no special casing or order:- Battery-powered Geiger–Müller counter
- Electroscope
- Spinthariscope
- Wilson cloud chamber with short-lived alpha source (Po-210) in the form of a wire
- Four glass jars containing natural uranium-bearing (U-238) ore samples (autunite, torbernite, uraninite, and carnotite from the "Colorado plateau region")
- Low-level radiation sources:
- Plastic "Nuclear spheres" for making a model of an alpha particle
- Gilbert Atomic Energy Manual — a 60-page instruction book written by Dr. Ralph E. Lapp
- Learn How Dagwood Split the Atom — comic book introduction to radioactivity, written with the help of General Leslie Groves
- Prospecting for Uranium — a book
- Three C batteries
- 1951 Gilbert Toys catalog
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