Criminal - The Dial Painters

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

In the early 1920s, painters at a watch dial factory in New Jersey started to get sick. No one could tell them why. Kate Moore's book is called The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Go on tour and meet so many of you. This month, Criminal is coming to Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta. If you didn't get to come and see our 10-year anniversary show earlier this year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand-new storiesyear anniversary show earlier this year, this is your last chance. You'll get to hear seven brand new stories, most of which will probably make you laugh. I'll even try to come and say hi at the merch table. Get your tickets while they last at thisiscriminal.com slash live. It starts really innocently.

In Molly's case, it's in her teeth. She has an aching tooth. And as you would, she goes to the dentist. She has the tooth pulled and hopes that that will be the end of it. Molly Maggia was in her mid-twenties. But then she finds that the next tooth starts to hurt. And she finds that where the original tooth was extracted, it's not healing. And so she goes to the dentist again. She has another tooth pulled. Then another tooth started hurting. And then another. Her dentist pulled those out too.

He thought it might be gum disease and started treatment. But it didn't get any better. Her doctor tested her for syphilis. The test came back negative. He thought it might be gum disease and started treatment, but it didn't get any better. Her doctor tested her for syphilis. The test came back negative. And eventually, Molly doesn't have to keep going back to the dentist because her teeth are literally falling out on their own. And the holes that are left behind have become these agonizing mouth ulcers. Molly Maggia lived in Orange, New Jersey. Her parents immigrated from Italy, and she was one of seven girls.

But unlike her older sisters, she didn't get married or have children. Molly left home and moved into a woman's boarding house. At night, she went out dancing. And during the day, she worked at a watch dial factory. It produced glow-in-the-dark watches, mostly for soldiers. Glow-in-the-dark paint then became hugely in demand because you wanted soldiers' watches to glow in the dark when they're in the trenches. You wanted glow-in-the-dark instruments, you know,

in aeroplanes, on the dashboards of, you know, automobiles. It was just hugely in demand once the war began. We're hearing from author Kate Moore. So you'd have whole factories with people making these glow-in-the-dark watch faces. How were they actually created? A cohort of young women, mostly teenagers, would paint the numerals and the hands of the glow-in-the-dark watches and clocks and instruments.

They would dip their brushes in these little crucibles and then they would suck on the brush. It was a technique called lip pointing, and they were instructed by the company to do that because it put a really fine point on the brush. So when they then painted the watches and the clock faces, the glow-in-the-dark paint would go on, you know, onto these tiny, tiny surfaces that the girls had been employed to paint.

Was this a good job to have? Oh, the best. It was an incredibly lucrative profession. The girls were paid by the number of watch faces they painted in a day, and they painted a lot of them. They were some of the highest paid women in the country. They liked the work, and they liked each other. They used to eat ice creams on their breaks.

You know, there was a little brook that ran behind one of the dial painting studios, and there were photographs of the girls sitting on this sort of makeshift wooden bridge that ran across the water, dipping their toes in the water and eating ice cream cones. Molly Maggia was one of the fastest dial painters at the factory. But as the pain in her mouth got worse and more of her teeth began to fall out, it was hard for her to work. She slowed down, and her friends noticed she was in pain. Her mouth eventually got so bad, she could barely eat or talk.

One day she goes to the dentist again to try and get some relief from her aching jaw. And he reaches into her mouth and just probes in the painful place where Molly says the pain is worst. And he finds that her jawbone literally breaks against his fingers at his gentle touch. And he's able to lift her jawbone out of her mouth, not by an operation, but simply by lifting it out because her mouth has been so destroyed and disintegrated by this mysterious attacking power. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. And it's not just in her mouth anymore. She has aching feet. She has aching limbs. And no one seems able to help her. No matter what dentist or doctor she goes to, no one can understand why this young woman, who is in her early 20s, has these symptoms and is suffering in this way. And the more they

try and help her, the faster the disease, this mysterious disease, seems to attack her body. She'd been tested for syphilis before, by her doctor. At this point, her dentist tried testing her for syphilis, and the test came back positive. Three months later, in September of 1922, Molly died.

The dentist told her family he believed the cause of death was syphilis. Her family tried to keep that a secret. But then one of Molly's friends, Irene, started having pain in her mouth. And then her friend Hazel did too. And so they start talking to each other about their aching teeth, their aching legs, their aching backs. The women began seeing doctors and dentists all over New Jersey and New York. They tried the same thing that Molly's doctors and dentists had tried. They pulled out the women's teeth, operated on their mouths, but none of the women seemed to be getting better.

Irene died, and then Hazel died, and even more of their friends were getting sick. As more women start to sicken, they have a meeting and they say they realize there is something going on about this thing, that there must be a connection between their different ailments, between all of them starting to sicken in this way. They had all worked at the same company, doing the same job, painting watch dials. One of the women went to the Department of Health and told them what was happening. The Department of Health went to the factory and asked the foreman what was going on. He denied that there was any problem.

But more women were getting sick. And the girls are sort of trapped in this nightmare where none of the dentists or doctors they're going to for help can help them. The company is not doing anything to assist, and they don't know what's going on. One dentist even told the head of operations at the factory to stop production. But the factory didn't listen. They stayed open. By this point, many of the women who hadn't already stopped work because they were too sick, quit. The mother

of a woman who was sick announced she would be filing a workers' compensation claim. After that, the head of the factory finally decided to launch an investigation. But only in private. They brought in public health experts to do it. So the company go for professionals at the top of their game. They consult Dr. Cecil Drinker, who is the professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and they ask him and his equally brilliant wife, Dr. Catherine Drinker, to conduct a study at the New Jersey plant to get to the bottom of what's going on, anticipating that it will give them a clean bill of health.

Cecil and Catherine Drinker drew blood from the women working at the factory. They examined their teeth. And then they noticed something very odd. The women's skin seemed to be glowing, just like the glow-in-the-dark paint they used on the watches. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story,

a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Subtle results, still you, but with fewer lines. Botox Cosmetic, autobotulinum toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults.

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they investigated each ingredient in the paint. And what did the study find? The study found that radium was at fault. The element radium was what made the watches glow. When the women licked the brushes to paint the numbers on each watch face, they were ingesting radium. Cecil and Catherine Drinker concluded that this was what was making them sick, which was not what the factory wanted to hear. They get into a private rouse with Dr. Drinker

disputing his results, you know, saying it's not a full study, casting doubt on his professionalism, you know, refusing to admit the results, basically, and then they bury it. They refuse to allow Drinker to publish it independently, and they themselves sit on it. They don't publish it, they don't warn anyone, they completely try and hush it up. Kate Moore says that in the early 1920s, radium was everywhere.

You walk into your local drugstore and there would be radium dressings, radium toothpaste to give you a brighter smile with every brushing. Radium cosmetics to give you a glowing complexion. Radium pills to treat anything from hay fever to gout, radium chocolate just to sort of give you a little extra pep with your sugary snack, radium lingerie to try and boost your sex life. Because you'd be kind of like shining? Yeah, literally. I mean, that was the idea. You'd be glowing. Glowing, absolutely. There was radium lipstick, radium energy drinks. One farmer even suggested putting radium in chicken feed to see if it would make the eggs boil themselves.

It even made it into a Broadway play called Piff Paff Poof in a song called The Radium Dance. It was actually the most expensive substance on earth at that time. A single gram would retail for the equivalent of $2.2 million in today's values. The women working in the factory knew it was valuable, and they felt glamorous painting with it. They used to slip off to the darkroom and sort of use it on their faces. They might paint their lips with it. They might paint their dresses with it. Sometimes they had a laugh with it.

They'd paint a sort of funny moustache or kind of comedy eyebrows on their faces and then, you know, squirrel themselves away in the darkroom and have a laugh with each other at these, you know, squirrel themselves away in the dark room and have a laugh with each other at these, you know, comedy faces they'd created with this radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint. They would wear their good dresses to the plant because they'd get covered in this shining dust and then go out dancing after work

in the music halls and the speakeasies of the roaring 20s. They'd be shining and shimmering on the dance floor. People called them the Radium Girls. What's interesting about the story of the Radium Girls was the type of poisoning they suffered had never actually been seen in human biology before, so it was a complete medical mystery when they started getting sick. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium in 1898 in her Paris laboratory.

Marie Curie was curious about what exactly made a new invention called the X-ray work. She eventually coined the term radioactivity and successfully isolated several radioactive elements, like radium. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work. Six years after that, Molly Maggia and her friends started painting with radium in the factory.

Marie and Pierre Curie had also discovered that radium could be used to kill cancers and tumors in the body and that in very small doses it could be good. But Pierre Curie said that in large doses, radium was unbelievably dangerous. He said that it could burn all the skin off of his body. You know, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him. But here you've got women who are working day in and day out

with the tiniest amount of radium. And, you know, this is why they think that it's so safe, because you can be around it and you don't have all those side effects that Pierre Curie described. But it turned out that radium is actually biomedically very similar to calcium. Calcium and radium are what are known as bone seekers. If you ingest them, they will seek out a skeleton and they will settle in those bones. Now calcium makes the bones strong, but radium has the opposite effect. And essentially it buried itself within the women's

skeletons. It built up over time, you know, depending on the dose that they were receiving every day, how long they worked at the studio, how many times they pointed the brush each time they painted a dial. But once it was in the body, there was no protection from it. You know, in the labs of the radium plants next door to where the girls are lip-pointing in their studio, those lab workers are issued with protective equipment, you know, ivory-tipped tongs and lead aprons to protect them from these dangerous amounts of radium. Within the women's bones, there is, of course, no protection at all, and therefore the alpha radiation in the radium

is able to destroy them from the inside out. One of the women who worked at the factory remembered early on a scientist coming to her with a warning. The warning was given to a radium girl called Grace Fryer. And it's Grace who remembers being sat at her desk in the studio. You know, the girls were absolutely crammed in at this point during the war. And she's lipping and dipping her brush as she's been taught to do. And Sabin von Sochotsky, he was a scientist. He wasn't often in the studio.

He was normally in the lab. And he crossed through the studio and he saw her painting and lipping and dipping her brush. And he said to her, do not do that, you will get sick. Sabin von Sahotsky had been handling the radium in the paint with his bare hands for years. He invented the paint and it helped start the company. And the tip of his index finger had been affected by it and it looked as though it had been gnawed off

and Grace, being the intelligent, curious person that she is, goes and speaks to her boss about it. And the boss reassures her that it's safe. And, you know, the company reiterate that. They actually get vice presidents over to reassure the women as these sort of rumors continue to fester, and that's only after the damage has been done, and many of Grace's cohorts and Grace herself have already started to show the symptoms of the radium poisoning that the work has affected in them. But then, in 1925, a man at the factory died, the chief chemist, Dr. Edwin Lehman. And in fact, it was Dr. Lehman who was the first radium victim to be autopsied.

His death got the attention of the county's medical examiner. Dr. Harrison Martland was the chief medical examiner in New Jersey. You know, he was a Sherlock Holmes fan. He used to do exercises every morning to bagpipes. A real character and a workaholic as well. He made no difference between weekdays and Sundays. He'd always be working in his lab late. And it was ultimately on his desk that it fell, this case, this mysterious case of the dial painters who were dying within his jurisdiction. Dr. Martland found that the factory scientist had died of anemia, which didn't make sense to him. Anemia wouldn't kill that quickly. Dr. Martland wanted to know

what caused it. He wanted to test the dead man's bones, but he needed the expertise of the scientists who worked at the factory to do that test. The factory agreed to help if the results were kept confidential, just like they were in the Harvard study. They turned Dr. Lehman's bones into dust and tested the bone dust with a device called an electrometer. It was the first time in history a human body was tested for radioactivity. The test results showed dangerous amounts of radium in the scientist's bones. A scientist helping Dr. Martland then asked him if he could examine the sick women who were still alive. He met the girls at St. Mary's Hospital in New Jersey.

He didn't know how to test them because they were still alive, and the only test he knew for radioactivity used pulverized bones. So with the help of another scientist, Dr. Martlin devised two tests he thought might work. First, the gamma ray test, which involved using an electroscope to measure if gamma radiation was emanating from the women's skeletons. And the second, to test if the women had radon in their breath. The theory being that if radium was in their jawbones and their teeth, when radium decays, it gives off this gas radon. And they devised, you know, a series of bottles that the women blew through, and it would measure how much radon and how much radioactivity was actually in their breath. And what do they find with these tests? That it was there.

The radium that the women had once worked with to make these glow-in-the-dark watches and clocks was in their bodies, and it was measurable. It was there with every breath they took. Shortly after, one of the women died, and Dr. Martland performed an autopsy And he found that the radium was throughout her It was in her organs

You know, her organs were radioactive Her bones were radioactive When, you know, you left her bones with x-ray filmed they would cause emanations on the film. The film would be fogged because of the radiation. Even after death, even as the autopsy is happening, the power that has destroyed her, this force, this radioactive force that has destroyed her, is still going strong.

While Dr. Martland had agreed, at the factory's request, to keep his findings on the company chemist confidential, he had never agreed to keep his exams of the women confidential. Before he even had the final autopsy results, he spoke to reporters and said the radium likely causing the poisoning was, quote, so insidious and sometimes takes so long to manifest itself that it's possible it had been going on throughout the country for some time without being discovered. Headlines shortly after read, radium rays kill six in factory where watch dials are made. The factory denied that radium killed the girls. Saying that such a tiny amount of radium couldn't possibly be to blame, even after they have, you know, scientific proof from experts that radium is responsible, they're still

denying it and denying any connection. Dr. Martland tested the women one by one and told every one of them, for the first time, what was making them sick and that there was no cure. When the news about radium went public, the women came together to figure out what to do. They wanted justice, if justice can be done in any way. They wanted the company to admit responsibility. They wanted other women to be warned.

They wanted the truth to come out. So many Radium Girls families were financially ruined by what happened to them because they had to pay for everything. They had to pay for every doctor's visit. They had to pay for every x-ray. They had to pay for, you know, everything. They had to pay for every doctor's visit. They had to pay for every x-ray. They had to pay for travel to hospitals. You know, medical treatment does not come cheap. The women tried to find a lawyer, but they ran up against a problem.

Many of them had left the factory a couple of years before, and the statute of limitations was up, no lawyer would take the case. And their last-ditch hope is a lawyer called Raymond Berry. He is someone who is up for the fight, and he comes up with several ways around the problem, but I think the most brilliant is that he says, you know, radium is inside the women's bodies,

and therefore the point of injury is happening anew every second. It didn't matter that the women hadn't worked at the factory for years. Raymond Barry wanted to argue that the radium was still hurting them. He also needed to prove in court that radium, without a doubt, was to blame for their illnesses. Because at that time, they still wanted definitive proof of what was hurting the women. exhume one of the radium girls who had passed away and probe and test her body and her bones to prove, you know, incontrovertibly, that radium alone was responsible for her demise. And the radium girl they chose was Molly Maggia.

Molly Maggia, the first dial painter to die. It was a rainy October day and they all gather round the graveside in New Jersey and, you know, the gravediggers take the earth off and they reveal this wooden coffin that she was buried in, a silver nameplate shining with her name on it, and they take off the lid of the coffin and eyewitnesses said her coffin was glowing because of the radium in her bones.

Radium has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so her bones will continue to be radioactive for thousands of years. The press became absolutely captivated with the story of the radium girls. They called it the case of the five women doomed to die. They had bandages wrapped around their jaws from, you know, several operations that they just had to keep going back and back and back

for more operations because that was the nature of the disease, this thing called jaw necrosis, where, you know, the jaw is disintegrating. The company weren't interested in actually drilling down into the truth of the matter. They were trying every legal technicality to get off the hook and they tried to draw the case out as well because they wanted the women to die

so that the case would go away. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Scott Galloway and on our podcast Pivot, we are bringing you a special series Thank you. for The Verge to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway?

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Tell me a little bit about the Radium Dial Company. So the Radium Dial Company operated out of the old high school in Ottawa, which was a very small town about 85 miles southwest of Chicago. And they had opened up in September 1922. They placed adverts for dial painters in the local newspaper, you know, commending the fact that they would work in this, you know, gorgeous studio with lots of light and that it was an artistic job and so on. One woman who answered the ad was a 17-year-old named Margaret Looney. My aunt's name was Margaret Looney. The family called her Peg. Darlene Hamm is Peg's niece.

And she was one of the first women to go to work at the Radium Dial Company in town, and she started working at the Radium Dial Factory on January 1st, 1923, along with a lot of other young women, including Catherine Wolfe. Catherine and Peg were friends from school. Catherine was very religious. Catherine was a mother of two young children. She was an orphan. She'd lost her parents very, very young. And she and Peg both came from Irish Catholic families. How did Peg's family feel when she first got the job at the Radium Dial Company? They were a very poor family. There were eight children. They slept three and four to a bed. So her having that paycheck, which she gave to her parents, really, really helped. And when she started at the Radium Dial, anything that was brought in was helpful.

And as all the Radium girls were, they thought they were really lucky to have this artistic, glamorous, lucrative job. I can remember my mother and her sisters talking about Peg would sometimes bring some of the radium and the dials to do at home. Then she would take her younger siblings into the bedroom and she would paint their nails and eyebrows and lips so they would glow in the dark. Catherine and Peg didn't know about the deaths in New Jersey when they started painting watches. But a couple of years in, their employer, the Radium Dial Company, did. In 1925, the company tested the Illinois women's breath and blood for radioactivity.

The women thought it was a routine checkup. And the company tests revealed that the women were radioactive and their fate looked to be identical to that of their colleagues in the East. Radium dial didn't communicate that to the women and they buried those test results. As the women in New Jersey were getting sicker and trying to prove that something was killing them, the women in Illinois kept painting. But when the women in New Jersey filed their lawsuit, the news about them went national. The women in Illinois heard about it.

One headline read, More deaths raise radium paint toll to 17. And they were stunned when the news came from the east of this major trial saying that radium was hurting dial painters. Catherine remembered that, you know, when the news first hit, you know, that it was a, there was a chill in the studio, you know, they were scarcely doing any work. And they were stunned, not only because you'd be worried about that anyway, if you read it, they were particularly worried because they too, in the past few weeks or so on, had started to perhaps have an aching ankle or a sore tooth. Like Peg Looney.

You know, pain, limping, and then after she had the tooth pulled, then things really got bad. The radium settled in her hip, making it very difficult for her to walk. Another young woman at the factory had also died the year before. But doctors wrote she had died of a bacterial infection. The Illinois women confronted their manager. The company tried to calm it. They took out full-page advertisements

in the local newspaper that said it's a different kind of radium out east they were using something called mesothorium here we use pure radium only they said and they said to the women you know if we at any time had suspicion that this would hurt our employees, we would have at once ceased operations. But we know, even when it was published, that that was a bare-faced lie, because they had tested the women, and they knew they were radioactive, and yet they did nothing. They actively covered it up, lied to the women in order to keep them working in these dangerous conditions. And Peg kept getting worse. She collapsed. She was taken to the hospital.

Eight days later, Peg died. She was only 24 years old and she was the second radium dial worker in Ottawa to die of radium poisoning. When Peg died, doctors told her family she had died of diphtheria, but her friends were still nervous. Back in New Jersey, they had heard the women painters had settled their case. They eventually got a lump sum, which I believe was $10,000 each, which obviously is much more in modern money. And they also got a commitment that their legal fees would be covered and their medical bills up to now and in the future. They wanted that commitment that future bills would be paid because they knew they were coming.

But the settlement had a catch. The New Jersey women had to be regularly examined and re-examined by a committee of three doctors. The company was allowed to choose one, the girls were allowed to choose another, and the third was supposed to be, you know, mutually agreed upon. And essentially what happened is the company, through various wranglings, managed to get two pro-radium doctors on the committee. And there was only one doctor who was really there advocating for the girls. And the twist was, if these doctors determined that the women were not suffering from radium poisoning anymore, all the payments would cease.

Meanwhile, in Illinois, Catherine had developed a limp, which got so bad she could barely bend her legs. And her friends, who also started at the factory with her, were also getting sick. Catherine went to a blood specialist. The specialist sent the diagnosis in the mail. Catherine had radium poisoning, and she later found out her friends had it too.

So the women band together, just as they did in New Jersey, and they try and fight for justice. And they're hopeful at first that the Illinois law will be more sympathetic to the cause than the New Jersey one was. It was a bit more progressive. It was a bit more forgiving for workers' rights and so on. But again, the company use every sort of legal trick in the book to try and wrangle out of it. The Illinois company didn't deny that radium had poisoned the women. Instead, they claimed that injuries caused by poison were legally not their responsibility. As one newspaper

put it, quote, in effect, the company's reply was, even if it was true, what of it? The women appealed their case all the way to the state Supreme Court, but the court sided with the company. The Chicago Daily Times called it an almost unbelievable miscarriage of justice. Catherine and her colleagues tried again, this time with a different lawyer, a man named Leonard Grossman. He was a lawyer who would always fight for the underdog. He would take on, you know, a seemingly hopeless case. And he was one of those people who,

you know, did what was right and did what was needed. And it was Catherine's case that became the lead case that Leonard Grossman took on. And that is where the real drama then ensues and where the real battle takes place. He presented the case to the Illinois Industrial Commission. He would argue that the company violated the state's newly passed Occupational Disease Act. By this point, Catherine could barely walk.

As she dressed for the trial, her husband had to carry her on a chair the few blocks between their house and the courtroom. Because Catherine was too weak to walk, but her bones were also too fragile, really for her to be safely carried all that way and so they put her on a wooden chair and carried her that distance but bravely she went up into that courtroom and she sat and she gave her evidence she had to have a handkerchief that she kept pressing to her mouth because her jaw was essentially seeping past all the time from all the abscesses and mouth ulcers within her mouth and so she gave evidence in a very quiet voice and had to keep dabbing at her mouth to give this evidence and the journalists who sort of packed the room were stunned at how thin she was

because she couldn't eat with a mouth like that. And yet, despite these physical limitations, she was there to have her day in court and to try to hold this company to account. Newspapers described the women as the society of the living dead. At the end of Catherine's testimony, she pulled a small jewelry box out of her purse.

She took out two small white objects and said, these are pieces of my jawbone. And then her doctor takes the stand and he reveals in front of everyone that what Catherine is suffering is fatal. And at that time, doctors didn't necessarily communicate that news to their patients. It was thought to, you know, better off to keep them in the dark, to try and keep them positive and so on. And so Catherine hears that news in the courtroom for the very first time. And she collapses as she hears this news, as she realizes, you know, there is no hope, there is no cure. She is not going to live to see her children grow up and to grow old with her husband. What is the verdict? The verdict is that the company is guilty.

And she's almost too sick to take in the news. The one thing she says is, you know, that she hopes it will help others. She hopes it will help her children, who are going to have to face their future without her. She hopes it's going to help her friends. And so when the verdict comes in she's you know she can barely take it in she is so weak and she's on her own in you know her house you know other people have gone to Chicago to hear the verdict a journalist rushes to break the news to her and

she can barely do anything with it she is teetering on the edge and in the end through company appeals you know appealing that decision over and over and over again she wins they appeal she wins again they appeal again and eventually after one you know one more appeal it's just too much for Catherine and she passes away with her family and her children by her side and doesn't live to see the day when final justice is handed down. You know, they appeal all the way to the Supreme Court and ultimately the Supreme Court don't hear the case because it's ridiculous that they're appealing again

and Catherine wins. But it's too late for her. She's not around to see that day. Many of the women who worked with radium paint developed cancer and had miscarriages, stillbirths and infertility. The remains of some of the women who died were kept in lead-lined vaults underground for further study. Kate Moore says the case helped lead to the establishment of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Businesses are now required by law to tell employees if they are working with dangerous chemicals, and to protect and properly train them to work with those chemicals. And workers now have a legal right to see results of any medical tests conducted by their workplace. When the factory in Illinois was shut down, it was turned into a meatpacking plant. The families of the women who still live there today, you know, they remember families getting their meat from that meatpacking plant. And, you know, they remember families getting their meat from that meatpacking plant and, you know, every brother in that family dying young of cancer. And people didn't know the danger at the time.

You know, they eventually pulled that building down and people were carrying off the bricks to take into their houses as memento, even though, you know, we now know that those bricks would have been incredibly radioactive. The building was torn down in the 1960s, and parts of it were repurposed for buildings and children's playgrounds around town. The EPA has designated 16 of those places as Superfund sites. Kate Moore is the author of Radium Girls,

the dark story of America's shining women. We'll have a link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Gabrielle Burbay. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.

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Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin?, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this Where Should We Begin?