Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #54: Lip, Dip, and Die! The Radium Girls

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Today we explore the horrifying true story of the Radium Girls — young women told to “lip, dip, and paint” with radioactive dial paint while their employers hid the deadly consequences. What began as a factory job seen as glamorous and high-paying turned into one of the most grotesque workplace poisoning scandals in American history, leaving behind shattered bodies, corporate lies, and a legal battle that helped change worker safety forever. For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to another edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins, and today I'll be sharing the story of the Radium Girls. A story that took place at a very strange time for radiation, shortly after its discovery, but before most people knew how incredibly dangerous it was. Back when people were rubbing radioactive elements in their skin via radioactive face lotions, when people were brushing their teeth with radioactive toothpaste, when some people were even going to sleep wearing a radioactive jock strap. thinking they were radiating some strong sexual mojo directly into their balls.

And also when a bunch of women were hired to paint watches with highly radioactive paint. During World War I, several factories were established across the U.S. to produce luminous watch styles for the military. These glow-in-the-dark watches were critical for the success of coordinated nighttime missions, and they just look cool. What made the watches glow in the dark, though, was decidedly not cool. It was paint that contained radium, a highly toxic. radioactive element. And when this watch was being mass produced, roughly 4,000 women were hired to paint these luminous dials. Women were thought to be the best candidates for this job because their smaller hands were supposedly better suited for precision work, and they were paid a lot

less at the time than men. Women were eager to take what was considered a high-paying job for a woman at that time, though, not knowing that the cost of their health would far outweigh any salary benefits they might receive. Hard to enjoy that sweet cash when radiation grinding your bones down to dust when you still kind of need those bones pretty badly. Hard to spin around on the dance floor to some big band jams and enjoy a steak dinner when your spine has radiation holes in it and your teeth have fallen out of what little is left of your jaw. Thousands of young women in the U.S. and Canada were hired to work in factories and then over the next handful of years, dozens will die, hundreds of others will suffer various ill health effects

and or disfigurement and an unknown number but definitely over 100 will die premature. in the years that follow from the toxic effects of radium. And the men that hired these women, they soon knew exactly how dangerous this radium was. And yet they continued to encourage the women to not just touch it with their bare hands, but also frequently ingest it in order to keep the tips of their paint brushes

tapered down to a fine point. They knew damn well that their continual instruction for the women to lip, dip, and paint was going to destroy them, and they told them anyway. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream.

I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. Before we talk about the Radium Girls specifically today, let's first back up and discuss where Radium came from. Radium had only been discovered two decades prior to the Radium Girls' tragedy by French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie. And if you think, didn't Dan already cover that? you're not crazy. Or at least you're not crazy for thinking that. You might be a bad shit crazy for other reasons. But we have touched on some of this in some previous episodes, but we've never covered it directly. Marie and Pierre Curie were a rare husband-a-wife physicist team who would win a Nobel Prize in physics for discovering two new elements on the periodic table. Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, November 7, 1867. For all my teasing of the polls early on with time sucked due to my wife being Polish, they had

have produced a bunch of very smart suckers. Marie's birth name was Maria Skodovka. I think I got that kind of right. She came from a poor family, partially because her schoolteacher's father had lost his job, simply because the Polish man had expressed some pro-Polish sentiments in Poland. How dare he? At the time, Poland was divided amongst Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia,

and none of those powers wanted to hear about Polish independence. Marie's father, a smart guy, taught her and her sister's literature and science, which was another no-no, definitely not common at the time and place for girls to receive the kind of formal education he gave them. But he was a man of high morals who was ahead of his time. But then, despite having the aptitude,

Marie was still unable to enroll at the University of Warsaw because the school, like most in the area back then, did not accept female students. Not willing to simply give up on their scientific ambitions, Marie and her sister, Bronya, attended the so-called flying university, sometimes referred to as the floating university. Terms at the time for this illegal night school run by women

that held college classes for women in different locations so that law enforcement would not find them. Fucking wild. Imagine certain forms of higher education, scientific education at that being deemed illegal. And yes, I am aware that many today would like to limit what can be educated and how. Still, that's so fucking crazy. Drop the book.

and beakers. Keep your hands where we can see them, ladies. You are all under arrest. Clearly, you are trying to get smart. And smart women are harder to control than dumb ones. Nice fucking try, broads. Both sisters would eventually have to leave Poland to keep pursuing scientific careers. Bronia was able to attend med school at Sorbonne University, this prestigious public research university in Paris. Marie worked for a time as a governess to help pay for her sister's tuition. which is badass. Very selfless. Marie was literally a scientific genius and also a solid human being willing to push paws on her own ambitions, ambitions backed up by a lot of brain to help her sister. Maria left Paris or left for Paris, excuse me, there we go, in the fall of 1891 to also study at Sorbon

because of her non-traditional education. She had to work hard to catch up to her peers, but she would catch up, then she would surpass many of them. She completed her first master's degree in physical sciences in 1893, then a second master's degree in mathematics the following year in 1894. 1894, also the year that Marie met her future husband, Pierre Curie. In the spring of 1894, Marie was searching for a lab to complete her studies in. It was then that she met Pierre, who was 10 years her senior, and a pioneer in magnetism. Pierre Curie, born May 15, 1859, was the son of a physician and had received private tutoring as a child. his travels through education

had been quite a bit easier than Marie's still had to excel in his studies of course though but if he excelled you know he would progress his family had the money he had the right gender to keep progressing he was gifted in mathematics he earned a master's degree by the age of only 18 then in his early 20s Pierre and his brother

Paul Jacques discovered the Piazoelectric effect certain crystals generate voltage when pressure is applied to them and when placed in an electric field those crystals become compressed, and Pierre and his brother constructed a Piazo Electric Quartz Electrometer to measure faint electric currents. And through this research, Pierre discovered a relationship between magnetic properties

and temperature, the temperature at which permanent magnetism disappears is now known as the Curie Point. Marie encouraged Pierre to write up his research as a doctoral thesis in this area he did. He earned his Ph.D. in March of 1895, was promoted to professor at Paris's municipal, school and then married Marie three months later. And now the two of them will support each other's work and push each other along in their scientific endeavors, truly a power couple. For her doctoral studies, Marie chose to study uranium rays, which had only recently been discovered in early 1896 by Henri, Beccarell, a French engineer and physicist. He had made his discovery months

after x-rays had been discovered by German physics professor by the name of Wilhelm Rensken. Marie conducted experiments confirming Beccarell's observations that the electrical effects of uranium are constant regardless of whether they are solid, pulverized, pure in a compound, wet or dry, angry, sad, jealous, constipated, clairvoyant, telekinetic, hangary, or exposed to light or heat. I may have added a few adjectives in the middle of that that were nonsense, but you get the gist. Marie validated the conclusion that minerals with a higher proportion of uranium emitted the most intense rays. Marie also formed a hypothesis that the emission of rays by uranium compounds was an atomic

property of the element uranium. She coined the term radioactivity to describe the effect. That alone, pretty cool claim to fame. Marie found the same effect in thorium compounds. Pierre, greatly intrigued by her discovery, soon joined her in her research. Marie then discovered that two types of uranium ores, pitch blend, and calcolite were more radioactive than pure uranium. And she concluded that their highly radioactive nature must be caused by some other, you know, yet to be discovered elements. She and Pierre worked to separate the substances in the oars and used an electrometer, we talked about earlier, to make radiation measurements to trace the amount of the

unknown radioactive element among the fractions that resulted from the separation. They found that one of the fractions was highly radioactive. It behaved much like the element, Bismuth, but they knew it had to be something new, so they named it. Fuck around and find out of them. No, they called it polonium. But I kind of like my name better. Continuing with the research, in December of 1898, Marie and Pierre, discovered a new element in a barium fraction, barium being yet another element in earth metal that they called, Goddamicum!

That shit'll melt your fucking tits off of cum. No, they called it radium. Marie Curie wrote about the discovery, quote, these gleamings seem suspended in the darkness and stirred us with a new emotion and enchantment. Ever new emotion and enchantment, actually is what she said. Radium was the wildest shit they had discovered. It's the heaviest, most intensely radioactive alkaline earth metal on the planet. The most radioactive natural element.

Literally a million to 2.7 million times more radioactive than uranium. It's so radioactive it glows. Think of Homer Simpson's glowing nuclear fuel rod. scientific community was initially skeptical of Marie and Pierre's discovery, so in order to prove that they had found unique elements, they had to isolate them, and that'll take a while. Pierre investigated its physical properties. Marie worked to chemically isolate radium from pitchblend. Radium does not occur freely in nature.

It doesn't show up just all by itself. So Marie and an assistant had to refine several tons, literal tons of pitch blend, just to isolate one-tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride. and they didn't accomplish that until 1902, and they will be rewarded in 1902 for doing so with the Nobel Prize in physics, along with Henri Beciro. And the trio's work led to the use of radioactive materials in medicine.

The radioactive isotopes were found to be far more effective and safer than surgery or chemicals for treating various forms of cancer and other diseases in some ways. Radioactive isotopes still effectively used today as tracers to track various chemical changes in biological processes or processes. Radiation works through a process called ionization. When radiation passes through a person, it removes electrons from atoms and transforms them into positively charged ions. This disrupts the chemical equilibrium of a cell and can cause cell death.

Cancer's tumors affected at a faster rate, limited in this way, ideally before the healthy cells are damaged. Who knows how many thousands or millions, probably millions of people with cancer, have seen their cancer going to remission and continue to live, thanks specifically to the discovery of radium. Pierre Curie also realized the potential of radioactive decay for dating minerals, and because of their study of uranium decay, the age of the Earth was determined. How cool is that? The discovery of radioactivity directly led to the development of radiometric dating by measuring the decay rates of radioactive isotopes and rock scientists established that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, and determined that dinosaurs roam the earth roughly 66 to 250 million years ago, among so much other cool shit.

Marie Curie awarded her doctorate of science in June of 1903, and yes, dinosaur bones, that jingle is playing in my head probably in some years too. Dinosaur bones! She was awarded her Nobel Prize, December 10th of 1903, first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize. Pierre Curie was appointed to the chair of physics at the Sorbonne in 1904. Marie, meanwhile, continued her efforts trying to isolate pure non-chloride radium. Sadly, on April 19th, Pierre was killed in a freak accident in Paris.

The monster known as the Red Hulk, a villain formed from radiation, smashed him to shit after accidentally throwing a horse carriage on top of him. Okay, maybe his death wasn't that freaky, but it was pretty freaky. He slipped and fell under a heavy horse-drawn cart while crossing the street in a rainy day, and one of the wheels ran over his head, fracturing his skull, killing him instantly. I told you was a pretty freak accent.

He was only 46. Then the following month, in May of 1906, Marie was appointed to his seat, became the first female professor at the university. So, clearly, she had something to do with his accent.

She pushed him! She was after his seat the whole time. Murderer! Murderer! No, she wasn't with him when he died. Almost 20 years after first discovering the element, Marie and her assistant, succeeded in isolating pure radium in 1910. Then in 1911, Marie alone won another Nobel Prize,

this time in chemistry, the first person ever man or woman to win a second Nobel Prize. We're incredible. For the next phase of her career, Marie became interested in the medical applications of radioactive substances. She studied the potential of radium as a treatment for cancer during World War I.

Starting in 1918, the Radium Institute at the University of Paris began to operate under her direction and became a major center for the study of chemistry and nuclear physics. Then shortly after this, Marie began to experience some medical issues that were almost certainly, they were certainly due to radiation exposure.

Her hands became chronically damaged, hardened, calloused, burned, severely cracked, the skin permanently thickened, due to years of unprotected direct exposure to radiation. Then in 1920, when she learned she had a double cataract, she would have to have four operations on it, probably also likely to her exposure due to her exposure uridium. 1925, with more health problems mounting, Marie participated in a commission of the French Academy of Medicine that recommended the use of lead screens and periodic blood cell testing for workers

and labs where radioactive materials were being used. Marie's health continued to decline. Some days, she was too sick now, even to go into the lab. Doctors could not seem to diagnose her, but some of them suspected she was sick with tuberculosis. No, medical expert from Switzerland later diagnosed her with an incurable blood disorder, and then Marie died July 4, 1934 at the age of 66, from aplastic anemia, a condition where the body stops producing sufficient red blood cells, and that condition, almost certainly,

99.999% certainly caused by years of radiation exposure. Her bone marrow had been destroyed by radioactive exposure. To this day, some of Marie's personal books and papers things she spent a lot of time touching are so radioactive, They're still stored in lead boxes, and her body buried in a lead-lined coffin due to how radioactive her corpse still is. Reconnecting all this with the topic of the day, Marie's health declined at the same time that numerous dial painters in the U.S. were becoming terminally ill. People who rightly believed they had gotten sick from exposure to all the radioactive paint they had once worked with. Paint that had covered their fingers day after day after day.

paint they put directly into their mouths day after day after day. But a lot of other people thought, no way. Not possible. Because for several years, radism was considered by many to be a miracle element due to its ability to treat cancer. How could something used to treat cancer also give you cancer or be otherwise harmful to you? People can wrap their heads around that.

A lot of people thought radium was a miracle cure-all. They thought it could improve beauty, vitality, even sex drive. it was advertised as a cure to all sorts of illnesses ranging from colds to cancer, even believed by many to have the ability to extend your lifespan. Back in the early 20th century, radium was not just being used in paint. It was being used in things like cocktails, all sorts of other shit to make stuff glow in the dark. I mean, a glowing martini would be pretty cool. 1913, Radium was reported as an effective treatment to reduce the size of malignant growths.

By 1919, radium was being used in toothpaste. taste, get those teeth so white, you can literally watch them glow in the dark. It was being used in all sorts of beauty products and makeup. There was even an early 20th century radioactive cure-all energy drink called Radithor, manufactured between 1918 and 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey. This shit was like some real-life whipple. Like, fuck you and fuck your family for real. Everyone's getting radiated.

It was owned by William Bailey, a college dropout with no medical license, who didn't just handle the business end of things. He actually ran the science laps. So that's cool. No, what could go wrong with that? His radioactive snake oil was marketed as a cure for the living dead, as well as perpetual sunshine. Even buyers, a wealthy American socialite,

athlete, industrialist, and Yale College graduate would soon find out it was neither of those things in a very brutal way. This dude, who was once one of America's top golfers, drank roughly 1,400 bottles of Radithor, beginning to 1927 when he was 47 years old. Stop drinking it three years later in 1930, but the damage was done. Holy shit was it. Once his shit builds up inside of you, you can't undo it. You can't get it out.

He died five years after he had first drank Radithor, two years after he stopped drinking it, in 1932 of numerous cancers, and before he died, hot damn. He'd lost a lot of weight, had a bunch of his teeth, literally crumble and fall out of his mouth. His fucking jaw had to be removed, amongst other devastating health problems. Like his inside just kind of turned to mush. In late 1931, his lawyer reported that buyers, quote, whole upper jaw accepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed. Oh, and that all the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating,

and holes were forming in his skull. Jesus! Dude disintegrated to death. While people were drinking Whipple Radiation Edition, radium-based depositories were also being sold. Uh-huh, yeah, people were sticking radioactive pills up their asses, just lighten up their insights. There was also a briefly popular radium-based hemorrhoid cream called Klein's Radium South.

Burn those hemorrhoids right off. Right before you shit out, you're melted organs. The weirdest product I found was the scrotal, the scrodle radia endocrinator that's actually what it's called scrotal radia endocrinator sold in the 1920s for as much as $1,000

a piece it was designed to radiate your balls while you slept at night to quote invigorate sexual virility and restore lost manhood would of course do neither of those things it was pure quackery like most of the other radium products you place this ludicrous device

and a specially designed jockstrap after inserting tiny pieces of paper quote, uniformly loaded with radium sulfate into a small embossed metal case about the size of a credit card with a mesh window with a mesh window separating the wearer's balls from the radiated paper

for safety, of course. I mean, you can't wrap your balls up directly with radiated paper, you silly goose. No way. No, you need a thin strip of mesh to protect those precious nuggets. Carl Willis, a nuclear engineer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, found one of these things in 2020 that was still in working condition, and when he tested it, he found it was still emitting.

This is just a couple of years ago. A tremendous amount of radiation. About a thousand times the amount emitted by the glow-in-the-dark radium watches that fucked up so many radium girls. He said that if this thing was used as directed, it would potentially leave the wearer sterile, riddled with cancer, and covered in radiation burns all over their genitals.

while the instructions that came with this thing said, where at night radiate as directed. Who's directing this? Who's telling you? What doctor is like, don't do it for more than four hours? But yeah, no, according to my research, which I didn't do,

four hours of scrotal radiation will get your dick longer. I don't know. Another company sold the radium or revigator, revigator, the radium or there's making up these words. revigator. It was marketed as a medical device, which of course it wasn't. This was just a ceramic water crock, aligned with a bunch of radioactive material that was supposed to power up your drinking water. Just really make it invigorating. Just like OG liquid death. The manufacturer provided the following instructions. Fill jar every night. Drink freely. When thirsty and upon a rising

and retiring average eight or more glasses daily. Hell yeah. Eight or more glasses daily of radioactive waste. This was marketed as a way to prevent illness, including arthritis, flatulence, and senility. Farting too much? Drink revigator water. You won't be able to fart at all when the radiation has disintegrated your butthole and destroyed most of your stomach and colon. Hooray! This thing was so popular that for years in the 1920s, the manufacturer could not keep up with demand. And there were also a bunch of other products that were radium-free but marketed as if they had radium inside of them, like radium hand-cleaner.

The advertising jingle for this bullshit Was take everything off but the skin Now before moving on Let me read from a full page ad placed in the November 10th 1918 edition of the New York Tribune About some fun radioactive beauty products Right after this week's first

To two mid-show sponsor breaks If you don't want to hear these ads Please sign up to be a space insert on Patreon Get the catalog ad free These episodes early and more Thanks for listen to those ads Now let me actually read from this full page ad, placed in the November 10th, 1918 edition of the New York Tribune

about some fun radioactive bea products. Radium and beauty! Here are the first toilet preparations to embody actual radium in astonishing new force for betterment, supplied as an aid to beauty. Learn how the amazing energy of radium has proved to boon to the human skin. Learn what radium actually means to beauty and how its power is employed in radior preparations.

Study our $5,000 guarantee. Then turn to radio toilet requisites. When you have used, enjoyed, and tested them, you will adopt them as your own first aid to beauty. Prehistoric woman first discovered her image in some quiet jungle pool. Ever since, beauty has engaged the world's attention. Radium, though new to the world,

is no less of absorbing interest. Its marvels have amazed and thrilled us all. Who would have imagined that these two subjects would someday go hand in hand? Yet in radium, science had discovered a revolutionary beauty secret. Consult books on radioactivity. Any number of them are in our public libraries. They will show you that radium possesses an enormous power for human betterment. The tiniest particle of radium throws off a luminous stream of energy rates.

As energy never diminishes, never fading, day or night, year in, year out. A force a million times more powerful than any other known. Radio or toilet requisites are necessarily higher in price. This must be expected in preparations containing the finest ingredients only, plus a definite quantity of actual radium. Notice how your complexion improved with radio poode valour night cream. Enjoy the strange elusive fragrance.

Then remember that each preparation has the power to work for. or betterment, the power of actual radium. And it goes on and on about the miracle of radium, guaranteeing the best results ever for perfumes, lotions, night skin creams, et cetera, for only two bucks a jar, you could buy toxic night cream, you could buy some radioactive ruse for just a dollar per box.

So now you might be wondering, how did things go from the Curie's initial discovery of radium to all this cure-all quackery? Well, it started almost a mean. back in up to 1902 that year an american inventor named william j hammer billy fucking hammer traveled to paris and obtained a sample of radium salt crystals directly from the curies and through some experimentation he found he can make dark paint glow by mixing radium with glue and zinc sulfide which glows when exposed to radiation hammer's discovery was then quickly put to use by the united states radium corporation previously the radium luminous materials corp to produce Undark, a special paint used to create luminous watches for U.S. Infantrymen. The United States Radiom Corporation went on to receive some valuable government contracts during the First World War. Undark was also marketed for household products such as house numbers, pistol sites, light switch plates, eyes for toy dolls and more.

No reason not to radiate the kids' toys. Dr. Sabin Arnold von Schakke, Sochaki, the dude who's, he, the dude who, who came up with the specific radioactive recipe for Undark, and the founder of the USRC would die of radium poisoning, years later, November of 1928. Colleague of his had died shortly before him of the same damn shit. Essentially, their fucking skeletal systems disintegrated. Their bone marrow stopped producing new red blood cells.

They died slowly and painfully. And before they died, they and others in the industry knew exactly what was killing them. While the dangers of radium were not widely known to the public in the mid-1920s, various company executives and scientists, you know, the people marketing and making all these lotions and potions and paints and shit, they were becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of radiation, and they were taking efforts to protect themselves, just not the public or anyone else.

At the United States radium corporation, chemists started to use lead screens, masks, and tongs when working with undark paint. Lead had been adopted for radiation protection almost immediately following the discovery of x-rays back in 1895, by the way. the USRC would also soon distribute literature to the medical community, describing the harmful effects of radium, but no protections would be given to their factory employees, who were not warned that they were figuring out that this shit was basically melting motherfuckers.

The USRC dial painters, or the radium girls, as they became known, had begun painting luminous numbers on watch, clock, and instrument dials using radium-laced paint starting in 1917. And by the mid-1920s, when scientists and management, again, definitely started to truly understand the extreme dangers of working with radium, they still were not being warned in factories in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut. The company didn't want to lose all that fucking glow and watch, Mool-Ap. So they kept sacrificing their workers' health to keep the cash flown into their pockets.

So much watch money to be made. Before World War I, wrist watches in general, primarily worn by women. But then that changed after soldiers started to use wrist watches, since pocket watches not considered practical for combat. the demand increased the number of luminous watches produced in factories around the U.S., therefore increased the number of women exposed to radiation daily. It's believed that around 4,000 girls and young women would work in these factories in the early 20th century. And soon these women hired to paint the dials came to be known as ghost girls. They were called ghost girls because they literally started to glow in the dark.

They were that radioactive. Many women would wear their best dresses to work so they could get them nice and grays. glowing before going out after their shifts ended? Out swinging and speakeasies, they literally glowed on the dance floor. Some girls even put glowing radium paint on their fingernails or directly onto their teeth to brighten up their smiles. And why wouldn't they put it directly on their teeth? They were used to putting that shit in their mouths at work.

They were told to by their bosses to do exactly that. Painters were specifically instructed to use their lips to create a fine point on their camel hair brushes, a technique called lip pointing. Lip dip and paint, ladies. They were told to sharpen their brush in this way For each and every number they painted They were 12 numbers on each watch To be painted, women painted 200 or more watches per day

That is at least 2,400 paint dips into their mouths Every single day And some of these women worked in these factories for years And whenever they asked about the safety of ingesting this paint They were assured that there was absolutely nothing to worry about This stuff was the best, it was a cure-all You're going to be healthier than anyone else of anything radioactive pain is so safe.

They continue to be told that even when their bosses knew exactly what that shit was doing to people. That's fucking evil. The women, of course, believed their bosses because most of them had likely read articles promoting radium as a miracle cure. And they didn't just assume

that they were working for demons. It's estimated that these dial painters ingested a few hundred to a few thousand microchurys of radium per year. And just one tenth of one microcury is the maximum level of safe exposure to radium. When the public began to learn about the dangers of radiation exposure, the

USC assured their customers that the radium in their paint was so minute it was harmless. And when talking about most of the actual products, that was true. But the conditions in the factory still extremely dangerous. Hundreds of women were employed at the USRC factory in Orange, New Jersey, between 1917 and 1926, where most of the worst cases of radiation exposure would later be publicized. It was a good job, right, in terms of high pay for the day. So all kinds of women, eager to apply and work there. One ad placed in the Free Trader Journal in Ottawa Fair Dealer in Ottawa, Illinois, for one of these factories, said radium dial studio studio, requires the services of several girls for studio work. Ideal location and surroundings.

Unusually clean and attractive work. Good pay while learning. Dial painters were paid five cents per watch there, average 20 bucks a week, making them, or placing them. in the top 5% of female earners nationwide at that time. But of course, these dial painters eventually began to experience the monstrous side effects of radium exposure. And pretty early on, too. For example, started in 1921. Numerous dial painters at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey,

started to complain of a mysterious illness. Maybe some complained even before this, but their complaints were never published. And before I share details of the horrors, the first known victim went through. time for today's second to two mid-show sponsor breaks thanks for listening to those sponsors now let's meet molly magia one of the first known victims was amelia molly magia who painted watches for the us rc between 1917 and 1921

her symptoms began with a terrible toothache she had the tooth extracted had a pulled out soon needed another tooth pulled out and then another and her teeth weren't just getting cavities they were crumbling and falling apart. And then once extracted the holes in her gums never seemed to heal properly. And pus-filled ulcers developed where her teeth had been.

These symptoms continued throughout her mouth and lower jaw. Can you imagine your mouth just starts falling apart? You're terrified, you're in pain, and you have no idea why this is happening. And then one day, Molly's lower jaw bone just shattered after her dentist lightly touched it during an exam. It broke so badly, her entire lower jaw had to be surgically removed.

And then she has fucking no lower jaw now, keeps getting more and more sick, the damage had spread throughout her body. Molly Magia died September 19th, 1922 from an organ beginning to hemorrhage. Her insides were just melting, just like her teeth had, basically. She was only 25 years old. And get this, doctors at the time were unsure of her cause of death. But instead of just admitting that, instead of just writing unknown, one wrote that she had died of syphilis, which is just a little bit fucked up.

How did she die, doctor? I have literally no idea. It's a mystery. Well, we can't write that. We have to give her family some kind of reason. Yes, of course. Let's just tell her family that she died from a venereal disease. She probably got from fucking everybody in the alley behind the local speakeasy.

Molly's deaths was quickly followed by 21-year-old Helen Quinlan and 22-year-old Irene Rudolph in 1923. Helen had worked at the dial painter for just 20 months. Irene had worked at the factory for two and a half years. Many more women were now getting very, very sick. By 1924, a group of these women firmly believed their mysterious illnesses were caused by their work at the U.S. Radium Corporation, and they reached out to health and labor departments with this concern. And according to information on a blog by the Science Museum Group, three separate state investigations were completed, but absolutely no action was taken.

So the women turned to the next, or turn next, to the Consumers League for help. which was a reform group that represented female workers specifically, still their complaints essentially ignored. The USRC refused to accept any responsibility and insisted publicly that Radium was harmless, while privately they knew better. Their entire business model depended on continuing to convince the public that their poison was actually medicine.

What a business to be in. Then these morally bankrupt assholes publicly claim that all the women complaining about Radium were actually all suffering from syphilis. They painted them as loose women with poor morals specifically to discredit their testimony. And they fucking did that despite the fact that in March of 1924, the USRC had conducted an internal investigation led by Harvard physician Cecil Dr. Dr. Drinker, solid doctor name, told the company that Radium was almost certainly the root cause of the women's illnesses.

Drinker wrote the following about factory conditions in his report. Dust samples collected in the workroom from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the dark room. Their hair faces, hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclothes, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous. One of the girls showed luminous spots on her legs and thighs. The back of another was luminous almost to the waist. The president of the USRC rejected the doctor's findings and buried the report. Even more deceptive, the USRC then submitted a fraudulent report with completely falsified information to the U.S. Labor Department in its place. And the government didn't realize what they had done until August of

1925. By that point, regardless of any studies or reports, the word was getting out. By the mid-20s, there was a growing body of evidence of a strong link between radium exposure and jaw necrosis, as evidenced by the Molly Magia case. Pathologist Harrelin-Martland and dentist Joseph Neff published a paper discussing high levels of radioactivity in examinations of living dial-painters and high levels of radioactivity in the autopsy of deceased dial-painer Sarah Carlo Milifer. Their paper presented what the researchers felt was a definitive link between dial-painting and radium poisoning. Martlin developed a test that conclusively proved radium poisoned the dial-painers by destroying

their bodies internally. The radium ingested by the workers became embedded in their bones, accumulated over time. this internal source of radiation killed healthy cells and destroyed bone marrow and blood cells. Meanwhile, publicly the radium girls were fighting back against the industry's

ongoing attempt to deny all of this. More of them were dying, and they wanted to help other girls who were still working with radium. The USRC continued to deny any connection between the women's deaths and their work as more and more factor workers

experience painful, deadly symptoms. More women had teeth that were falling out, more previously healthy young women were suffering from anemia, deterioration of their jaws, various forms of cancer. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, quote,

the alpha radiation in the paint they had ingested, had eaten away their bones from the inside out. Some had a plastic anemia. Others had collapsed hips and backbones so damaged that they needed braces from the neck to the waist in order to stand up straight. What a fucking brutal way to go, right? Their bones are too destroyed to even stand.

stand up. And yet when the company they worked for had given their falsified report to the New Jersey Department of Labor, they had written that, quote, every girl is in perfect condition. The president of the company, Arthur Roder, disregarded all the advice. And see Dr. Drinker's original report made literally none of the charges or changes, excuse me, recommended to protect the workers. The false report was later discovered by Drinker's colleague, Alice Hamilton in August of 1925. She sent him a letter about it, which caused Drinker to be like, what? that's not what I fucking wrote. He went public and he published his original report in a medical journal. The U.S.R.C. had threatened legal action for him having the balls to whistleblow on them and publish the actual truth, but good on him, he went through with it anyway and got the information out there.

Meanwhile, more women are getting sick and dying. By 1927, over 50 women had already died, many of them newlyweds with young children at home. At same year, five women filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corp. The women were. Quintamagia, McDonald, Edna Husband, Albina Magia, Larice, Catherine Shab, and Grace Fryer, and the poor Magia family. Three different sisters, Quinta, Albina, Molly, whose death we covered earlier, all destroyed by radiation. Grace Fryer first developed her symptoms in 1922. Her teeth started to loosen and fall out with seemingly no explanation. Her jaw became swollen and inflamed. She went to a doctor for an x-ray. Bone decay was found. Her job was full of a bunch of tiny holes where the bone had just completely wasted away.

Grace went to several doctors to try and get a diagnosis and then similar cases started to pop up in the area. One dentist noticed that several women were suffering from deteriorated jaw bones and the common factor was that all of them, without exception, were employed by the same glow-in-the-dark watch painting factory at some point.

Then in 1925, a doctor suggested to Grace that her jaw problems were directly caused by her old job at the USRC. She looked into her further, saw a specialist from Columbia University named Frederick Flynn, and Frederick said she was in fine health. Who the fuck was this guy?

A quack, a con artist, paid to deceive her. Dr. Flynn was not a doctor, licensed or practice medicine. He was a toxicologist, and he worked directly for the USRC. And a colleague of his, who confirmed his misdiagnosis, one of the VPs of the company,

right? Those sneaky fuckers. A lawyer named Raymond Barry would help Grace Fryer and four of the women file their suit. They each sought $250,000 in damages from the U.S.RC, which equates to about $4.7 million today each. During the lawsuit, it would be revealed that the U.S.R.C. scientists and management had made all sorts of efforts to protect themselves from the radium once they knew it was dangerous, but continued to do nothing to protect the workers. while the lawsuit was ongoing dentist Joseph P. Neff, who co-wrote the report on radium poisoning, examined the jawbone of Amelia Magia, the deceased dial-penter who worked at the USRC. As a reminder, Maggie's official cause of death had been labeled syphilis. Neff suspected no, radium poisoning.

And when you exposed the bone to dental film, it detected, quote, an absurd level of radiation. The company now switched their defense strategy. Instead of continuing to argue that the women had argued that the women had They argued that since the women had left the factory before they got sick, the radium-based pain could not have caused their illness. But that simply wasn't true. They were sick when they were working at the factory, right? More lies.

They stopped working at the factory when they got too sick to be able to work at all. The hearings would take place in January and April of 1928. By the April hearings, all five women now too sick to attend the hearing in person. Two of them completely bedridden. Grace Fryer couldn't even sit up anymore without wearing a back brace. Attorney Raymond Berry called an honor an expert to measure radiation in them and present the data for them in court. The expert was Elizabeth Hughes, a former lab assistant in the radium section of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly called the National Bureau of Standards. Hughes had been hired by the NIST back in 1919.

She was tasked with calibrating sealed radium sources using a, quote, gold-leaf electroscope. And according to the NIST, quote, that device consisted of a small lead-line chamber with a thin gold leaf suspended from a metal rod. When Hughes applied a voltage to the electroscope, the suspended gold leaf accumulated charge and tilted relative to its original position. When Hughes placed a small amount of radium at a fixed distance from the electroscope, gamma radiation emitted by the radioactive sample entered the chamber and ionized the air, causing the electroscope to discharge and the leaf to move back to its original.

position. The faster the leaf moved observed to a small window in the electroscope, the more radioactive the sample. Physicist Noah Dorsey helped develop this device. Dorsey told Hughes that radium was hazardous, which as we know was not known to the public at this time. Dorsey had suffered burns from handling radium samples himself. Norsey took a leave of absence in 1920, and Hughes left to take a position as a physicist at the USRC. She worked there for two years, measured the amount of radioactivity. activity and paint samples for quality control. In 1922, Hughes co-authored a journal article with her supervisor, Victor Hess, a renowned Austrian

physicist, on rapid methods for measuring radium and rocks and sediments. She would leave the company by late 19202, and from 2025 to 1927, she occasionally worked as a consultant for the former president of USRC measuring radium samples. When Hughes was hired by attorney Raymond Berry, she used an electroscope to measure the breadth of the five dial painters who filed suit. All five had preposterous amounts of radium just constantly being emitted from their bodies, just in their breath.

Just so crazy how it can stick to you like that. In our April 1928 court session, Hughes testified that all workers and scientists should be protected from radium exposure, that the material burned the hands of almost everyone who was in direct contact with it. Company lawyer Edward Markley then attacked Hughes' character.

He questioned how someone riddled with syphilis could be an expert in anything other than Dix. he told the court that if a dick expert was needed Hughes should be brought in for that trial but this was man's work right this was for the guys so how about she take her sweet little ass and purty little mouth and go home

no Ed wasn't quite that shitty he was pretty fucking shitty but maybe not that shitty Ed did attack Hughes's credentials not her character attacked her credentials even though she worked for the company he's represented was rehired by them many times over the years

Hughes acknowledged that yeah she was currently a housewife who had not worked regularly in a lab and five years and that her breath measurements provide but that her breath measurements provided qualitative indicators of radioactivity. Then Hughes described how she collected the samples. She had each woman breathed through a series of bottles for five minutes. The bottles contained calcium chloride to remove moisture, glass wool to remove dust, and sulfuric acid to trap other chemicals, so that only air and noble gas radon would be collected for analysis. The bottles were connected

to the electroscope chamber and a suction port drew the air through the chamber. Voltage was applied to the chamber. If there was sufficient alpha radiation, it would cause the gold leaf to discharge and move. That was not speculation. That was science. And for all five women, the gold leaf moved at least twice as fast as the normal drift rate she measured with controls, which meant the women had ingested so much radium, their breath still toxic, years after they stopped being exposed to radium. To go fuck yourself, Ed.

you don't know shit about radiation, so sit down at the kitty table, wait until the grownups are done talking. Her expertise, unfortunately, would not help as much as it should have. There was national outrage when after the April 1928 hearing, the case was then adjourned until September because several U.S. R.C. higher-ups who were supposed to be witnesses. They were in Europe, vacationing for the summer, right? How lovely. Just enjoying some of that blood money they'd made while young women trying to hold them accountable were dying, penniless, and in pain. many worried now that the five young women would not even be alive

when the next hearing was held. At least their lawsuit now made national news and because of that news, radium safety now became a worldwide issue. When Marie Curie herself heard about what was happening, she said, quote, I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could. There is absolutely no means

of destroying the substance once it enters the human body. Damn, the expert of all experts just confirmed that these women were indeed going to die. newspapers around the nation started calling the five women the radium girls and more ominously the living debt walter lippin an editor of the new york world newspaper called the decision to adjourn until september a quote damnable travesty of justice there is no possible excuse for such delay the women are dying 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 well said well Walter. The following is an excerpt of a May 10th, 1928 article published about the case by the New York paper, by the New York-based paper of the world. In New Jersey, there are five women who have for a year tried to obtain a hearing in the courts. They are crippled by radium poisoning, contracted in the plant of the United States Radium Corporation at Orange, New Jersey, where they were employed to paint numerals on the dials of watches. 13 other women who worked in that plant are already dead. These five women are doomed. Six physicians have examined them and agree they have only a short time to live. On May 13, 1920, the Sunday Star, a paper for Washington, D.C., published interviews with the five women in an article titled Five Women D.I.N.

The article asked the readers, what would you do with the final month remaining of life? If the doctor told you that you were dying, that there was no escape, and though you might be going about your affairs today as usual, nothing could be done. to save you. Five young women who live in Newark or at suburbs have this problem before them. They are under sentence of death by disease, which they have been told cannot be cured, with each day bringing the end swiftly near. The paper reported that 10 former co-workers had already died. Their death certificates listed the cause of death as pernicious anemia, probably secondary to exposure to radioactive substances. Each woman discussed how they felt about their impending deaths. Catherine Schaubb said,

I can't tell just how I feel about it because my mind changes all the time. Sometimes I feel, sure, the doctors are wrong, and God won't let me die. Other times a shudder goes through me. I feel so old, too, and as if I never appreciated life before. I want to enjoy the spring.

Grace Friar underwent 25 separate jaw operations in just one year, trying to save what was left of her damn mouth, while the rest of her body was also falling apart. By the time of her interview, the bone in one of her arms was partially gone. Grace said, I am happier at work. I think it is good for me to be out in the air. And I like to be with healthy people.

If only I could catch health the way I caught this disease. Ooh, that's fucking painful. If only I could catch health the way I caught this disease. Edna Husman told the paper, What the doctor said has frightened me into changing my way of living. I have a good deal of pain and I am crippled. but as long as I can I'll go on the same old way

because it's pleasanter than any other in the evenings my husband takes me out driving and if there's no pain at the time I manage to forget religion it seems more precious than ever Quinta McDonald gave the following statement I suppose it's true that I think about it more than I used to and I try to live better

than I ever did before hope for this life well the doctors say there isn't any they call it hopeless just the same I'll never give up permanently, I mean, because occasionally I do get very depressed. Yeah, how could you not get very depressed in this situation? Albino Larisse was the only one of these women who was not a minor when she was employed by the USRC.

She said, I've given up keeping house in my old way because it is too hard for me to get the meals. But I stick to the old routine all I can, for I want to seem natural and like other people. Of course, I feel awfully close to the four others. I hope to be cured, but I want people to know that our suit is for the benefit of our families in case the doctor's prediction comes true. Albino will actually live far longer than the rest of the Radium girls. Suing alongside of her, she will live until 1946, dying at the age of 52. Meanwhile, national backlash will lead the courts to reschedule the next hearing, moving it up from September to early June.

By then, excuse me, but then, that hearing will never take place. On June 4th, 1928, the New Jersey women accepted an out-of-court settlement with the U.S.RC. The USRC originally had offered the five women a lump sum of 10 grand with a stipulation all doctor and lawyer fees would be deducted from that payment. Those assholes remember these women had asked for $250,000 each and the USRC's counteroffer 10 grand total. The women refused to accept. The company then offered them the same lump payment of 10 grand plus a payment of doctor's bills and a yearly pension of $600. A yearly pension for women thought by many to have months, not years left. to live still just wanted it to be over and done with the women agreed to these terms and then

quinta maggie mcdonald died the following year december 7th 1929 at the age of 29 catherine schaub died four years later february 18th 1933 only 30 years old grace fryer died october 27th 1933 at the age of 34 ednobo's husband died in march of 1939 at the age of 37 and as i mentioned Albina Magia, Larice, died November 17th, 1946 at the age of 52. The USRC lawsuit did fortunately, at least set a precedent for future suits and make it easier for other women to sue. In 1938, former worker Catherine Wolf Donahue successfully sued the Radium Dial Corporation because of her illness didn't win a lot, but at least she won, I guess.

You won a $277 annual pension for life and an additional $730 in awarded compensation from the Illinois Industrial Commission, while she died very shortly after the ruling, like within weeks, her husband did receive approximately $5,700 in total. The Radium Dial Corporation had opened a facility in Ottawa, Illinois in late 1922, and Catherine had started to work at that facility shortly after it opened. The Radium Dial Co claimed that the element mesothorium, a radioactive isotope of radium was the problem at the New Jersey plant, but the Radium Dial plant, their paint, it was super safe because it didn't contain that.

that pesky, rascally mesothorium. When Catherine Donahue and others had initially tried to sue back in 1935, they ran into a statute of limitations roadblock, but they were finally granted a hearing with the Illinois Industrial Commission, July 23rd, 1937, attorney Leonard Grossman had only accepted their case two days prior. By that point, the Radium Dialco had closed its Ottawa plant, but opened a new plant in New York.

Despite the initial setback, the women will win their case in 1938. Catherine Donahue had to give testimony from her bed, after she collapsed at the hearing. Radium dial filed numerous appeals, but Catherine at least survived long enough to learn that the company's first appeal had been denied. She passed away July 27th, 1938, the day after the second appeal was filed

at the age of 35. 1939, the Radium Dial Co went out of business, kind of. The owner opened another factory just a few blocks away called luminous processes, which operated until 1978. The old Radium Dial building became a meat packing plant and a farmer's co-op.

How much radioactive meat were they shipping out of that place? It was finally demolished 1968, and then the contaminated rubble used as landfill and buried around Ottawa. The luminous processes building was later used as a meat locker, even though it was still full of radium particles. There are 16 sites in and around the city that are now part of the Ottawa Radiation Area Superfund site, and Superfund sites are not super fun.

They are locations that have been dangerously polluted, by hazardous waste. The United States Radium Corporation went through a long period of decline following the Radium Girl tragedies, but remained open, and then they profited greatly when there was a huge surge in demand for luminescent products during World War II. During the war, the company operated mining, processing, application facilities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, even in New York City. The company then downsized after the war, but kept chugging along and went through a reorganization in 1979. A corporation called Many of the United States. A corporation called Metriel Incorporated was created to hold some of the company's assets, and manufacturing

operations were moved to new subsidiary corporations. In May of 1980, U.S. Radium created a new holding company called U.S.R. Industries and then merged itself into its new holding company. And then in 2005, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finally declined to renew licenses for the company's Bloomsburg facility and the EPA added the facility to the national priorities list for remediation through Superfund. And now let's wrap this up. While they didn't get the settlements, they should have gotten.

And while no one was held criminally responsible for their deaths like they should have been, the Radium Girls lawsuits were among the first cases in the United States in which a company was held responsible for the health and safety of its employees. The increased awareness of workplace safety led to a variety of reforms and the creation of the U.S. occupational safety and health administration, OSHA. Guess many of you have heard of them. 1949 Congress passed a law that gave workers the right to receive compensation for occupational illnesses, radium-infused watches, interestingly, not discontinued until 1968, but safety regulations were improved, lip pointing, thankfully was banned following the Radium Girls case, and all workers were required to wear protective equipment when working with hazardous materials. Legislation was introduced to recognize radium poisoning as a compensable occupational disease. Surviving radium girls were tested. for decades, which contributed to scientific knowledge on the long-term effects of radium exposure.

In 1950, some scientists at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, studied the women to establish standards for nuclear and atomic safety. In total, it is estimated that radium caused the deaths of at least 112 dial painters. A woman named May Keen was one of the last surviving radium girls. In 1924, 19-year-old May had been hired at the Waterbury Clock Company, and Waterbury, Connecticut. She was paid eight cents a dial. May and the other women were told, like the rest of the Radium girls, that they could paint faster if they sharpen their brushes with their lips. But May didn't like that. The paint tasted bitter to her, seemed dangerous. And she

was fired at the end of the only summer she worked there for low productivity. She was upset at the time to lose a job, but overjoyed years later, when her former co-workers started to die, and she learned about the true danger of Radium. Still, despite her comparatively brief interaction with Radium, despite barely putting that shit in her mouth, she lost all her teeth by her late 30s. Luckily, the rest of her body somehow weathered the exposure remarkably well. She would die in 2014 at the age of 107.

She may do without her chompers for around 70 years, so I guess teeth are overrated. Fuck teeth! The Waterbury Clock Company, where May worked, was at one time the largest clockmaker in the U.S., the company was able to manufacture clock movement small enough to fit in the pocket. 1923, like when that was a brand new thing. 1923, the company partnered with Disney to get licensing for a Mickey Mouse watch.

And I do wonder if that's how May lost her teeth for making radioactive Mickey Mouse watches. That's weird. Company left the city in 1944. That same year, it was renamed the United States Time Corporation, now known as the Timex Group. I used to wear a Timex watch myself as a kid, one of the Timex Iron Man. watches thought it was so cool, glad it wasn't radioactive. The original Waterbury Clock building now houses low-income apartments that hopefully are not radioactive. Waterbury never publicly admitted that their former employees died from radium poisoning, but they did

compensate the dial painters and promise them free medical care. And all of that is a great illustration why government watchdog agencies are so important. Left of their own devices, incentivized only by profit, there will always be employers and corporations who will happily and nefariously work you until your fucking bones rot out of your bodies and your teeth fall out of your skull in order to make a buck

if we don't stay on top of them. And that is it for this edition of TimeSuck Short Sucks. Glad we have better safety controls than we used to. My God, if you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic Catalog, beefier episodes at Time Suck Mondays on noon Pacific Times. new episodes the now long-running

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