26: Women Were Poisoned by Their Job for Years: The Radium Girls
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

This is an ad by BetterHelp. What?

What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better, even when it's impossible to make time for them. Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow.

Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.

Hi friends, how are you doing today? I hope you're having a wonderful day so far. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to my couch. My couch that's full of dark history. Ooh, wouldn't that be fun if I could just like dig in here and then pull out like, oh shit, whoa, you know?

Fun. Okay, great. So if you are new here, I'm just letting you know that this is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who are like, hey, isn't history boring? Like it was really boring in school.

And I'm here to tell you, no, no, babe, no. This is where we can learn together about all the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories that our teachers never told us about. Because there's so many. There's so many. History is fun. It's all about how you look at it or read it, whoever's telling it to you. And that's why I come in.

Hmm. Do you ever like wonder where that glow-in-the-dark stuff comes from? Like how do things glow in the dark? That's what we're going to talk about today because it's pretty fascinating. Like it's kind of magical when you think about it. Did you ever have those stars you put on the ceiling and then at night they'd glow in the dark and you're like, oh my god.

Yay. Yeah. Anyways, so glow in the dark. The main thing that makes it glow in the dark is like radium. And recently I learned radium is a poisonous kind of glow in the dark. Yeah. You know what else is poisonous? Aqua to fauna. Shout out to Madame Tofauna. We're always thinking of you. You know what else is poisonous? Abuse in the workplace.

Anyway, my takeaway from this week's story, well, maybe we should believe women are whistleblowers, okay? And when someone is saying, hey, all of my teeth are falling out. I think something is seriously wrong. I don't know. Maybe you should listen to them.

Well, in like the workplace. I feel like if you come across someone on the street and they're like, my teeth are falling out, you're going to be like, well, yeah, I mean, okay, and, you know? So it's debatable. I always overcomplicate things. I really do. That's my job here. All right. So let me grab my dark history book because I almost forgot. So let me open up my dark history book to the chapter of radium. Here I go. Ooh. Ooh.

Ah, found it. Let's get into it. All right, Joan, buckle in kitty cat or birdie because this is going to be a wild ride. That's probably going to piss you off per usual. Yeah, girl, I know.

Alright, so the year 1902 and the industrial age is upon us and factories are the main source of income for the working class. Everyone is moving to bigger cities for work, right? Including a family of German immigrants known as the Schaub family.

So one of the Schaub children, her name was Catherine. Now Catherine had dreams of being a professional writer someday, but her family was so poor. She ends up dropping out of school at the age of 14 years old to start looking for work to help support them.

So one day Catherine's friend tells her about this new factory job in town. She's like, "Hey, like this isn't like any other factory job. This is a watch studio." She's like, "What's that? A watch studio?" And it's basically a bunch of young women working together, making way more money than any other job in town.

And all you had to do was paint watch dials with like a small brush and it literally made the numbers glow. So it's like a, you know, your watch face with the numbers on it. The numbers are going to glow in the dark so you could see it and be like, oh, it's 1.13 PM. Very specific, but you get it. To Catherine, this sounds like a dream. She's going to make great money and all she has to do is paint numbers on a watch. Sign me up.

So on February 1st, 1917, Catherine walks into the watch studio in Newark, New Jersey, and it's everything she ever dreamed of. The four women walked her around the factory to show her the ropes. She was like in awe as she watched all the dial painters sitting in different rows, like just dressed casually and just painting. And these workers were moving so fast. Catherine said that their hands were a literal blur. Like,

just so fast. But it wasn't the dials that really got Catherine's interest. Oh, nay, nay. It was the bright green glowing paint that they were using. And that paint was made of a chemical called radium. So let's talk about radium for a second. What is it?

Well, in 1898, radium was discovered by a scientist named Marie Curie, which is a great name, by the way. Marie Curie? Marie Curie! We love that. And her husband, Pierre. When it was discovered, scientists all over the world said, like, it was one of the greatest finds of history. The main reason was because it turned out that high enough doses of radium could destroy human tissue in just days. I don't know why that sounds like a good thing. It sounds pretty awful.

but doctors quickly discovered that it could be used to destroy cancerous tumors. At one point, people thought radium was going to be the literal cure for cancer. The U.S. Surgeon General would call it a mythological super being. Others would call it the unknown god.

Very quickly, radium became one of the biggest industries on earth. It was put into medical supplies like bandages and pills to help with healing. And for the rich, there were even radium clinics and spas where their skin would literally glow and make their skin glow. I mean, they were like, what's that vampire's name from Twilight? It was like that. There were radium jock straps and lingerie, radium butter, radium milk.

A range of radium cosmetics and radium toothpaste, which was like going to guarantee a brighter smile with every brushing. Radium was even said to pump up men's sex drive. Now, the problem was that nobody ever stopped to think that adding this kind of mysterious substance to their bodies could maybe, I don't know, be bad.

And guess what? Surprise, surprise. It actually was. But because it was brand new, there hadn't been enough time to really see the harmful effects radium could have on the body.

So in the 1910s, a huge industry popped up that started making wristwatches covered in radium paint. And this industry became even bigger when World War I happened. Most of the battles took place at night in dark trenches, so there was a huge need for soldiers to have a watch that they could see at nighttime. The biggest company that sold these kinds of watches was called the U.S. Radium Corporation. And this is the very same company our girl Catherine was working at.

Like most people at the time, Catherine was in love with radium and super thrilled that she got to work with it all day, every day.

Not only was it beautiful, but it was extremely expensive. One gram of radium cost $120,000, which is over $2 million today. Working at these wash studios was actually a really glamorous job. In the factory, each painter had her own supply of paint. To make the paint, they would dab their brushes into the powdered radium, then mix it with some water and adhesive.

The paint had a greenish white color known for its strange glow. The company even trademarked the name of the color and called it "Undark."

Yeah. Undark. That's unique. Now, since the radium came in powder form, it would get all over the place when the jars were opened. And throughout the day, the loose powder would slowly fill the air, land on the workers, making them glow. Catherine didn't care though, because you know, that was just one of the perks of the job. She literally got to shine while getting paid to paint watches. Honestly, sounds great. She's glowing. Like girl, you are glowing.

Catherine mostly worked with other girls around her age and many of the women were also immigrants and she quickly made friends with all of them. So let me introduce you to them really quick because they come up a lot.

So first we have Grace Fryer. She was like the super smart ones, the brain. She was 18 years old and she had two older brothers who were fighting in World War I and viewed the watchmaking as a patriotic duty. Duty. Then we have Albina and Molly Maggia, two sisters aged 21 and 19. Albina was a clumsy one and Molly was a productive one.

since she was one of the fastest workers there. Then there was their younger sister. Her name was May, who was known for her million-dollar smile.

This friend group was super tight. They were super close. They would share lunches on top of the radium-dusted tables. They would gossip about boys, gossip about the co-workers. You know, work friends. BFFFFFF. Then after work, they'd like to go out on the town, have drinks at a bar, and just hop around the town. Little did they know that in just five years, one of them would be dead from radium poisoning. Oh, but first an ad break.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.

Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com slash Dark History today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Dark History. So while Catherine and her friends are having the time of their lives and unknowingly poisoning themselves with radium, let's talk about a doctor who was the one who actually owned the factory Catherine worked out. This man's name was Sabian Von Shoshaki. I feel like I nailed it.

Dr. Sabin created the undark paint formula as a way to make a little money so he could fund medical research on radium itself. But he quickly discovered that he could make way more money just selling this glow-in-the-dark paint by itself.

So he gave up on the medical research and took his business from selling radium paint to making radium watches. In his first year of business, he only sold 2,000. But by 1917, he was selling millions of watches per year. Sabin was incredibly respected for his hard work and ethic and his deep knowledge of radium. Magazines would rave about how he was one of the greatest scientific minds in the world.

He had learned everything he knew about radium from none other than Marie Curie and her husband Perry. What?

But while he was studying with the Curies, he heard Pierre say he would never be in a room with a kilo of radium because it would burn the skin off his body, destroy his eyesight and probably kill him. And Dr. Sabin is like, oh, LOL. So Dr. Sabin had even witnessed the dangerous powers of radium when a speck of radium accidentally got under the nail of his left index finger.

It started burning so badly that Sabin cut off the tip of his own finger. Yeah, could you imagine? No. My point here is that Dr. Sabin knew all about the dangers of radium, but that didn't stop him. Since he was making so much money off the watches, Dr. Sabin kept quiet. And the public image about radium would remain positive for decades. I mean, long after it was first discovered to be dangerous. They didn't give a shit.

Even though Saban knew how dangerous radium was, he freaking loved it. He would sit in at meetings or even alone in his office in the dark, holding glass tubes of radium with his bare hands, just watching it in awe as it glowed right there in his hands. He was just like, wow, this is fucking cool, bro. You know? And yeah, like this was after he cut off his own finger. So.

There was even this one time that none other than Mr. Thomas Edison warned St. Ben not to mess around with radium so carelessly. If you remember, Edison knew what prolonged exposure to radiation looked like. Remember the x-rays?

it was not pretty and you will undoubtedly die if you expose yourself to it on purpose. So I guess if Thomas Edison is one of the heroes in this story, then someone is probably fucking up big time. It's only a matter of time before this product was going to cause some real harm to all the dial painters at the watch studio, especially since in order to get the radium and all those tiny little like details on the watch, the women had to lick radium

the brushes, you know, lick the tip. The brushes the girls used were very, very tiny, but they had a tendency to spread or like fray and the girls would accidentally paint outside the lines. So to make sure that the brushes would stay pointy and fine, they did something called lip

pointing. the girls would take the tips of these brushes, dip them into water after painting a little, then stick the tip in their mouths to make sure the brush just stayed nice clean and pointy. oh and they would do this after the brushes were covered in radium so they were just straight-- it's not funny. i'm laughing because of just like this is just awful because they were straight up just eating radium.

I know, Mayday, and they have no idea. It's not like this was something the girls had been super careless about. The first thing most of them asked whenever they got hired was, is this safe? I mean, the paint glowed in the dark. Plus, some of the girls that trained the new dial painters had deep red sores around their mouths. Yeah, so maybe that should have been a sign. But the supervisors would tell the girls that there was nothing to worry about.

So in 1918, Catherine is having a great time working at the watch studio, but she starts breaking out in a lot of pimples. Not just like a lot of pimples, but like a lot of pimples.

Now at this time, she was only 15 years old. So you and I, even she, are probably thinking, you know, it's normal, right? Teenagers, acne, they go hand in hand. Well, Catherine also started to notice some other strange things happening. Some girls were covered in sores. Some had super stiff necks and also just fucked up

backs. Others had mysterious rashes on their face or arms. And every other girl seemed to be going through just something. Even a few older women started to have pimple outbreaks just like Catherine. So Catherine decides to go see a doctor. And after a standard medical exam, the doctor tells her, like, he has good news and he has bad news.

The good news is that the pimples are not a big deal. Catherine's 15 and that's called hormones. But when he goes to tell her the bad news, his tone changes. He asked her like, where do you work? You know? And she was like, I work at the watch studio. And the doctor asked Catherine if she works with a chemical called phosphorus. And she's like, IDK. Why?

So the doctor explains that her blood work shows that her blood had changed. And the way that it changed was similar to a well-known disease called Fosse jaw. This was a type of phosphorus poisoning so extreme that it could eventually lead to your entire jaw just falling off. Did you hear that, Joan? Have you ever noticed that Joan's head is tilted like what the

I know. Every time I look at you, I'm like, I know. They were losing Joss. They were zombies. Literally. Let's take a moment and breathe. Uh,

Exhale disappointment once again. So Catherine was pretty chill about this news. She's like, jaw, who needs it? Just kidding. Of course, Catherine freaked the hell out, okay? She went to work the next day and she's like, you guys, all her friends, she's like, you guys, my blood had changed. Our jaws are gonna fucking fall off. Like...

This is all going to happen to us because of this stuff we're licking. So they're all freaking out. And immediately they go to the supervisor demanding answers. Is there phosphorus in this paint? If not, like, why are we all getting sick? Oh my God, is radium dangerous? Like, am I going to die? And just...

obviously nervous, right? As one would be. And the supervisor told the girls to just relax, calm your tits. Radium is harmless. He told the girls, it's probably your hormones. You're just acting up because hormones. Now that didn't go over great. And this supervisor calls his supervisor who then calls his supervisor. And that supervisor is none other than the owner of the company,

Dr. Sabin. So all the supervisors and Dr. Sabin sit the girls down for a lecture on radium. Now during the lecture, they mentioned that radium is kind of, sort of dangerous, but only in huge amounts. Dr. Sabin was silent for most of the lecture, but he chimed in to mention that the watches couldn't possibly have enough radium to do any harm. But here's the thing.

Most of the girls were barely listening to the lecture because they were all so starstruck that Dr. Saban was there in the first place. Like, he was a genuine worldwide celebrity. He was Mr. Worldwide before Mr. Worldwide was around, you know? Because he was a radium expert, and he was the founder of a huge, successful, sexy watch company.

I mean, they would later say that it felt like a huge honor just to be in his presence at all. So when he says that watch painting wasn't making them sick, sadly, they believed him. I mean, why would he lie?

Why would he lie? So after this, the girls all went back to work and even started joking about how silly they had been. They're like, oh my God, we're so silly. And they were now convinced that any sickness happening at the studio was just a huge coincidence. Now, the girls would get mysteriously sick every now and then, but they never really thought anything of it.

Everybody stopped thinking about how Catherine's blood had changed or about how the doctors had told them about Fosse jaw. By all accounts, I mean, life just kind of went on. Let's pause for an ad break.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24-7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop because members get cash back at over 3,500 stores across every category, including fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, and more.

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Something was going on. World War I has been raging for a few years, and the watch factory has hundreds of workers now making these watches. One in every six United States soldiers owned one of these glow-in-the-dark watches, and word has started to spread. Basically, if you own one of these watches, you can be just like your heroes overseas. Yay! And very quickly, the radium watch industry became one of the largest on Earth.

Then, November 11th, World War I came to an end. Now, you might think this spelled doom for Dr. Sabin's business, but nay, nay.

Soldiers came home and when people saw their cool watches, it was like a mad dash to grab one. And the people who did have one already were lining up to get the latest and greatest version. So what I'm getting at is that the business was booming and the watch factories had to move. But first, they were going to cut half the workforce by letting some of the girls go and transferring others to the remote factories.

There was just one big problem. The demand for the watches increased and so did the workload, but now there were literally half as many workers. Plus, to make some extra money to cover the cost of building the new factories, the decision was made to turn this operation into a seven day per week job.

Seven-day work weeks were legal and extremely common back then. So you either got with the program or you just didn't work. But this workflow simply did not fly for a lot of girls at the studio. Now, many of them started to quit. As for Catherine, the work was starting to catch up with her. I mean, at this point, she's 16 years old and her legs were like always hurting her.

Plus, she felt super weak all the time, she had trouble sleeping, and she would get sick way more than she ever used to. She thought it was because of the increased workload and maybe because she's just getting old. I mean, she's 16 now. She's so old. So in the spring of 1920, Catherine finally decided to quit the watch studio because she was tired of feeling sick all the time, okay? She's like, I want to move on with my life and just go.

Get over this. Now, the only members of the old squad working there were Albinia, the clumsy one, and Molly, the productive one. Now, Molly was really sad for a while that all of her friends were gone, but in September of 1921, she didn't give a shit about that anymore. She was upset with how much her freaking mouth hurt

Okay? She's like, what the hell is going on? A few weeks earlier, she had gone to the dentist because she had a really bad toothache. And the dentist told her that the tooth was completely rotten, dead,

And it needed to be removed ASAP. Okay? So that's what he did. But then a week goes by and she's like, the pain's not getting any better. So she convinced herself that the problem wasn't with her. Maybe it was with her dentist. So she decided to get a second opinion from a different dentist. His name was Dr. Joseph Neff.

Now, Dr. Joe was an expert in mouth diseases and was known for being able to identify super rare and strange things going on in your mouth. So she told Dr. Joe that the pain in her mouth was so unbearable. So he looked into her mouth and noticed that even though it had now been like a month since Molly's tooth was removed, the wound, it wasn't healing. It hadn't healed at all. But he also noticed that all of Molly's teeth were just loose in general.

Dr. Joe recommended that Molly come in for like regular checkups so he could figure out like what is this all coming from? Molly returned to the dentist a lot but over time she never seemed to be getting any better. Dr. Joe couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with her mouth. Every visit he would have to take out more and more teeth and the wounds in her mouth just never healed.

infections started appearing in all of the holes and at this point Molly's still working at the studio but she is struggling she was just in pain all the time and she was still having to put her mouth on that damn brush for her job and even that was becoming painful Dr. Joe could not figure out what was wrong with Molly and he became even more horrified when he realized he didn't have to pull her teeth anymore because they just started falling out on their own

Molly was literally falling apart in front of Dr. Joe's eyes. So eventually Dr. Joe referred Molly to a new doctor. Now Molly's new doctor immediately diagnosed her with a mysterious condition, sores in the mouth,

joint pain, extreme tiredness, a young single woman living away from home, all of that means one thing and one thing only. It's syphilis, baby. Hey, shout out to syphilis. It wasn't syphilis. We know that now. But then the doctor was like, girl, syphilis, you got it. You got it, you know?

So he ends up testing Molly on January 24th, 1922. And he, the doctor gets the results back and he's like, oh weird, it's not syphilis. So now he's just confused because he was like, it's fucking syphilis. So to make this even more exhausting, Molly goes back to Dr. Joe and she's like, what the hell is going on? She's like, I think it has to do with this thing called phosphorus poisoning. I heard about it a while ago, but we all ignored it. Like, I think it might be that.

but it wasn't exactly the same. So Dr. Joe asked Molly where she worked and he decided to do a little of his own investigating. We love that. He went to the radium plant and he asked if there was phosphorus in the paint. Now, nobody wanted to tell him anything since the paint was like their own secret recipe, like freaking KFC. Yeah, whatever. Okay, but one of the scientists did tell him one thing. There is definitely no phosphorus in our formula for our paint.

By this time, Molly's entire lower jaw and the roof of her mouth and even the bones in her ears were one big infection. Talk about ouch.

There was no way she could continue to work at the studio. So she quit her job and she was on bedrest. She only ever left the house to visit Dr. Joe, hoping that he could help find some kind of cure, but he never did. And then in September, 1922, the mysterious infection that had plagued Molly for a little less than a year spread to the back of her throat and started eating through the tissue of her jugular vein.

for a watch, mind you, but we don't know that yet. Spoiler. Just one week later on September 12th, Molly died. She was only 24 years old. And like a very painful death, my God. It would be two years before the United States Radium Corporation looked into the cause of Molly's death. And in that two year period, another dozen or so women died in very similar conditions.

Okay, an awful, slow, terrible deaths. The company hired some Harvard University scientists to figure out why so many of the girls were dying in the first place. Very quickly, the scientists discovered the plant, the employees, and the product were coated in radium dust. Their conclusion was that the deaths were definitely related to the radium. Of course, because this is America, the US radium company refused to publish the study.

There were dial painters all over the country who were just dying mysteriously, so a few independent doctors began running their own tests. One of the bodies they ran tests on was indeed Molly, and the doctors did a test for radioactive elements in Molly's bones, and they discovered that every single one of Molly's bones showed lethal levels of radioactivity.

The doctors concluded if Molly's dead bones looked this way, the same could be true for the living bones of the dial painters. They knew that the radium dust was bad on its own, but the real culprit here was the lip pointing process. Every time the painter put a brush in her mouth to bring the bristles to a sharper point, she ended up swallowing radium or absorbing it just right through her skin. Our

Our bodies mistake radium for calcium. So when you ingest radium, the body stores it away in your bones the same way calcium would be stored. And remember how radium destroys human tissues?

Well, spoiler, it does the same thing to your bones. This would explain why the woman's bones and especially their teeth were becoming so weak and just falling out. The doctors came to Dr. Sabin with their findings and were shocked to discover he already knew how dangerous radium could be. When asked why he didn't tell the woman about the hazard, he said that he had warned other members of the corporation, but like he also said the women were out of his jurisdiction. Whoopsie. By

By 1927, more than 50 women had died in Sabin's factory as a direct result of radium paint poisoning. Now the girls of the radium studio would get revenge for this, but first they had to find out why all of this was even happening. Ad break.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24-7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.

Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory. So let's back up a little bit. Talk

So I could tell you a story. This is the story of a girl who was known as the Radium Girls. It's not funny, but that's what we're talking about. Because I'm going to tell you a story of how these women became known as the Radium Girls. So it's the Roaring Twenties in Orange, New Jersey, 1923.

This woman, her name's Grace Fryer, she no longer works at the watch studio and has a new job as a bank teller. It's closing time. Hey, this is a musical. We got a musical today.

It's closing time at the bank and all the girls just want to go out dancing, right? So they quickly make plans to head to the local speakeasy. But Grace, she's like, I don't really feel like dancing tonight, you know? For the past few weeks, Grace had a sharp pain shooting from her back down to her feet. And she recently had to have two teeth pulled by her dentist. Much like Molly, the wounds in her mouth, they just weren't healing. She now had bad breath.

and a lot of blood and pus in her mouth. So her co-workers thought a little dancing and drinking would cheer her up.

Like, sure, okay. I mean, they tried. Now, Grace's former work bestie, remember Catherine, was a few blocks away and she was also suffering from a toothache. Now, the newspapers were quickly filling up about these mysterious deaths of all of Catherine's old friends, including Molly, and how every death began with a toothache. Now, she was getting sick of all her friends dying. She was like, this sucks. And she knew something needed to happen fast.

So she decides to file a complaint against the wash studio with the Department of Health, making it a point to mention the death of Molly and all the mysterious illnesses. Catherine told them it was a priority to investigate the studio. It's not clear what they said to Catherine, but she left feeling very confident that something big was about to happen.

So the Department of Health files a memo asking the studio if what Catherine said is true. And the studio accuses Catherine of being a lying little bitch.

Now, to make matters worse, during their investigation, the Department of Health interviews people who say Molly died of syphilis. Yeah, syphilis. So they conclude, Catherine, this bitch is overreacting. Okay, she's probably just hormonal like the rest of them. This completely destroyed Catherine. This was supposed to be the big thing that changed everything.

She didn't know what to do next. Like, where does she go now? No one's listening to her. And then one day, Catherine gets a phone call from Dr. Joseph himself, the dentist who treated Molly. Now, it turns out another one of Catherine's old friends, her name was May, was having the same health problems as the other girls and had decided to also go to Dr. Joe for help.

Dr. Joe was never able to get young Molly out of his mind, and when May came to him, she barely even had a tooth in her skull at all. So he knew he had to figure out what the fuck was going on.

Dr. Joe reached out to all of his other dentist friends asking if there were any other stories of women having teeth rotting out of their skulls and guess what? There were at least four other women going through the exact same thing at the exact same time. So he asked the dentist to send the women in and one by one they arrive.

The women are Catherine, Grace, and Albina. Now, whether he meant to or not, Dr. Joe had gotten the old gang back together. There was one other woman, Edna. Ed?

Edna! She wasn't part of the original group, okay? She's like the new member of this group, but she had worked at the factory with them. Everyone knew Edna as the Dresden doll because of her beautiful hair and she had like a super gorgeous smile. But when the women saw her that day, they didn't even recognize her. She had no fucking teeth. Her beautiful smile snatched, stolen.

Dr. Joe informs them that he's made a breakthrough while looking into everybody's sickness. He discovered the doctor's study about the effects of radium on Molly's body and then informed the girls that this wasn't phosphorus poisoning at all. And he was so sorry for saying that it might have been that.

He told them without a shadow of a doubt that it was radium that was killing them. And unfortunately there wasn't a cure. Yeah, soon each of these women were gonna die and there wasn't nothing they could do. I mean, we're all gonna die, but like they were gonna die faster. I'm glad we cleared that up. So not surprisingly, all of the girls would later say this was a moment of pure darkness for them. All of the girls, that is except Catherine, she actually started laughing. Oh, that's so me.

She started laughing. Oh my God, Catherine. Yeah, same Z. She started laughing and she told everyone it was a relief and everyone was like, what? Like Catherine, we're all gonna die. And she looked at each of them in the eye and said that because of this, now they had the perfect evidence for a lawsuit.

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Grace, the smart one, was actually the one who set up the lawsuit, but she had trouble finding a lawyer at the time. One time it turned out that the lawyer she did find was a stakeholder in the U.S. Radium Corporation. So she had to start all over on the hunt because this person obviously isn't going to like represent her fairly, right? Right. Right.

Eventually, in 1927, she managed to find a lawyer to represent her, Catherine, Edna, and the Magia sisters. Now, this story would quickly become national news with headlines like, women doomed to die of radium poisoning. Very dramatic.

Some of these headlines were more critical of the women saying things like, this is a settlement of a pathetic case. Of course, like, you know, throughout history, just blame women and all that stuff. We love that. No matter what the tone of the article was, there was one thing about the case that truly took off in the news cycle.

I just kind of, I kind of love it though. By the time of their first court appearance, the radium poisoning had completely destroyed most of the women. None of them even had the strength to raise their arm for the oath and two of them had to leave.

literally lie in beds in the courtroom during the trial. But perhaps the grossest thing at this trial was that the witnesses from the United States Radium never showed up because they were too busy vacationing in Europe. Of course, this caused a delay for the next hearing as well, but eventually the trial date came and witnesses actually showed up, including the president of the corporation who decided to take the stand. When on the stand, the president was asked,

"'What was the first case of radium poisoning that you knew of?' And he answered, "'I don't recall their names.' And one by one, each of the higher-ups at the company said the same thing. "'I do not recall their names.' The independent doctors from earlier spoke at the trial too, and all the evidence they showed was simply too compelling to ignore. Radium ingestion leads to permanent poisoning and a horrible death, and the watch studio knew the dangers but did nothing to stop it."

The case ended up being settled in the women's favor in 1928, with each woman being awarded around $100,000, which today is like $1.6 million. Unfortunately, though, most of the women barely even got to cash their checks because within just two years, each of the original radium girls had passed away. Fucked up.

Because of the trial, everybody around the world became aware of the dangers of radium. The lip-pointing technique finally was discontinued, and now all of the women working in these factories were given protective gear. Oh wow, thanks. And I wish I could say that this is where the story of the radium girls ends, but it's not.

because the women of the New Jersey factory were not the only radium girls. In Connecticut, another company existed called the Waterbury Clock Company that saw countless women die of radium poisoning, eventually having to issue over $90,000 in medical settlements.

So rough for them. There was also another factory in Ottawa, Illinois going through the exact same thing. Long, painful deaths from radium exposure, lip pointing, I mean all of it. But in this case, the town actually begged the women to look the other way. Ottawa was a small town and they thought like this kind of attention would just be super bad for the community. Plus it was the middle of the Great Depression and like I said earlier, these watch painting jobs...

they paid better than any other entry-level job and money over everything as we've learned over and over and over again. In conclusion, all in all, we'll never actually really know how many of the women at these factories across the country died of radium poisoning because they didn't care enough to actually look into that, but between all three of these factories alone, over 4,000 women worked in the industry were affected by radium poisoning.

and honestly, it doesn't really matter. There are hundreds of women who died in the course of this story alone, so this story barely scratches the surface of the issue. With a half-life of 1,600 years, once the radium was inside the women's bodies, it was there for good. It was said that you could take one of those radiation measuring devices, it's called a Geiger counter, shout out to you Geiger, and

you could like place it over the graves of any of the radium girls and it will click for over a thousand years. Detecting radium is what we're saying. If you live by where the radium girls are buried at, send me a video of it, of you using the Geiger thing. I know, step one, go get one of those Geiger machines. I know, I'm asking a lot here. Step two, go out to where they're buried. Step three...

Step four, send me a video of it. I just, if you want, if you have time is what I'm saying anyways. Radiation effects on the human body are largely known because of the radium girls and the way scientists have been able to study them over the years. Medical research found that the dial painters had ingested between a few hundred to a few thousand microcurries of radium per year.

Today, the maximum safe exposure is considered to be one-tenth of a microcurry.

There's too much math. It's a fucking lot of radiation shit, radium in their bones and stuff, okay? You get it. The main takeaway here is that, you know, you should never have to die for fucking living wage, god damn it. And the companies you work for, I don't know, hey, idea, maybe they should enact safety measures to make sure that no one dies. C, triangle, shirt, waist, DuPont. Yeah, DuPont, this is DuPont before DuPont. Book...

Well, Joan, what did you think of that story? It's pretty fucked up, huh? Does anyone care about us out there? Let me know down below. Who's looking out for us? Anyone? No? All right, cool. Let me just shut this book. Cool. Well, everyone, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. Remember, money over everything. And don't be afraid to ask questions or be a curious cat because we deserve the whole story. You deserve that.

Now, I'd love to hear your reactions to today's story, so make sure to use the hashtag darkhistory over on social media so I can follow along and see what you bitches are saying. Join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs. And also, don't forget to check out my other series. It's called Murder, Mystery, and Makeup, which drops on Mondays. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Make good choices. Bye.

Dark History is an Audioboom original. This podcast is executive produced by me, Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Dunya McNeely from 3Arts, Ed Simpson, and Claire Turner from Wheelhouse DNA. Produced by Lexi Kiven. Research provided by Tisha Dunstan. Writers, Judd Bookout, Michael Oberst, Joey Scavuzzo, Kim Yageed, and me,

Bailey Sarian. Special thank you to our historical consultant, Timothy Jorgensen. And I'm your host, frickin' Bailey Sarian.