A Brief History of: The Radium Girls (Short Documentary)

radioactive elements have found many uses since the first discoveries in the late 19th century they have affected almost every person for good and bad at least once in their life radium known for its eerie glow would play a part in not only scientific discovery but US employment law however like most subjects on this channel a few unwitting victims would pile up along the way I [Music] looted to covering this subject in my video on David Han and after putting it to a vote to my patreon it found its way to what you are watching now now I know this subject has been covered a bit by other YouTube channels recently but after reading up about it I just had to look into the subject 100 years ago things that glow in the dark were a serious novelty electricity hadn't made its way into everyone's home yet for example my Nan's house and Sluggo didn't have running water at fist time either so the idea of something melis aluminous without any sunlight or power was pretty impressive particularly watching clock faces were pretty useful for a bit of eerie glow as look at your watch at night or early morning proved pretty annoying if you can't see the time quickly and clearly the discovery of radium and its luminous properties opened up a market for glow no dark items and the radium girls before we get on to that let's look at the wider context of the radium craze of the early 20th century after his discovery in 1898 by the Curry's radium permeated itself into the public consciousness very quickly as a Wonder element it's early uses were for cancer treatment and it proved very effective how this kind of gave manufacturers a green light to put radium into everything during height of the craze radium was added to pretty much every consumable item you can think of from toothpaste to tonic makeup and even food such as the power of radium to the public consciousness that the radioactive material reached prices of around a hundred thousand dollars which ironically price Curie out of being able to purchase it for research which nearly carried to tour the u.s. to raise funds to purchase just one gram she'd already been a Nobel Prize winner since 1903 one such deadly tonic was ready for it consisted of triple distilled water containing a minimum 1 micro Curie each of radium-226 and two to eight isotopes it was the pinnacle of quackery with claims like a cure for a living dead and perpetual sunshine although the tonic would kill athletes even buyers from radiation poisoning in 1932 he consumed so much over around 1,400 doses but he needed to be buried in a lead-lined coffin ingesting such an element in the early 20th century seemed like the norm and this neatly leads us on to the plight of the radium girls the United States radium corporation was founded in 1914 in New York City and has started out producing uranium however the company changed its business model during the radium craze to creating luminous paint called undock with the creation of undock in 1917 the company began to move towards the application of the substance undock was a mixture of radium-226 and zinc sulfide the mixture made the paint luminous and u.s. radium had a good market being a defense contractor in supplying painful watches for the military but this left a middleman or in our case woman and that is in the application of the under up to the clock u.s. radium set up a factory in Orange New Jersey and hide around a hundred staff mainly consisting of women for the purpose of painting clock dials and faces with undock the facility at orange also processed half a ton of ore per day the job of a doll painter was well paid for the time and was considered a top end job working with a glamorous and exciting substance known for its health benefits to achieve a precision paintbrush end and not waste the expensive undock the workers were instructed to point for camel hairbrush by placing it in their mouth each time this was done a small amount of carcinogenic radium was ingested and management said it was perfectly safe to put radium in your mouth because of the perceived high status of the job from the title being called an artist and again working with an exciting wonder substance many of the workers encouraged their sisters and other family members to join up what workers didn't know was that the scientists and management's working on the ore wore protective clothing and stood behind protective screens however this was not all happening within just one company around 4,000 workers in total over the US were employed in various businesses involved with radium but the other big player in our story was the radium dial company based out of Ottawa Illinois the company was set up in 1922 to supply painting services for the West clocks Corp and also employed the lip dip paint method management paid workers a few cents for each item they completed giving an incentive to complete on average two hundred and fifty dollars per day ingesting four thousand micrograms of radium in just six months so add more exposure some of the workers painted their nails lips and even teeth with the radium paint even those who hadn't painted themselves came out of the factories at the end of each shift with a glowing hue from the radium dust that has settled on their clothing this led some workers to not wash their clothes in order to keep the glow as some even came to work in their best outfits in order to get the radium glow however despite promises from management and a perceived health benefits around 50 young otherwise healthy workers died by 1927 how did radium cause to damage as you know radium is radioactive and like all radioactive elements it kick kill the cells within your body this lends itself very good for pinpoint cancer treatment however this is done in a controlled environment we've carefully measured doses in exposure time radium emits alpha and gamma rays as it decays which kills off healthy cells in your body around 80 percent of the element when ingested is passed through your body and eventually leaves via feces 80 percent doesn't sound too bad but it's really not great as the remaining 20% enters your bloodstream finally making its way into your bones where your body mistakes radium for calcium which essentially radiates you from within lead to cancer as well as numerous skeletal issues including but not limited to teeth falling out jewels crumbling spine collapsing and bone fractures and breaks this leads us back to the radium gills by the mid-1920s a number of workers had been taken ill and had passed away many of these deaths were covered up by putting the cause of death down to syphilis a sexually transmitted disease in 1924 u.s. radium hide industrial hygiene expert Cecil drinker along with Kathryn drinker his wife and William Castle to investigate the growing scandal the team agreed to visit to the Orange New Jersey Factory to observe the watch dial painters at work and speak with their doctors the team from Harvard was shocked at the working conditions and a close proximity to the dangerous element a report was prepared damning the working practices of us radium one such quote red dust samples collected in a work room from various locations and from chairs not used by the workers were all luminous in the darkroom their hair faces hands arms necks four dresses we under clothes even a corsets of the doll painters were luminous one of the girls showed luminous spots on our legs and thighs the back of another was luminous almost at a waist Drinker set out a list of improvements to help with the safety of the workers herve u.s. radium in response denied the link between the injuries of the workers and the environment that they worked and in not at all scummy and morally wrong move u.s. radium president Arthur Rhoda threatened for drinka team with legal action if they were to ever publish to report reluctantly drinker complied however he found out that u.s. radium had submitted a doctored version of their report to the New Jersey Labor Department basically saying with drinka fought that the whole operation was a okay this prompted drinker to publish his original damning report on US radium's working practices to a scientific journal leading a New Jersey Labor Department to order u.s. radium to implement all of drinkers recommendations essentially shutting down the factory whilst this was running the case of the radium girls came into the public eye in the form of a trial grace fryer had worked for years radium between 1917 and 1920 until a change of a career to work in a bank not long after taking up a new job she started to feel discomfort in her jaw after a loss of a number of teeth she visited a dentist radiographs were taken and showed her jaw to have a moth-eaten pattern she visited a number of doctors to find a cause of the problem however unsurprisingly radiation poisoning was not an ailment that any of them had come across however a trend had started to materialize in the New Jersey area as a number of women reporting similar symptoms began to succumb to the effects of exposure everyone had one thing in common though that they were or had been employed by us radium grace in 1925 decided to take legal action against her previous employer however it would take two years for her to find a lawyer willing to take on the powerful defense contractor in 1927 attorney Raymond berry took the case and with four other u.s. radium employees brought a suit against the company the suit claimed two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per person with the first hearing in January 1928 by now to DES claimants were bedridden u.s. radium filed a motion to deliver proceedings because of some of the members of staff being on holiday which is a bizarre reason but odder still the judge granted a delay until September the tactic was used to try and wait until all the claimants were dead however this came to the attention of newspaper columnist walter Lippmann via Harvard professor Alice Hamilton after public pressure the date was brought forward to June however the case was settled out of court with US District Court Judge William Clark who was also a stakeholder in u.s. radium mediating the five radium girls agreed that each would receive ten thousand dollars and six hundred dollars per year while they lived and that all medical legal expenses would also be paid by the company the agreements also stipulated payments for all future medical expenses which would be determined by an impartial panel how the u.s. radium wouldn't have to pay out for many years as the last one of the five litigants died in the 1930s in an ironic twist inventor of radium base paint died in 1928 from aplastic anemia a side-effect of radium exposure in Illinois a similar story was unfolding for radium dark corporation from 1927 when employees started demanding for health care costs however it wasn't until 1937 murder case was brought against radium dial from five employees and it would take eight rulings against a company before they paid any type of compensation applied to the radio girls brought the risks of industry to the forefront of many people's minds collecting media and claimants was set a precedent for future abuses of workers rights though it wouldn't be until the 1960s that ralien based paint would be made illegal u.s. radium in orange left even more of a mark when it's directly affected workers as the factory site in orange became a designated Superfund site after 1600 tons of polluted material needed to be disposed of thank you very much for watching I hope you enjoyed the video if you'd like to have a say on future videos and even get early access to our new videos you can on my patreon for just one dollar per creation I've also got a PayPal donate link if you'd like to buy me a drink and I've also got a Twitter as well and always said to say is thank you very much for watching

Channel: Plainly Difficult

Views: 327,474

Keywords: Atomic, Nuclear History, Education, Plainly Difficult, radium girls, learning, science, US Radium

Id: De7aMkdpHZ8

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020