The Deadliest Job Of All Time | Random Thursday

what's the worst job you ever had because there's a lot of different kinds of bad jobs out there and they all suck in their own little sucky ways there's the physically demanding job where you just wear down your body over time there's the straight-up dangerous job where you put your life on the line every day there's the mentally exhausting job that brings you to the breaking point on a daily basis there's the boring repetitive job that just makes you feel like another cog in the machine and then there's now all the jobs that exist things the internet like the overpaid know-it-all social-media influencer or douchebag there will probably always be crappy jobs at least until super intelligent AI comes along and automates us out of existence but as bad his job might be today they don't want a candle to the just astonishingly dangerous jobs of the past for most of human history workplace safety just wasn't really a thing it just was a completely foreign concept if something had to be done you just threw a whole bunch of human life and suffering at it you know the ancient Egyptians weren't exactly going through labor unions to build the pyramids in fact for most of human history most of the work was done by a slave class that wasn't even being paid for their labor luckily here in the land of the free we only tolerated that for about a hundred years or so it wasn't really until the turn of the last century that the whole idea of workplace safety got any attention at all with the birth of Brotherhood's of railroad workers the Knights of Labor the American Federation of Labor and in work-friendly laws that provided protections for workers now before you guys start getting political in the comments and start complaining about labor unions and mobs and corruption and that kind of thing let's talk for a second about phossy jaw those of you who are squeamish just might want to you know not be here for this one Fosse jaw is also known as phosphorus necrosis of the John it's also called the dear God why at the bottom half of my face falling off disease because that's what happens your jaw falls off it's unpleasant white phosphorus sometimes called yellow phosphorus was used in matchsticks in the 1800s the problem is when the matchstick workers were exposed to phosphorus vapor it would combine with water and co2 to create vais phosphates in the mouth by phosphates this would lead to pervasive tooth aches eventually the teeth would fall out the gums would swell and release pus and of nice sweet sweet smell decay as the phosphorus eat through your jawbone eventually the jawbone would just separate from the rest of the face which led to a common look that many matchstick workers had with their mouths just kind of hung open all the time in fact it was common for people with fussy Java wrapped scarves around the top of their heads just to keep their mouths closed this was obviously excruciating for the person that was suffering through this and eventually their jaws would have to be removed just to save their lives Fosse jaw was first linked to white phosphorus in 1839 by a physician in Vienna but companies continued to use it throughout the 1800's which eventually led to the mastic workers strike in London in 1888 Finland was the first country to ban white phosphorus and matches in 1872 in the United States eventually banned it with the white phosphorus match act of 1912 this forced the match companies to use red phosphorus which worked just as well as white phosphorus but they avoided doing it for 73 years because say it with me it was a little more expensive luckily this was the last case of a company putting their workers at risk just to save a buck except no it totally wasn't in 1917 a mere five years after the United States banned white phosphorus we entered World War one and this was the first war where airplanes play the big part and this bird on the invention of glow-in-the-dark paint which made it easier for pilots to see their instrument panels at night by the way I love the name they gave this stuff they called it unde Ark it's like darkness but um they could have also named it unsafe because it was safe except totally not because under was made of zinc oxide and radium a fact that the company who made undock cleverly hid from the public by naming themselves the United States radium corporation a quick background on radium it's a radioactive element that was discovered by Marie Curie in 1898 and she did experiments with it throughout her life and it did eventually kill her via aplastic anemia in fact the doorknobs to her lab are still dangerously radioactive to this day fast-forward about 20 years in the u.s. RC began hiring in their Factory in Orange New Jersey to support the war effort and much like later on in world war two and world war one a whole bunch of women came out and joined and started working in the factories to support the war effort and a job at the radium corporation was actually considered a pretty good job at the time you know there wasn't a lot of loud heavy factory equipment to deal with it was air-conditioned and it pretty well radium girl could make $20 a day just painting dials $20 a day doesn't sound like much now but considering back in the day you could get a whole house for 3,200 bucks not bad which I could get a house for 3,200 bucks and the only downside is you know early death that kind of thing you just have to weigh how much you want to keep living versus how much you like air conditioning and by the way it's not just that they were handling dangerous radioactive materials is that they were doing so while being told that it was completely safe in fact that when they were coached to do what they called the lip dip paint technique where they actually used their lips to pull the brush to a fine point they were just ingesting this stuff day after day after day and they actually thought that the paint was so safe that they actually used it to paint their fingernails because they found that at night when it glowed it was fun and alluring it's not like the company didn't know that this was dangerous okay the managers would actually wear lead aprons when they walked out of the floor and they handled the paint with ivory tongs cool guys tight and inevitably of course bad things started to happen and the first unfortunate victim was a girl named Molly mogea so radium does is it binds to calcium so it finds its way into the bones where it kind of pokes holes in the bones making them brittle and weak and it affects the bones that the body stresses the most so like the legs and of course the jaw much like phossy jaw it started as a toothache as her teeth were pulled that was replaced by dark pustules using blood and pus her legs started hurting so bad that she couldn't even stand on him anymore and as she became bedridden her job continued to deteriorate eventually breaking apart into several pieces eventually her whole jaw had to be removed and it was so fragile that as they pulled it out of her face it literally crumbled in the doctors hands sadly Molly died soon after due to complications when a blood vessel burst in her throat and the doctors perhaps at the head of the company listed her cause of death is syphilis ah the old let's get out of our responsibility by calling the woman a [ __ ] a bit a classic sadly Molly's horrific experience would repeat itself over and over and over and over again in the u.s. our C would continue to deny responsibility even after an independent study linked their destiny imposing they just and did their own study which shocker said that they weren't responsible for it in fact the claims of the factory workers weren't taken seriously until the doctors who treated them began dying of radium poisoning the death of dr. Edwin Lehman finally resulted in a class-action lawsuit against the company by the workers but if you think that things are about to get a little bit better they are not because the judge in the case postponed the trial over and over and over again until the women just had to settle out of court which of course means that the company didn't have to admit to any wrongdoing now nobody knows exactly why the judge did this but the fact that he was a shareholder in the United States radium corporation sure that had nothing to do with it the only real good news here is that this case did get widespread news attention and led to lawsuits and other radium corporations yes there were more than one and some of these did actually go in the favor of the plaintiff it was because of the plight of the radium girls that eventually watchdog groups like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were formed but sadly most of the radium girls didn't get to actually see this take place because they all died and by the 1930s now it might be tempting to ask why these women were so willing to work with such a dangerous substance or say they were too stupid to know any better but in all fairness there was kind of this radium craze going on at the time you know how in comic books people become superheroes because they got exposed to gamma rays or some kind of nuclear energy people kind of believed that back then like that's where those ideas and the comic books came from when we first discovered radioactivity people were just fascinated by this idea that energy was just coming out of rocks and stuff I mean surely you could use that to give yourself vim and vigor so they actually put rhenium and all kinds of stuff thinking it was good for you there was a drink called rad a Thor that contained radium salts and was praised for its health benefits it was a radium infused toothpaste called doma red that was said to make your teeth whiter with the power of nuclear energy there were radium treated pots called riveters that would infuse water with radium when you drink out of it spas even offered radium mud baths and skin treatments stuff like this was everywhere so of course the factory workers didn't think twice about working with radium they probably even thought it had some health benefits the difference is the water and the toothpaste and all that stuff they just had trace amounts of whereas the Sun dark stuff was just loaded with it in fact I covered in a previous video the story of David Hahn the nuclear boy scout and he actually collected clocks that had radium glow-in-the-dark paint in it and used that to make a working nuclear reactor so ya just smear some more of that stuff on your lips there ladies now I would love to say that the radium girls and the phossy jaw were isolated cases but they are very not from the Hatter's and the haberdasher that went crazy from mercury poisoning to the mule spinners cancer that affected workers in the textile industry this isn't by no means unique today you hear about horrible working conditions and places like Amazon's fulfillment center and of course the threat today is that if humans can't keep up the pace then they'll just be automated out of a job completely as long as it cost companies less money to settle lawsuits than to improve workplace conditions there will always be occupational hazards and before anybody goes on an anti capitalism rant in the comments I should just point out you know Chernobyl 3.6 rongkhun not great not terrible but i'll wrap this up by going back to my first question what's the worst job you've ever had let's see if anybody can beat losing their jaw from work talk about it down in the comments alright thanks for watching if you're a longtime viewer I hope you enjoyed that and if you're a new viewer I also hope you enjoyed it but Google thinks you might like this video too so you might want to check that out or any of my other videos down there and if you only like them if you enjoy this kind of stuff I invite you to subscribe I'll come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday t-shirts available at the store answers with Joe comm slash shirts they're fun they're cool check them out thanks again for watching you guys go out and now I have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday hope you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 484,392

Rating: 4.9433312 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, radium girls, radium, radioactivity, dangerous jobs, world war 1, glow in the dark paint, undark, phossy jaw, white phosphorous, matchstick women, cancer

Id: 31iZZcTmDsg

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2019