Rotten Mango - #176: Torture Deaths of the “Ghost Girls”

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

The dead list - well, he called it the “List of the Doomed.” On there was a long meticulously written list of 50+ local young girls. In the years to come he would sit down, pull out his little dead list, and in a red pen, he would methodically write “D” next to a name. D for dead. Another one is dead. It didn’t matter if the girls on the list knew they were doomed. It didn’t matter how much they tried to protect themselves. Once they were on the Doomed List they were going to die a painful death. Not a single girl on the list would survive. Full Source Notes: rottenmangopodcast.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rambles. Whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist in the office parking lot, or being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift, whether you're running on your Peloton tread at your mom's house while she watches the baby, or counting your breaths on the subway. Peloton is for all of us, wherever we are, whenever we need it, download the free Peloton app today. Peloton app available through free tier or pay to description starting at 12.99 per month. Better being better, boo. Welcome to this week's main episode of Rotten Mango. I'm your host Stephanie Sue.

And let's talk about the dead list. Well, that's what he called it, the list of the doomed. It was a long list of names. All the names on the list were woman in the local area. And the handwriting, oh, it was so neat. Everything, every single name, every single line was so meticulously written, and each line had a new name. Catherine, Shob, Grace, Fire, the list went on and on to list more than 50 different names. And in the years to come, he would sit down, pull out his little list, and in red pen,

he would methodically write the most perfect D next to each name. D for dead. Another one, dead. It didn't matter if the girls on the list knew they were on the list. It didn't matter if they tried to protect themselves. Once they were on his list, they were doomed. They were going to die a very painful death, and there was nothing that they could do about it.

Is this the real death note? Do you guys remember that? The manga where a journal has the power to kill whoever's name is written on there? Well, this is like that, but in real life, and instead of a journal or a notebook, it was ironically on the back of an empty autopsy report, the list of the doomed, the list with a hundred dead girls on there, not a single girl on the list would survive. As always, full show notes are available at rottonmingopodcast.com, but there is an incredible book on this

case called The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. I mean this book, I loved it for so many reasons, it's wild, it's mind boggling that this even took place. This book is such a fantastic deep dive on of this. I literally have nothing but praise for this book, which is honestly well researched. It was difficult to put down, I recommend you go pick up a copy, give it a read, and in the meantime, if there's anything else Kate Moore has written, I'm gonna be reading it. And just a side note, a lot of you guys have been requesting this. I don't like to name. It's so unique you would have never guessed it. We do visual short versions of the podcast over on TikTok. We got all these like fancy editors to do the editing. So truly, it's like, it looks good.

So go check it out. That's rotten Mingo Pod at TikTok, with that being said, think about the most painful way to die. And you probably won't even come close to what happened to the girls. One of them was tortured with having paper thin skin. If she just so much to scratch to her arm, that part of her arm would be infected. It would never heal. It sounds like an astymedical experiment. Like that's what it sounds like. Her skin is paper thin. Yeah. Another girl had her spine shattered inside of her body. She couldn't walk, she couldn't move.

Without the feeling of the fire, burning pain, just shooting throughout her entire body. Another girl's entire face started to essentially mold. Her flesh and bones were decaying to the point where doctors said her head was extremely rotten, but somehow she managed to be alive still. Another girl had a black fluid seeping out of her mouth and nose, and one's chin was swollen to the size of a football. I mean, it was pure torture every single second of it, and in the end, there would be no

hope. There would just be more painful death, and death at this point would have been an act of mercy. Let's talk about radio. Radioactivity is a loaded word. Literally. Okay, that's a lame joke. First of all, tell me why my mom is so adamant that I don't sleep next to my charging phone because she is convinced that it admits radioactivity into my little brain. She is certain that it's going to make me dumb. Yeah, my mom believes if I keep self-poin in my my pocket, we are not gonna be able to produce any more child.

Yeah, the amount of times that she has sent you articles, pretty much confirmation by us seeing her whole theory about this is insane. Jokes on the both of them, we're not having kids, and I'm dumb. Okay, but regardless of whether our parents like it or not, radioactivity is pretty much everywhere You cannot escape it even a small percentage of potassium is radioactive and we literally need potassium to function as human beings That's why you'll randomly have people be like wait don't eat too many bananas

They're not good for you because They're radioactive Bananas it's yeah, it's typically because bananas have a decent amount of potassium, but the radioactivity in bananas is super minuscule. I mean, you would need to eat 10 million bananas in one sitting to get acute radiation poisoning. Maybe you're like, wait, I can't even make a pass too before my bowel start having a field day. Maybe you're like, I really want to drag this shit out. I want that

chronic radiation poisoning. You would need to eat 247 bananas every single day for about seven years. Honestly, you're more likely to get radiation poisoning from Brazil nuts, which is actually the most radioactive commonly eaten food. That's why you're only supposed to eat one Brazil nut a day. Really? Yeah, Brazil nuts contain Brazil nut is the one that's the big one. Oh, yeah, nobody likes those. Yeah, right. Radioactive. I actually really like Brazil nuts. Well, they contain radium, which is what we're talking about today. So you're thinking, oh my God, this is the case of the Brazil nuts serial killer. The guy has been tying up girls and force feeding them strictly a diet of Brazil nuts

every single day. That's all he gives up. Now they have radiation poisoning. Well, not quite. In order to fully understand today's story, we have to quickly talk about the difference between acute and chronic radiation poisoning. I'm so sorry. You're already looking up at the ceiling.

What's going on? Okay. Listen, I'm going to try to make this as quick and painless as radiation poisoning can be, which is not painless at all. Acute radiation poisoning means that your body absorbs a large amount of radiation in a short period of time. Acute sounds cute. It sounds like small minor. Oh, I didn't even notice. But it's not. It's going to have devastating consequences. Think Chernobyl, think what happened to Japan

at the end of World War II. I mean, that's a very extreme example, but that's acute radiation poisoning. But even with acute radiation poisoning, death is sometimes not that sudden, nor is it that brutal immediately. Sometimes, there's a few years where you live in complete bliss.

You might not even know that you were exposed to a large amount of radiation. Until your bones start decaying out of nowhere. And by the time those symptoms start kicking in, you will typically die in excruciating death in just a few weeks. Now chronic radiation poisoning is somewhat more forgiving, even though it sounds more intense. It means that over a long period of time, you've received slightly higher than healthy amounts of radiation. It's definitely more forgiving than a nuclear bomb, but it's not going to be good for you.

You don't want this. Typically, people who work in mines will tend to have chronic radiation poisoning since there are always exposed to slightly elevated radiation levels for decades at a time More often than not with chronic radiation poisoning you're gonna get some type of cancer and if you're like wait hold on Bring it back home because I don't even know what the radiation is Radiation in the simplest term is just energy when an atoms nucleus is unstable It'll spontaneously decay it will essentially have a mental breakdown out of nowhere. She's unhinged, she's a little unstable, okay?

You just never know what's gonna happen, is she gonna freak out now or tomorrow? And to freak out, it'll give up a certain amount of energy to become more stable. That released energy is harmful because it has the potential to literally devour human tissue. And once the atom decays once, it'll be slightly more stable. But not completely stable, so it'll probably decay again. Because what's life without a series of mental breakdowns? That's essentially what's happening here.

We are radium. Just constantly having breakdowns, constantly unstable. And when radium decays, it eventually transforms into radon, another radioactive element, and that will decay into polonium and so on and so forth until it becomes a stable atom. You're like, what's the big deal? Let it have a few mental breakdowns, slap it on the ass, say good luck, and give it a venti ice coffee and they're good to go, right?

Not that simple, because a radium isotope takes 1,600 years to decay into radon, which is still fricking radioactive. 1,600 years? Yeah. So they basically consistently stay unstable. Radioactive. Pretty much. Got it.

So, okay. And there is nothing so far that we know as humans to stop this process. There's no way to like put a pause on it, put a hold on it to prevent this chain of events. Like it's going to happen. We just have to write it out. So you're like, okay, we'll just stay out of those areas. Maybe let the YouTubers and the documentaries sneak into, you know, all these abandoned radioactive towns and like, makes and videos.

Why can't we just do that? Okay, I'm sorry, but we do have to go a little bit deeper. It's going to make sense, just bear with me, okay? And it's once it makes sense, it's going to make you infuriated. Ionizing radiation can be divided into alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron radiation. Neutron is obviously Jimmy neutron radiation. You don't know the show. That joke just went over your head. It was a good one. And gamma rays is a really scary one. There is no way to prevent gamma rays

from penetrating your skin. There is no material, no matter how thick, you could have five layers of concrete in between you and whatever that's emitting gamma rays. It's not going to stop it. It's terrifying, but every little thing that they pass through weakens the gamma ray a little bit more.

But they can penetrate anything. So if you're standing behind a thick block of concrete, you're not gonna absorb the full force of the gamma ray. You'll probably be fine. Maybe not. I mean, don't try it at home. And you're like, how do I even try this at home if I wanted to? My mom would tell you all you have to do is stand in front of a microwave.

Alphan, beta rays on the other hand sound almost laughable compared to the gamma ray. Alpha rays can't even penetrate a simple piece of printer paper and beta rays can't even penetrate a thin sheet of aluminum. So these rays are not likely to penetrate through your skin, most likely. It's not going to penetrate into your deep tissue like gamma rays, but if they do, if they do, they are more destructive, insanely destructive. And radium happens to emit alpha rays. So that means if you handle radium with the proper equipment and you're not chronically exposed to it, you will be fine.

Imagine ingesting some alpha rays, like swallowing an alphare. Inside of you, there is no sheets of paper, there are no sheets of aluminum, there's no protective gears, just you and your organs, all your vulnerable organs. An alphareia miter inside of your body is like a flame thrower, just waiting to ignite. It's going to tear you apart from the inside. So naturally, humans bottled up radium and sold it as the newest Aeroan health drink of the time. It was the green drink of its time. It was the smoothie of its time. How do you sell that?

It was called a radium tonic and it was to bring usefulness to old men. Did we talk about this before? Yes, they also had, well, they had different types of energy drinks. This was just like the newest fad. It's kind of like, imagine CMOS, listen, I take CMOS. It's like CMOS, you know, everyone's like, it's all natural, it's going to be beneficial. So since it's buzzword, let's just throw it in everything. Literally everything. So they were selling radioactive drinks.

Yeah. And people were drinking it and what happened. Exactly. Oh, let me tell you. I mean, who the hell even thinks to do something like that? Definitely not the couple that discovered radium. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie, they discovered radium. Which side note, we really stand Marie Curie.

She's like the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person and only woman to win it twice. She was the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband won it with her, so they were the first married couple to win a Nobel Prize. And on top of that, she was the first female professor at the University of Paris. I love this woman.

Anyway, the couple discovers radium and they have no idea how scary or harmful it is. They take no precautions at all. Marie was known to carry around test tubes filled with radioactive substances in her pocket. Lunch with her kids, she's got radioactive isotopes in her pants. She also loved the way that the test tubes would glow in the dark. It was like carrying around glow sticks. Back in the day. So she did pass away from anemia, and a lot of people believed it was from her long term exposure to radiation.

But when her body was exhumed, she didn't have any lethal levels of radiation in her body. So it wasn't that. And trust me, radiation has a half-life of 1600 years. If you die from it and they open up your coffin You would be glowing you would be glowing like a little ghost Really yeah The reason that Mary probably didn't die from radiation poisoning is that radium and it's Alpha rays which can't penetrate a piece of paper

So they can't harm you unless you ingest them swallow them pour them pour them in your eyeball, push them up your butthole, or put it close to an open wound or something. Makes sense? But it's speculated that she actually died due to her exposure of X-rays. Yeah, she was a radiologist in World War I, and she was exposed to a ton of X-ray radiation, which is terrifying, because anytime you get an X-ray,

they're like, yeah, no, no, it's so safe. And then they fucking zoom out of there. And're like I'm alone in this room there's like not a single soul in here why am I alone it's just unsettling I get it it's a necessary evil but unsettling now what's interesting is though that even both the curries were set to have past room causes unattributed to radium all of their research papers even Marie's cookbooks that she had at home, they're all considered way too dangerous to touch. They literally still glow in the dark. But she's good?

Yeah, but she didn't die from radiation. She died from, well, she died from x-ray radiation, not radium poisoning. You can get radiation from different things. Now, all of their lab bugs are kept in these special lead boxes that's supposed to trap the radiation. So for all the people that want to see them, you have to be decked out in like protective clothing. And you have to have a really good goddamn reason that you want to go in there. Okay, sorry. I hope I didn't bore you with the science rundown.

Listen, I just needed all this information so that you can understand the story better. So hopefully there's some context. Now anyway, let's start at the beginning of the 20th century. This was before the world had even seen world wars. Yeah. Not, okay, they saw wars, but not all encompassing global wars. America was the show of the world. Still is, nothing's new.

But it was the show of the world, right? And around this time, America is coming up as an economic powerhouse. They're starting to really flex their economic status in the world. They're showing the Europeans. You think that you're the only colonizers here? Are you freaking kidding me? I can do it, and I'm gonna do it just as hard as you did. We're just as strong as you.

Of course, women America were not allowed to vote, and Radium had just been discovered, and it was just a time to be alive. There was a report when radium was discovered that radium would replace the calcium in the body, it would go directly into the bones, replace the calcium and everyone's like, wait, that kind of sounds good. That sounds like a good thing because radium is better than calcium, right? Like that's what I'm reading on these newspapers. So I should just have like a radium body. I would love that in my bones. I heard it has healing properties.

So companies started coming out with radium tonics, essentially green juices, but make it radioactive. It was being advertised as the end-all be all to cure anything from blindness to the good old hysteria. Histeria, hysterical really really this word is one word that you should never aim at a woman or anyone with a uterus if you want to have a good day just not a good word because hysteria back then was considered a real mental illness and it was sex selective so only woman had hysteria why well remember Freud are good old friend

the fucker Freud he's a walking red flag. He said, women experience hysteria because they get penis envy. They look down at their bodies and they don't have a penis. And they're so upset by this that they become hysterical. They're like, where's my penis? Ah! Penis! So what's the cure to hysteria? He said women should just get married half sex because the idea is that she can regain her metaphorical penis if

um, she marries one and potentially gives birth to a penis She will be healed if she marries a penis and then has a son essentially is what he's saying So a lot of doctors would literally prescribe women using hysterical You should get married and have tons of sex. Well the problem is, most men then and now have no idea the geographic location of the clitoris. So she would still be hysterical with good reason just now married.

And the theory is later proven to be correct because doctors started treating quote hysteria with this very medical procedure. Where the doctor would place one hand on the lower stomach of the woman, pressed down, and he would put his other hand inside the vagina of a woman and perform a massage until a convulsion of the woman's body occurred. The cure to hysteria was an orgasm. Okay. Because their husbands get into it. Did you know vibrators were made because doctors were getting exhausted?

Just fucking masturbating woman all day. You're kidding. No, I'm for real. Oh wow. Yeah. So even though the cure for stereo was to get married and have sex, clearly it didn't work. So just remember, the next time that a guy calls you hysterical,

that's a very long roundabout way of him confessing to you that he has never found the clit. Ever. He probably thinks it's somewhere on your upper left thigh. Don't give him the time of day, he's not worth it. Now, back to Radium, the story. Eventually, doctors realized that Radium could destroy human tissue, and instead of being like,

wait, we should stop feeding it to people. They're like, let's use it to treat tumors. It can destroy the tumor, we don't have to surgically remove it anymore, just throw it in there. But they failed to notice that the radium was destroying all the healthy tissue too. So radium at the time was literally touted as magic. There was an ad that said, no medicine, no drugs, just a slight little comfortable, inexpensive radioactive pad worn on the back by day and over the stomach at night. Radium was the essential oils of its time. People thought it

could cure anything from asthma to mental illnesses to lack of orgasming. Radium was straight up a holistic medicine fad and it kind of worked because it's a naturally occurring element So today it would be touted as radium natural medicine GMO-free additive-free gluten-free sugar-free vegan keto pay-the-o but you'll still die a painful death just some GMO-free food for thought People called radium liquid sunshine and they just started adding it to everything that they could think of. Now radium is interesting because it literally shines in the dark. It glows in the dark. Companies added radium to

lipsticks to make them glow. They added them to toothpaste to make your teeth wider. There was even radium chocolate and radium butter. The radium butter was for housewives that wanted to impress their guests with glue in the dark baked goods. Which is more alarming than anything. But a high concentration radium was sold to men as a euthtonic. It was said to make old men young again. They sold it for like $3,700 of vial. And you were supposed to do it and get five to seven times a day until you got about

$300. In today's money. Wow. It's for a rich man who couldn't get it off. Wow, did it work? I think so, but it also completely ate their penis after I'm sure. So why did the whole world have radium poisoning? Well, a lot of the products didn't actually have a lot of radium in them. It was kind of a marketing word. They would name the product radium lipstick and there would be trace amounts of radium,

but not enough in there. I mean, not because companies cared about you and they didn't want you to ingest radium, but it was because it was so freaking expensive. It was hurting their bottom line. So it's like truffle oil that has no truffle in it. Tastes like truffle, and you're gonna buy it because it says truffle and you like truffle, right? I mean, there was nothing that's scary about radium at the

time, but there was still something eerie about the girls. As quickly as radium became the newest health fat, the ghost girls were also a new addition to the town. At night, the girls would come out, and these are real girls. These are not ghosts. These are not people seeing things hallucinations, nothing. They're real people. The girls would come out at night, skipping around, prancing down the sidewalk. No flashlight, no other light source, but their skin was glowing. Not like one you would have after a facial or during a pregnancy. No, their skin was glowing a pale light green color in the dark.

You couldn't see much of the outline of the face just… just… orbs almost dancing around the city. Sometimes their clothes would shine in the dark. They looked like ghosts, floating through the city. Every single night, they came out. Nobody was hallucinating. It wasn't an urban legend. The ghost girls were real girls, and they would all die a horrible death.

What's worse than die? I think the only thing worse is knowing that it's coming. And it's not fast either, you know? It's not like, oh, you know you're about to die in the next two seconds. Imagine the idea of knowing years in advance that you're about to die. And not only are you about to die, but you're going to die a painful death. Do you just put a pause on life? How do you fall in love knowing it's going to be over in two years? How do you get married and dream about having a family of your own? You can't. How do you even go to the movies and sit there knowing death is coming in? Maybe a year.

At first, the girls were happy that they had just climbed one of the biggest mountains in the world, metaphorically. They were seriously ill. These ghost girls, they were dying. And they were able to prove that radium was what was killing them. And all of them were cheering, people believed them now, it has been such an uphill battle for them fighting for this moment. But after the screams, like the yelps of glory, the victory laughs, they started getting quiet. And they're looking around at one

another and at the empty spots, the empty seats that should have been filled, but now there was no one, and they had won this small battle, but then the realization had hit them like a truck going 90 miles an hour. They were able to prove that radium was going to cause an excruciating death, but now every single one of them was going to live out that death. There was nothing they could do to stop it. Because they were on the dead list, the list of the doomed. Dr. Saban Vaughan, shocky. I think I'm saying that wrong.

And Dr. George Willis co-founded Radium Luminous Material Corporations. They opened up a branch in Newark, New Jersey, later in Orange, New Jersey, later in Orange, New Jersey, and originally the company produced uranium. But once radium became the newest hot word, they moved on to making radio luminescent paint, basically glowing paint, glow in the dark paint. And what do they do with that paint? Oh, you already know. They started producing luminous watches, the wrist watches, the numbers glow in the dark. What? This guy's a watch fan, so. Wait,

is that still the material they use? No, no, he's like, I got to throw away my watches. I'm just kidding. Oh my gosh. But for if you buy some vintage watches from brands like Rolex, Somega, Paddock, from before the 60s, a lot of them still have radium. What? To make the numerals glow. What? Yeah. So they started producing luminous watches

and gauges for the US Army. Just imagine regular watches, but the numerals glow in the dark. And that seems normal now, but that was new back in the day. I mean, what? Especially with diving watches now? It's like a thing.

Like the Rolex Submariner, the C-Dweller, I don't know, guys love that shit, it like glows. That's what they wanted back then. They're like, we need to make everything glow. for money, for drugs, whatever was in there. Why aren't you afraid of getting caught at doing this? No, who's gonna catch us? What a police. It was the height of the crack era, and instead of locking up drug dealers,

some New York City cops had become them. I would suit up in my uniform and we're gonna want some drug dealers, and I know how to do it really well. We've stood up in my uniform and we're gonna want some drug dealers. And I know how to do it really well. This is the inside story of the biggest police corruption scandal in NYPD history and the investigation that uncovered it all. Did you consider yourself a rat? 100%. I saved my soul just like everybody else does.

Listen to and follow the set, an Odyssey Originals documentary podcast series available now in the Odyssey app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your shoes. I'm not a big guy, man, but I love being that dirty mother f***er. And it's also incredibly rare at the time and incredibly useful in times of war. With this new discovery of radium and World War I breaking out, the radium luminous material

corporation was set up to make a killing, literally. They would make watchdials in one part of their factory, then it would be sent to the artist studio, which was just a fancy name of saying a room filled with a ton of people painting the numbers on the watchdial with the paint. And the paint wasn't just straight up radium, it was a mixture of radium powder with water and some sort of special gum adhesive, so it sticks. The exact formula was proprietary, and the greenish white luminous paint was called the Undark. Okay, sounds simple enough. Well, maybe making the watch dials was, but not the painting of the numerals, it required an immense amount of precision and skill. Sometimes the watchtiles were as small

as 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter. I mean, just imagine the numerals on that tiny little watchtile, they are incredibly small, and you can't even make mistakes because after you turn your little watchtile in, the supervisor is going to take it to the dark room to make sure there's no little drops of radium powder. Because imagine that would be a bad look for these watch companies. It's also very hard to get rid of the luminescent paint. You can't just wipe it off, it's still going to have a tiny bit of glow. So the company decided the best people for the job were teenage girls. Honestly, the job sounded quite glamorous and enticing.

Working class girls that were teenagers at the time, they were working in factories. But this sounded like a privileged job. The workspace was fancily referred to as the studio. You wouldn't be dealing with as many fumes and a sweaty factory setup. I mean, the salary was great. And the girls would get paid per watch that they painted. So if they really put their backs into it, they painted eight to 10 watches a day.

They would be making $40,000 a year in today's money. So it's kind of insane for a teenager to make $40,000 a year, or really anyone these days with the wages that they're dishing out. So plus, the girls were able to work with radium. How fancy is that? Only rich people could afford products with radium because a single gram of radium cost around 2.2 million dollars. A single gram? Yeah, that's why it's $3,700 for like a tonic radium.

2.2 million for a gram? Yeah. In today's money, I don't know if radium costs have gone down now that it's like out of the you know But at the time it was worth a specific amount that if you calculate different inflation It's 2.2, but this is like the height of radium Everyone was like we got to get radium in our toothpaste Otherwise the competitors are gonna kill us. Wow So most people with their age and their socioconomic status, they would never even come close to radium. This felt like the dream job. So the girls around 16 years old were lining up for this job, and the company was more than happy to hire them all. Well, almost all of them. They were making a killing selling their little glow in the dark gadgets and their

glow in the dark watches. They needed all the painters that they could get. 15-year-old Catherine Sharp would be one of them. When she walked into the studio for the first time, she was in awe. Like a smile crept up to her face, her eyes lit up. It was like she was staring into the future. Her future. You could see the radium powder particles on everything. All around the studio, you could see it in the air when the sun shined through the studio. It was all over the work spaces and even the girls themselves. As the time passed from morning to evening, Katherine would look up in awe.

She saw that all the girls were glowing. They were literally glowing in the dark. She looked down at her own arms and it was such a magical moment. She had never been around something like this. And at the end of the day before the girls went home, they were supposed to shake off all the radium from their clothes and their skin, but it's like glitter. Imagine shaking off millions of tiny little particles of glitter. You're gonna get some off, but more than likely you're gonna be walking home looking like a disco ball. It's gonna be with you forever.

The girls would end up leaving the studio glowing in the dark, glowing in the night. They would be skipping to their bus stops, staring at each other's faces, staring at their own arms and legs, and they were just so fascinated at the fact that they were glowing. Some of the girls purposely even wore their nicest clothes to work so that later they could wear those same clothes

out with their friends and they would glow. They would literally impress everyone. Everyone would be so jealous, Oh my God, how did you get a job there? Like that's so fancy! Being a dial painter pretty much made you famous in Newark, New Jersey. And every single one of those girls felt incredibly lucky to have been chosen to work for the company. Catherine was so grateful that she poured her heart and soul into quickly learning everything about dial painting. The brushes that the girls were painting with were incredibly fine, extremely fine because like I said, the numerals are tiny. The brushes maybe only had about 30 hairs or so on each brush, so the bristles, they had a tendency to spread. Have you ever,

you know, tried to paint something in the bristle spreads and you got to do that annoying out, you get that annoying outside the box streak And you're like oh, that's so bad But for the girls it wasn't just annoying. It was life or death in a sense If you messed up a dial because the brush was separating you would be fired Radiant paint is incredibly pricey the company had a zero tolerance for waste Well kind of Typically a zero tolerance for waste the girls would get fired and their family wouldn't have enough money to eat.

So the margin of error was virtually zero. And the key to the job that gets pounded into these girls heads every day on their first day of work is don't let the brush bristle spread. Bad things happen when the brush bristle spread. Okay, so how do I prevent that? It's called lip painting. Lip dip paint. You put the paint brush in your mouth and you use your teeth to ever so lightly make the brush point

pointy again. And then you paint. And if you think your brush is going to spread again, you put in your mouth, use your teeth to put the brush back together and then you paint. So they're eating radium. This was a really antiquated way of doing things. In Europe, they were making radium watchtiles too. They were not lip pointing with their brushes. In Europe, they just invested in more expensive brushes. In Switzerland, the watchmaking capital of the world, they used solid glass rods to kind of dollop the paint down and let it spread.

In France, they used small sticks with cotton wadding on the ends. Other European countries used sharpened wood styluses and metal needles to move the paint around. But in America, cutting costs was key. Those brushes would definitely be more pricey than the standard brush bristle brushes. So they were just going to go with that. And of course the girls were skeptical. Wait, does this stuff the radium paint does it hurt you? No, not at all. It's not dangerous. There's no need to be afraid. I mean, have you looked around? Radium is a wonder drug. If anything, you will benefit from your exposure to radium. There are rich men out there willing to pay $4,000 for a radium tonic

just so that they can get a boner. You'll be fine. You're getting it for free. I mean, it kind of made sense. People did pay a pretty penny for radium. A lot of people would use their life savings to buy radium if their loved one had an incurable illness. They're like, we got to put our money together and buy a radium tonic because that's gonna cure,

you know, my sister's cancer. This is kind of the best job ever. And when World War One was in full swing, more people would be working with radium, demand was skyrocketing, the company could barely keep up, they had to open up another shop in orange New Jersey, they weren't just watch painting anymore, they were doing their own radium extractions. Yeah, radium extractions in their new factory that's in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

As you can imagine, that's gonna cause problems later. But the new studio for the dial painters was Glamrs. It was on the second floor with big, big windows on every side of the room. Skylights on the roof. A room like that in a studio apartment in the arts district and like a historical building would go for like two million dollars these days. It was absolutely beautiful. Just flooded with natural light, with rows and rows of wooden desks, right next to each other, paint brushes, I mean, it looked so fancy, and it was so huge!

The company hired a lot more dial painters, including Grace Friar. Listen, Grace was a beast. She was the most productive dial painter in the company's history. She painted an average of 250 dials a day. Let's say she worked eight to nine hours a day, that means she painted 30 watch dials an hour.

That's an average of two minutes per dial. And at the time, the girls were working seven days a week. I mean, just insane. So the girls, they sit in this beautiful studio all day long, lip, dip, painting. At one point, the company decided to supply them with a cup of water. Hey, clean your brushes here. But they only changed the water out once a day.

I don't know. I don't know why they're being so freaking stingy. They're making like tens of millions of dollars. So it didn't make sense to clean the brushes in the water because honestly, it just made the brush bristle spreading situation worse. The girls quickly reverted back to lip-paint dip because at the end of the day, it's their jobs on the line. It's their families on the line. The water would get cloudy and it would just get weird and the brush just wouldn't

paint as well. And the company agreed, they didn't like the water cups. They believed the water cups wasted too much precious, radiant paint. And then the company started supplying little cloths for the girls. Hey, wipe the brushes on here instead of putting it in your mouth. But then they quickly snatched those cloths away and they were like, you're wasting too much precious paint. I mean, I don't understand how the company didn't figure out that the girls literally

eating radium wasn't wasting it, but I guess it's out of sight out of mind. They don't see how much is being wasted. What's interesting is that some of the girls claimed that the paint had no taste. Others said it tasted really nasty, like very grainy, similar to eating what sand. But some girls really grew to love the taste, and they would even purposely put the brushes in their mouth for the taste. So the studio is working overdrive to keep up with the demand. I'm talking seven days a week, most girls worked all seven days.

There were day shifts and night shifts. It's said that during the nighttime, if you pass by the second floor of the studio, you look like it was glowing. Not from the lights, it wasn't those fluorescent lights that you nighttime, if you pass by the second floor of the studio, it looked like it was glowing. Not from the lights, it wasn't those fluorescent lights that you might see if you're walking past an office building and someone's staying late, but it looked almost like this greenish glow.

It was the girls. They were literally glowing. And they all giggled with each other. They thought it was fun, glowing in the dark. Sometimes if their supervisors were gone or asleep, they would paint on each other's faces, so that they would light up. And for the next few years, the girls were blissfully enjoying their lives. I mean, as much as they could, they were all in lower socioeconomic classes, which explains why they're working,

but this was a really well-paying job. It's fun, it's sociable. The girls all got along, they had fun working. And at this point, radium had been around for about 20 years and a few select individuals are starting to learn. It's not as nice as we thought. There are some side effects, some negative side effects. For example, the discoverers of radium, the curries, they had suffered multiple radium burns and the founder of this company, well one of the co-founders, Dr. Sabin, remember, he was becoming aware of the dangers. He provided all the radium extraction

workers with protective equipment, but not the dial painters, because I mean they're just working with small bits of radium, it can't be that dangerous, right? But then here's what he does. Dr. Sabin himself knew more than he was letting on because radium had gotten into his left index finger through an open wound And guess what he does he chops the f*** off Wow, he hacked off the tip of his finger. He chopped it off. Does that sound like a man? That's just being cautious. That's just being better safe than sorry. No, so that's the proof that he knew This is very, very dangerous. But he hasn't said anything yet. No. He only gave it to the extraction workers because they're

dealing with a lot of radio. So they're like, here's some protective. So the imputation happened immediately that that he was infected. He was like, let me just chop them. Wow. It sounds like someone who knows something we don't know about radium. But again, the dial painters, even then, they were left with no protection. Why? Again, they were saying, you're dealing with such small amounts of radium in the paint. There's no friggin' way that you're gonna be negatively impacted. And I mean maybe, if they weren't literally ingesting the paint. Remember what we said about alpha rays?

They're virtually harmless outside the body. They can't even penetrate a simple piece of paper, but inside the body, where you don't have paper, or really anything to shield you from that, they're a flame thrower. It's literally a ticking time bomb inside your body, and the girls were sitting there consuming micro bombs on a daily basis. And eventually, they would all go off. There's no preventing it. There's no stopping it. It's gonna happen. It's just a matter of one. By then, they've worked there for 20 years?

Like three, four? It depended per girl because how much radium ingested depended on the worker. So some girls like Catherine, she would only lip her brush maybe once every couple of dials, but other girls would lip their brush multiple times per dial. And I'm sure it's has something to do

with the girls' health itself, but some girls started to quit during like year end of year one. They're like, I feel a little weird. But regardless of the end of the work day, the girls were literally glowing in the dark on their way home. And it's not like the girls were dumb.

It's not like they were like, it's so sparkly, I'm having so much fun. They definitely questioned their safety at work multiple times. And each time they were told, it's fine. Not just by their employers, but by their doctors as well. I think the biggest mass questioning of the worker's safety happened

when Katherine got a few pimples. Sounds a bit dumb, but hear me out. Katherine started breaking out and she's 15. So this isn't like highly unusual, but hear me out. Catherine started breaking out, and she's 15. So this isn't like highly unusual, but to her it was. She's always had super clear skin. She went to the doctor and she's like, I don't know what's going on. Well, Catherine, it's probably hormones, you're 15. Yeah, I know, and okay, I don't want to be dramatic.

It's just that there's other things, and that's why I came here. It's not because of the pimples, but a few of the girls that I work with, they quit after a couple months on girls that I work with, they quit after a couple months on the job because they said that they felt sick. So I thought, I don't know, maybe it's strange, maybe it's connected. The doctor's like, well, do you work with phosphorus? Now, phosphorus is a known poison, especially at the time, like it was the thing. Yeah, the shock, she's like, wait.

Now that you say that, I don't know the exact formula of the paint that we work with. Maybe there's phosphorous in there. So she goes to work the next day and starts asking around. Hey, do you guys know if there's phosphorous in the paint? Do you know if there's phosphorous? They're like, we don't know the formula. And they all kind of start panicking.

Like, you're right, oh my god, I did notice the girl that was sitting next to me, she quit too. And they confront their manager who did what any manager would do. He went to his manager, and that manager went to his manager until they contacted one of the co-founders, Dr. George Willis. Now, the founders knew that they had to nip the panic in the butt. They flew down from their posh New York City apartments to Jersey to have a conference with the girls. Now, Dr. George Willis insisted over and over again that the paint was not dangerous.

There was nothing harmful in the paint. Even radium was such a minuscule amount that it could never cause harm, even though it doesn't cause harm. But truly, radium is too expensive, girls. For us to be using that much in the paint, there's barely any, it's like trace amounts. Nine and a half finger, Sabin didn't mention,

not once, that he cut off his own freaking finger. He's just sitting there with nine and a half fingers. The conference was enough to pacify the girls, and they start joking about how, oh my God, I can't believe we overreacted. But you know what, that makes me kind of feel good, that the company listened to us, you know? At least they did something about it. And Catherine felt embarrassed embarrassed and she starts,

she's like, I can't believe I did this over a couple of pimples. They're joking around when Grace Friar, the top producer of watches, went to blow her nose and her nasal discharge, her snot, glowed in the dark. They were all like, cool, that's weird. Now, this is kind of unsettling, but the girls try to forget about it because they kind of need the money. So it's one of those situations where I'm sure they had doubts, but it was better to believe nothing was happening.

Dr. Sabin came in to make sure everyone was working well, and one day he sees Grace in the studio, lipping, dipping, and painting. Like she does every single day, like how she was taught to buy this very company that he owns. And he calmly walks over and says, hey, don't do that. And she's looking at him like, why? That's how we do it.

That's what you told us to do. And he says, don't do that. You're going to get sick. And he just walks away. She's like, what? I mean, she feels uneasy, but she's got to do it at her job. Now, the company starts running into trouble. Not with the girls, not with the finances,

but with the residents, because remember how their new factory was in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Well, the neighbors started to complain. The factory fumes were discoloring their laundry, and honestly, it was affecting their health. At first, the company thought it was just one or two people, so they're like, let's just pay them and have them shut up. So one executive gave a resident $69 for her dirty laundry,

and that turned out to be a mistake for the company, because they said it opened the flood gates, and all the residents felt like they should be compensated too for their struggles, which, yeah, they should be, but the company was disgusted. They saw it as, and I quote, a bunch of poor people anxious to take advantage of the company.

So the firm learned what they believed was the most important lesson in their business is that nobody gets so much as a cent, otherwise everyone else will want a dollar. And soon after, they were hit with another problem. The war was over, and the need for luminous compasses and other gadgets it declines. What does the company do? They lay off most of the girls. They don't give a shit about what these girls are going to do now. Eventually, they had to let go of close to 75% of their dial painters. They were employing less than 100 of their most productive dial painters now.

One of the women that was let go was Catherine Schop. She had spent three years of her life giving everything to the factory, but they just let her go. She was sad, but she was in panic. You know, she's only 18. She had a full life ahead of her. Or so she thought. Later the company would be hiring again, and Catherine went in to train as a future dial painter, and she's striving, but the same could not be said about her former colleagues. A lot of the former colleagues started complaining of weird health issues. They had chronic fatigue, but it didn't feel

like they were just burned out. It felt like something more intense. Everybody was telling them, oh, you're just too tired, but they were dropping weight at alarming rates and oddly enough, a lot of the girls were experiencing incredible jaw pain. It was just so weird and so random. But the girl thought, maybe it's something in the air. It's definitely not the company that they used to work for. It can't be the radio.

Why you ask? Well, for one, their former employer was all over the local news. So the residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand. It was like a pure white sand and the company was going to cut back on their industrial waste because you know, we love a sustainable company by selling the waste to schools for their playgrounds. The schools loved it. The kids shoes would even turn white while they played in the sand. Are they radioactive? Or... Yeah, a bit. Oh my god. And Dr. Saven did interviews where he said, this is the most hygienic sand for children to play in, more beneficial than the mud of the world renowned, curative baths. So we hate Dr. Saven, the one that chopped off his finger, but it could be worse. And it would be worse. That summer, Sabin and George, the two co-founders, they were kicked out

of the company by the treasure Arthur Roder. It was a hostile takeover. And author had big, big plans for this company. He first renamed it to the United States Radium Corporation, USRC. Which just sounds so scary. And it won't be long before you all hate them too. Now remember how radium poisoning at high levels takes a few years to really start seeing symptoms like a ticking time bomb? Well, the first one that went off, her name was Molly Magia, and it all started with a toothache.

Now, this is back then, where if you had a toothache, the doctor would simply take your tooth. They're like, you can't hurt anymore if it's not there. And that's what Molly's dentist did. And for the first few weeks after, her gums are so sore. I mean, that's to be expected. But even a month later, her gum is still in so much pain and her dentist is getting nervous. He's like, you need to go see an expert named Dr. Joseph Neff. I don't know what's going on with you. By the time that she gets an appointment with Dr. Neff, her entire jaw was in so much unbearable pain. The socket where

Molly's tooth was pulled is failed to heal. But not only that, several of Molly's other teeth were loose. So he's like, you probably have some sort of inflammatory disease that affects the tissues around the teeth. Don't get me wrong, Molly. It's bad. But with some diligent treatment in my care, I'm confident that you're going to improve, like all my other patients. But she didn't.

Instead of responding well to the treatment, Molly's condition became steadily worse. Her teeth were so sore and her jaw was so sore. And he just kept pulling out more and more of her teeth, which was a bad idea because none of them ever healed. In fact, ulcers started popping up in those holes where the teeth were pulled. So they were hurting her more than the teeth had. Meanwhile, Molly's still working in the studio. I mean, with all this dentistry debt she had to, she kept using the brush in her mouth because she had to. But she had changed completely.

Molly stopped smiling, she refused to talk. Every time she opened her mouth, there was an incredibly foul odor that came out and she was embarrassed by it. Molly's gums were literally rotting from the inside and her entire jaw was sore. It got to the point where Molly didn't even need her teeth taken out. They were just falling out on their own. The physical pain was unbearable, but the emotional and mental pain was devastating. Molly was known as one of the most outgoing girls in the studio. She loved to joke around, she had this big toothy grin that you just couldn't help but smile with

her, but now, as more and more teeth fell out, she was unrecognizable. I mean, even the pain and the embarrassment of trying to smile was too much. The doctors realized this is not a normal tooth problem. So what did they think it was? They're thinking, well, sores in the mouth. Pain, joint pain, extreme tiredness. I mean, it's got to be an STD, right? The test came back negative. So the dentist moved on to believing

that she had something called Fossi jaw, AKA Foss first poisoning. It had very similar symptoms to radium poisoning, there's tooth loss, gum inflammation, necrosis, and pain, and Molly had all of that. So they asked Molly, where do you work? She took a deep breath, not because she thought work was the culprit, but because she knew

that talking was painful. She said, painting numbers on watches so that they will shine at night. Dr. Neff took it upon himself to go see someone at the USRC where Molly worked, and he's trying to ask, is there a phosphorus in the paint or something? And the company was incredibly short with him. They treated him like he was some outsider trying to steal their patented formula, their top secret stuff. Like this is like the crabby patty recipe of the time.

They're like, we can assure you doctor there is no phosphorus in the formula. So Dr. Neff is like, if that's true, then I don't know what the hell is going on with Molly. She just keeps getting worse and worse she can't talk, she can't eat her entire jaw, her mouth, even the bones in her ears are starting to turn into one huge abscess. Her mouth was like a minefield of angry red ulcers. And one day when Dr. Nav tries to feel her jawbone delicately, okay, he could see how much pain she is in.

Just existing. He was barely touching her. When he did that, his eyes opened wide and he was shocked. Because her jawbone broke against his fingers. And he removed it. He was able to just pull out her jawbone like that or piece of it. It was horrific. Molly could not bear the pain. She was given a few drugs, but they barely helped. Her jaws were swollen, filled with pus literally breaking apart, and they would spontaneously bleed. And on top of that the rest of her body started experiencing intense pain and the doctors were like, well you'd probably just have

Arthur right as. Later the doctors tested her again for STDs and this time she came back for syphilis. Now they didn't tell her this because they wanted her to concentrate on getting better but if they had told her this, Maldi would let them know there's no way, literally no way that she could have an STD. So after a year of the most unbearable pain that you can ever imagine, the infection spread to the tissues of her throat, and it literally disintegrated through her jugular veins. And soon her mouth was flooded with blood and she hemorrhaged so fast the nurse couldn't even stop the bleeding, and that is how Molly died at just 24 years old.

And because her STD results should cause it for syphilis, it was like a cherry on top of the insult cake to Molly and her loved ones. Molly would be the first to die, an unimaginable horrible unjust death, but she would not be the last. Even her own sister Quinta would suffer a similar fate. Meanwhile, another radium company opened its doors in Ottawa, Illinois, the radium dial company. They wanted to go up against the USRC.

A local newspaper ad for the Watch Dial Company said, We want girls, 18 years or older for fine brush work. Work is clean and helpful, surroundings pleasant. And even though the ad stated that they were looking for 18 plus girls, girls as young as 12 were showing up and getting hired. The instructor would teach them how to paint the dials, lip, dip, paint. And to show the girls how safe the radium powder was,

she dipped a big spatula in it and licked it off. And she said, you see? Harmless and kind of tasty. No way. Yeah. Now, this company had a bit more of a fun working environment as long as the girls were productive during their work hours, they were allowed to have fun with the radium powder afterwards.

So they would paint each other's faces with radium. Sometimes if they were going on a date, they would paint their teeth as like a cool party trick because they would literally glow in the dark. But during the work hours, they were super busy and productivity was key. So most of them ate their lunch right then and there with the radium particles surrounding the air. Because they have to mix their own paint. The radium powder comes in a powder and they have to mix it with the gum adhesive and some other things So the powder is going to be in the air. It's not paint. It's not just a room full of paint

But it would be years before any of the girls started feeling the effects of radium Meanwhile in New Jersey the USRC girls they were feeling it. Remember Catherine? Well her cousin Irene starts to feel pain in her teeth Her mouth got so bad she couldn't even work anymore, and she was burning through all that precious savings that she had acquired devoting her years to being a dial painter. Each time Irene's dentist removed a tooth it only got worse. Her gums were red, swollen, and he was so confused. It's like her jaw was decaying away and they could not figure out why. Her jaw seemed to be eating her alive bit by bit

and she could feel all of it. It was excruciating. And that's how 21 year old Irene died. Around the same time, one of Irene's friends from the orange plant, Helen, died with the same complications. Nobody had any idea why the girls were dying. Nobody could have guessed it was radium poisoning.

Well, everyone but the girls, the girls weren't stupid. They knew that their symptoms were similar. They figured it out. It had to be work related. They all knew each other from work. And a lot of the girls told their doctors they suspected it was work. Now some doctors did try to get the industrial hygiene division to investigate. And ultimately it let's nothing.

I mean the audacity of the USRC was insane. For example, one time a hygiene investigator went to the plant and noted that all the girls were dipping the USRC was insane. For example, one time, a hygiene investigator went to the plant and noted that all the girls were dipping the brushes in their mouth. And when he told the vice president of the USRC, hey, they're not allowed to do that. The vice president of the company says, oh my God. I told the girls time and time again,

not to do that, that it's too dangerous, but I just cannot get them to starve. You know how teenagers are. I mean, just bullshit. So the hygiene inspector contacts the New Jersey Department of Labor, letting them know some shady shit is going on. And the investigator for the New Jersey Labor Division looks up in books if radium is bad for you.

Most studies concluded it was not. So they're thinking there's no need to even investigate because of the girls' ingesting radium, but there's no proof that radium is even bad for you that in case closed I mean it's ridiculous for so many reasons one of the main reasons being that there was scientific evidence and literature That showed that potential negative side effects of radium existed. It had been around for decades now It's not like everyone was still blindly raving about radium So why were so many studies showing it was good for people? Here's a crazy thing. And it's still going on

today. That's why it's so hard to trust. You know when you go online and you're like, wait, I don't even know what's good for me anymore because this study said it was and then this study said it's not, well, companies will pay top dollar to scientists to write heavily biased research papers saying that a product or a certain element or some sort of supplement is good for you. And that's what the radium companies and their deep, deep pockets did with radium. Shady? Yes.

Something that people knew, especially the New Jersey investigator knew. Yeah, but they decided no big deal here. Case closed. Even one of the co-founders of the USRC, remember the one that was kicked out, Dr. George? Well, he chopped off his finger too. He got radium in one of his fingers and he chopped it off. So another doctor? Yeah. And when they tested his finger because he actually waited a little bit longer than the other doctor to chop it off, he was like, oh, shit, now I shut, right? They tested it. It was riddled with cancer. And he himself was dealing with radium poisoning because he used to carry test tubes of radium

with his bare hands everywhere. Now he is paying the consequences. He even wrote an article that said, the reputation of harmlessness enjoyed by radium may, after all, depend on the fact that so far, not a lot of people have been exposed to radium in large amounts over long periods of time. There is good reason to fear that the neglect of precautions may result in serious injury to the radium in large amounts over long periods of time. There is good reason to fear that the neglect of precautions may result in serious injury to the radium workers themselves. Yeah, Captain, too fucking late.

The USRC didn't give a crap about his article. First of all, he's not part of the company anymore and we're making top dollar. Who cares what you have to say about radium? Well, I'm sure the radium girls would have cared. Most of them were getting sick. They didn't even have a clue why. They just knew that it had something to do with the USRC.

Another girl, Hazel Vincent, was suffering. She had this black discharge oozing out of her mouth and nose, and it had this strong, pungent, garlic odor, and soon her entire face was beginning to rot. Remember Grace Fyer, a top watch-dial painter? Well she suddenly had tooth pains that would persist? She had them taken out and once she did it only got worse. Her extraction sites were leaking pus profusely, I mean it was incredibly painful, it was smelly and it tasted disgusting.

Katherine noticed that all her former and current colleagues, they're getting sick and she's feeling this intense anxiety of like, wait am I next? What's going on? She reaches out to the Department of Health, files a report. She tells them about Irene, her tragic death, Molly, and all these other girls that are dying are already dead, and they all knew each other from the USRC.

The health officer is equally as useless as pretty much everybody else in this story so far, well, as far as investigators go. They just said, I looked up Molly's records and they said she died of syphilis. So I mean, I guess I'll reach out to the vice president of the USRC. Oh, he's out of town on vacation? Okay, well then I'll never call back again. Thank you for your time. Catherine did everything in her power and everybody failed her. And then the worst thing happened. Catherine started having trouble with her teeth.

And she was beyond terrified. And she did not ignore it, which honestly I give her so much credit for, I feel like I would have so much anxiety, I wouldn't even go to the dentist, because I'm like, I can't even face this reality. But Catherine went to the same dentist that Irene had gone to, and Dr. Barry noted that both of them had the same problems, and they both worked at the orange plant for the US RC. He noticed Catherine's teeth looked filthy, even though Catherine had really good dental hygiene and her teeth were just breaking off.

She had to get teeth pulled, but that didn't make her feel any better. In fact, she could barely live. She was just weighed down by this intense anxiety. I mean, I can't imagine how depressing that is to have this feeling of knowing what's going to happen to you, this hopeless feeling, and not only the pain of watching your closest friends and family die, but knowing that you're next. Around this time, the USRC started banning the lip-dip paint method. They said, oh, it has nothing to do with anything, but the fact that the acid inside your mouth

is spoiling the adhesive. So we just want to make sure that you stop doing that. And they came up with a freaking reason. Yeah, a fake reason that blamed it on the girls. Always the acid in your mouth. But it was too late. Girls that were working there, they already had taking time, moms in their bodies.

Margaret Carlo started seeing her dentist and she had a few painful tooth extractions. She went to the same dentist as some of the other girls. Dr. Barry was confused. He kept realizing more and more girls worked at the USRC and had tooth problems. Then when he watched yet another girl getting eaten alive by her own jaw and watching her die and decay at alarming speeds, I mean, he couldn't just sit back. He was incredibly outspoken. He started investigating the USRC himself.

The company did not like that. They put out a statement that said, their recently has been rumors and comments made by individuals particularly dentist. I mean, could you be more passive aggressive? They said, they claim our work in our application department is hazardous and has caused injury and poor health to former operators of ours. And they are advertising that other operators should discontinue their employment with us. We do not recognize that there is any such hazard in the occupation. The USRC argued that most of the women were no longer employed when they got sick. Molly had died of syphilis and Irene, while she was an orphan, and her parents died when

they were young, so she probably just had bad health running in the family. That's what they said. I'm sorry, what? And soon the case got the attention of another doctor from New York. His name was Dr. Blum. He was one of America's first they said. I'm sorry, what? And soon the case got the attention of another doctor from New York. His name was Dr. Blum. He was one of America's first oral surgeons. He specialized in X-rays for dental diagnosis. I mean, the guy seemed like he knew what he was talking about.

So Hazel, one of the girls that was a former employee, she had dental pain and her family panicked. They begged her to see a specialist. Maybe it'll increase your chances of staying alive. We got to do everything we can. Now, Dr. Thuridore Blum, his fees would bleed Hazel's family dry, but they had to try. He examined her and he knew something was wrong.

He had never seen anything like this before. Her face was swollen with pus bags. Her jawbone seemed like it was moth-edin. There were holes everywhere in her jawbone. Dr. Bum concluded that she had been poisoned by some sort of radioactive substance, but there is no cure. He did everything he could to help Hazel,

and I mean, of course he charged her for it. The family were now close to $100,000 in debt. And even then, Hazel would die in agony. Hazel's mom was so infuriated. She went down to the USRC, left them a letter. She threatened, she's like, I'm gonna freaking sue you guys. In classic USRC capital is in fashion, they suddenly gave a shit about Hazel.

They're like, wait, tell us more about your daughter, what's going on. Especially because rumors had started spreading that the company was finding it hard to even find girls to work for them now. These girls, you know how they are, they're hysterical for no reason. So the president Arthur, remember him? Well, he said, move aside VP, I got this one. Arthur called in Dr. Dr. Dr. He's the professor of physiology at Harvard School of Public Health.

He hired him to investigate the orange plant. He told the doctor, listen, we need to address the psychological and hysterical situation that's going on right now. With my employees. Wow. So Dr. Drinker and his wife, also Dr. Drinker, also a scientist, they went to the orange factory and investigated and even went to meet some of the girls that were in poor health. It took the drinkers a few months, but they concluded that the company was ignorant when it came to the dangers of radium. They wrote in their report, few months, but they concluded that the company was ignorant when it came to the dangers of radium.

They wrote in their report, there seems to be an utter lack of realization to the dangers inherent in the material which is being manufactured. Dr. Drinker's wife asked the dial painters to follow her to the dark room, remove all their clothes, and she tried to measure how much radium residue was left on their skin, and she expected some. But what she found was shocking. Each girl was covered head to toe and radium. Under their clothes, it made them literally glow.

And even after vigorous washing the girls, they still persisted to glow, like it was not coming out of their skin. Now thankfully the drinkers were not biased, even though they were hired by the USRC, they delivered their full report, their full lengthy detailed report, it was incredibly meticulous. They concluded it was not a safe work environment, they ran blood tests on the girls, some of

them had abnormal blood, a lot of them had practically normal blood, which side note, practically normal isn't normal and it's not good. It also indicates that the women are in the early stages of radium poisoning. Not a single woman had actually normal blood. That's what the doctors were trying to emphasize. They were trying to emphasize that this is bad. But when the VP, Harold, he got the report on his desk. He skimmed through it.

He's like, that's so many words. So let me just, ooh, there's a big graph here. Let me see this graph. Oh, everyone has practically normal blood levels. And he closed the report. He just assumed practically normal blood means the company is good. We're not doing anything weird. Besides, he had a vacation. He had to get to know literally he had a vacation. So anytime a doctor, a lawyer, a concerned employer, parent came to the USRC, the executives would use the doctors findings to shield away all the haters. Listen, I don't know if that's what they called them,

but that's the vibe. Like, they were just saying, oh, all these poor people are haters. They just want our money. How's the energy they were giving? The drinkers had no idea how grossly the USRC was misrepresenting their findings. And the company went all out and being gross.

Remember the dirty laundry fiasco where the company paid someone for the laundry and it opened the floodgates? Well, they really stuck by that. They refused to pay a single penny to anyone. Even when Hazel came to them with her face, completely swollen, literally a football was sprouting in her jaw and it was filled with fluid.

And I'm not exaggerating. Like, it's literally a football, a fluid sprouting from her jaw. Even then, the USRC decided that she was Like, it's literally a football of fluid sprouting from her jaw. Even then, the USRC decided that she was money-hungry and hysterical and told her to fuck off. Of course the girls wanted to sue. They wanted to do something about it, but New Jersey law was not on their side.

Industrial work compensation was very picky. There were only nine approved diseases on the permitted list that you could sue for, and a five-month statute of limitations, which does make sense. Because like I said, radium poisoning takes years at times, and no attorney was wanting to take on such a risky case without money upfront. And the girls were already indebted with their medical bills,

so they just sat there in pain and in debt. Katherine said that the pain that she felt could only be compared to the pain caused by a dentist drilling into a live nerve hour after hour day after day month after month. After a while, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Margaret found a lawyer willing to take her case and she filed a suit against the USRC for $1 million. This pissed the company off. They hired the best attorneys money could buy, which like they could have just compensated the girls with that money, but no,

they had to win. they had to be right. As soon as they hired more lawyers, they were slapped with more lawsuits. Arthur, the president, was convinced the girls were money hungry. So he had Dr. Drinker's report to prove it. It had been a year since that report, and he finally sat down in his fancy CEO desk.

He opened up the report. He didn't even bother to read it until now. And when he finally read it, he was shocked. The report detailed how Radium replaces calcium in the bone marrow and slowly eats away at the body from the inside out. Radium was dangerous and it was responsible for the girls falling ill and dying. You would think reading this report in his big fancy CEO desk, Arthur would realize you fucked up, right?

Now, he just hired another expert, Dr. Frederick Flynn. Listen, this Flynn guy is as shady as it gets. First of all, he's not a licensed medical practitioner. He's not even a medical doctor. He only has qualifications in philosophy. And he starts interviewing the radium girls. And he gives them all clean bills of health. Even though they all die within a few years with

radium poisoning, whether he lied or he was so unqualified and so dumb that he didn't know that they were I mean what? So this guy was gonna be the USRC's defense expert. Meanwhile the girls had another doctor on their side. Dr. Martin, he was the chief medical examiner of the county. He was new, and he performed the autopsy of a victim of radium poisoning. And his findings were alarming. The doctor reached out to one of the co-founders, Dr. Saban. Remember him? The of the USRC before it became the USRC, the chopped finger guy.

Well together, they created a method of detecting radioactivity and a person's remains with an instrument called the electro meter They did make history with this meter. So for the time being Dr. Sabin and Dr. Martland they examined Margaret She was still alive, but barely. She's heavily in debt living in the hospital basically Most of her facial bones are decaying. She can barely hear there is a hole between her mouth and her nose Her bones are literally disintegrating and she's in so much paint her entire head was described by doctors as just being rotten. But she was still alive. Margaret's older sister Sarah ended up passing away from radium poisoning recently, and she had worked there with Margaret. But before Sarah died, she let the doctors perform painful tests on her to see if she had radium poisoning.

Because the meter that they made, it was only to test remains. They couldn't use it on the girls until they were cremated. So at this point, no doctor had ever attempted to test on living patients before. They came up with two different tests. One was just to put a patient next to a device that would read the level of Gamer radiation emanating from the patient's body. The second was a bit more accurate. It was going to put a patient next to a device that would read the level of Gama radiation emanating from the patient's body. The second was a bit more accurate. It was going to be more painful. Do you remember as radium decays, it turns into radon, which is a gas.

So the doctors come up with an instrument that you have to continuously breathe into for a certain amount of time, like big breaths, and the instrument would measure how much radon gas you exhale. It sounds easy enough, but the girls are literally dying, especially in their mouth area. Sarah was in so much pain that she started to get delirious as she performed the procedure. The test showed that she had suffered from radium poisoning, but the stress of the test ended up killing her kind of. She ended up passing away two days after. He also conducted Sarah's autopsy, and it showed that her entire body was radioactive

down to her internal organs. And I guess Dr. Sabin felt so bad when he saw how the girls were dying, he gave the other doctor a secret formula for the radium powder to test it. The radium isotope found in the powder had a half-life of 6.7 years, instead of the 1,600 years. It's cheaper, that's why the company used it, but it's also a lot more abrasive than regular radium. It's a lot more unstable. And the depressing part was that the girls were so happy to have answers, but they all knew one thing, this just confirmed.

They were all going to die. They were doomed to die, painful deaths, every single one of them. When Grace Fire was sent to be tested, remember Dr. Semen told her many years ago, don't lick the brush or you'll get sick when he was there when she was being tested. And she was furious, she wanted answer, she yelled at him, why didn't you tell us? And he bowed his head and mumbled something about, I tried to warn the others of the corporation but they wouldn't listen, it wasn't a major restriction I couldn't do anything. Yeah, I guess he couldn't do anything,

but watch countless young women poison themselves. And since the girls were together, Catherine suggested that Dr. Martin write down a list of every girl that she had ever known to work at USRC. Now, he's a medical examiner for the county. So he took whatever sheet of paper he had nearby, an empty autopsy piece of paper. He flipped it over to the blank page in the back, and he wrote line by line, every girl the girls knew that had ever

worked at the USRC. Some of them were ill already, some had died, and some, they were fine, but they were doomed. They called it the list of the doomed, and one by one, the girls were dying and no one on that list would survive. And then a few developments. The USRC started settling with some of the girls. Some received as anywhere between 13,000 to as much as 120,000, which honestly isn't much,

it barely even covered the girls' medical debts, especially after lawyers took a cut, but it was better than nothing. I mean, the families weren't complaining. It surely wouldn't take away the pain. Grace's bones were deteriorating. Her spine was literally shattering in multiple spots. She had to wear a back brace just to function.

She couldn't stand up without it. The bones on her feet were completely thin. It was agonizing every single step. She would later say, Radium eats bones, a steadily and a surely as fire burns wood. The girls came together, they hired an attorney and they got to work. Not only were they going up against the USRC, but they were going up against New Jersey and their laws. The statute of limitations for workplace health compensation was over. They had to prove that it wasn't over.

And it was an uphill battle for girls that could barely even sit on their own. They barely sit down. But they were gonna do it. Molly's family allowed her to be exhumed to strengthen their case. And inside of the coffin after they opened it up, it was glowing. There was a soft luminescent light coming from her coffin. The test showed that she had died from extreme radium poisoning. During the trials, the radium girls, five of them, they testified, and they were all sick.

One of them couldn't even walk. One of them couldn't put her shoes on. She couldn't bend over. Most of them couldn't even lift their arms to give the oath. They could barely talk without agonizing pain, but they all testified. They were in pain. They knew they were going to die, they wanted justice, and not only that they needed it. Their families were going to be left with maybe possibly hundreds of thousands of these poor girls, and they died, their families, I mean, they're ruined, and they testified.

Quinta would say, I face the inevitable unflinchingly, because what else can I do? I don't know when I will die. I try not to think of the death that is creeping closer all the time. The defense team was honestly such a bitch. They kept trying to postpone the trial, hoping the girls would die first. They also hired a ton of doctors to evaluate the girls because they wanted their own experts, which I mean it was insane. They forced the girls to get their blood drawn, which by the way, most of the girls,

if they had so much as a cut or a bruise, their skin would simply not heal and it would just start decaying. It would turn black at that spot. The girls, they couldn't even itch themselves if they had an itch. Because if they itch their leg, that part would start decaying. Their skin would never heal even from the fingernail. Their skin was paper thin. The defense was being sociable. Their doctors would deem the girls healthy even though they were literally decaying in

front of their faces. Which honestly, I feel like doesn't even make them credible. Like if I were a judge and you're a credible doctor and you're telling me that I'm not seeing what I'm seeing, I would think you're crazy. So the lawyers turned to the public. They did interviews with the girls and the public. They were on the girls side. Katherine said, when I die, I will have lilies in my coffin because they're cheaper.

But I love roses. If I win my settlement, maybe I can have roses. Grace said, I couldn't say that I'm happy, but at least I'm not utterly discouraged. I intend to make the most out of my life and what's left of me. And when the time comes, I'm going to be donating my body to science

so that the doctors can find a cure one day. My body means nothing but pain for me. And if it might mean longer life or relief to others, if science has my body, it's all that I have to give. And in the end, with the public hate, the distrust, the USRC were backed into a corner, and they propositioned each girl gets a $208,000 cash lump sum

and $8,000 a year pension for every year that they are alive. Which honestly is freaking annoying, because every year the girls survived the board of the company would be like, wait, why aren't you dead yet? So are you saying you're not as sick as you claim to be? This settlement wasn't fair, it wasn't. But the girls were going to die soon and they didn't want to leave their families shackled with debt. And the USRC knew that they knew that the girls were desperate, they used it against them. And in the end, you would think that the radium companies would come together and think,

hey, maybe we should stop doing this. We can find other things that glow in the dark. No. They just stopped using the bristle brushes. They bought the equipment that Europe had been using for the past decade now. The girls, they tried to move on. They tried to live happily for the short amount of time that they had left. Catherine bought a small house on the hilltop outside the city, but she tripped. A simple trip. Something if it happened to me or you or any other able-bodied person would be nothing. You would get up. You probably wouldn't even get a bruise.

But the radium girls, their bones were like glass. And she had to give up her role side living. That was the only thing she liked. And she had to move back to rural side living. That was the only thing she liked, and she had to move back to the city because she could not live on her own. Grace smiled all the time despite having 25 jaw surgeries, and she kept working until the day she died because she quote liked it. So maybe they had some happiness if you could call it that, but anything that they had was short lived because all of them would die painfully at a young age. And believe it or not, dial painting was still going on.

Remember the radium dial company in Ottawa? They had heard about the radium girls and they panicked, and their company offered tests for them to take blood tests in X-rays, but the girls were not allowed to see their own results. So they're like, why? And the company said, why, my dear girls? If we give you the medical reports You would riot this place. I'm kidding, but there's no such thing as radium poisoning you have nothing to worry about

It's safe. Thankfully the radium industry finally collapsed in 1933 and like everything else It took a rich white man's death to change the world a wealthy man named even buyers was prescribed radium for a back injury and eventually it killed him. This caused so much panic that instantly the FTC got involved in declared radium medicine illegal. Because what is the world without another rich man? And the American Medical Association quickly followed and removed radium from its list of new and non-official remedies. The radium industry soon after collapsed.

And that is why the radium watch dial painting vanished. Not because hundreds of girls died excruciating deaths. That didn't matter to anyone. Which side note, like I said, radium watches aren't produced anymore, but some of the top brands, if you look online, you can even find like on eBay, it'll even say radium, on there. Like radium dial. Like these older watch brands that have been around for a while

since before, like the 50s, you'll see a lot of the vintage ones. A lot of them are considered collectibles. There's actually been concerns about keeping large amounts of these vintage watches in an unventilated room such as a safe or a closet, because eventually the radium will turn into radioactive gas. And these watches are too old to be able to seal it in. So honestly, it's like, uh, what the fork moment.

But it's like we've learned nothing because you would think that we learn from even the radium girls, but we never do, because at the end of the day, women dying is just collateral. It's sad, but change is not made, until men start dying in large numbers. Or I guess all it takes is just one rich man. It's like we're still living in 1914, literally.

And that is today's main episode. I've never seen you so angry. I just wanna grab a spoonful of radiant and shove down. Like, those people's mouth, like, yeah, if it's not dangerous, you do it yourself. It's not even about the money. The damage is done.

The pain, the torture. This is like probably one of the most torturous story I've ever heard. Nobody's paying the consequences, right? No one. No one. Yeah, very depressing time to talk about this story. It's definitely, um, I highly recommend the book. I think they turned it into a movie or a show called The Radium Girls. I think it's on either Hulu or Netflix, but maybe we'll give it a watch tonight because I don't think I'll be able to sleep well. I hope you guys enjoyed this week's main episode and I will see you on Sunday for the mini-sode. Please stay safe out there.