Undark and the Radium Girls (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Undark and the Radium Girls (2006)

damninteresting.com

74 pointsnot_a_boat30 comments

One part of the saga of “why didn't anyone do anything?” is that this was a state's rights problem originally:

> In New Jersey, reformers won their fight for a law allowing compensation for “radium necrosis.” State labor and health agencies were able to halt lip pointing, but their power over industry was sometimes limited. For example, the New Jersey Labor Department issued to U.S. Radium Corporation an order to tighten safety for its dial painters — “comply or close.” It closed and moved elsewhere. Federal agencies mostly deferred to state authority over radium. [1]

If you have never seen the ads, they are a head trip too. People telling you how drinking radioactive water will give you “natural energy” and so forth. [2]

The craziest part is that it didn't stop due to lawsuits or regulations, it stopped because nuclear energy plants proliferated and gave us many other isotopes to work with, most of them without the 1000+ year half life of radium. The feds didn't get really involved until fricking 9/11, if you can believe it. [3]

1. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

2. https://flashbak.com/vintage-produce-of-the-day-cure-all-rad...

3. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

I mean, it absolutely would give you natural energy. It's just the format that leaves a bit to be desired.

> If you have never seen the ads, they are a head trip too. People telling you how drinking radioactive water will give you “natural energy”

To be honest those ads were true. Radioactive water _will_ give you “natural energy”, it will be bad for your body though.

I think the "1000+" is a little misleading, so to clarify: longer half-life means less dangerous, something like unrefined uranium has little radiation risk unless you have very long-term exposure to it (but it's very toxic because it's a heavy metal, so it will still kill you), its half life is billions of years, something on the order of magnitude of 1000 years, like Radium, is way, way worse.

My friend Rachel Sumner wrote a song about this that won the John Lennon National Songwriting Contest last year.

https://rachelsumner.bandcamp.com/track/radium-girls-curie-e...

Come hear it live at Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Festival over Labor Day weekend. Odds are I’ll be working the merch tent for them.

Radium, Lead, Asbestos, Nicotene, R-12 refrigerant, Social Media

Seems like a lot of things that are an initial good, but turn out to be not so hot after a decade or so.

Well, we've known about the dangers of lead for an awfully long time:

> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0960327117737146

I feel like what let it go on so long was the massive campaigns that used blatant racism as misinformation.

Always such an awful story to read and re-remember. The invisible hand sometimes seems to engage in some rather horrible things for the sake of a buck.

The excellent podcast The Constant has a great episode on the health benefits of Radium...

https://www.constantpodcast.com/episodes/for-that-healthy-gl...

It's cool to see an article with almost 20 years of comments

Agreed, and also the comments dropped off steeply 10 years ago in 2014.

> supervisors assured them that rosy cheeks would be the only physical side effect to swallowing the radium-laced pigment

A nice reminder that you shouldn't drink the koolaid unless you can actually see your bosses doing it.

In the incident that coined “drinking the koolaid”, the bosses did drink it.

Jonestown?

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/23/8647095/kool-aid-jonestown-fla...

(semi interesting tangent on the correctness of that phrase)

I’ll pass either way.

When there was worry about the toxicity of TetraEthylLead in gas, Thomas Midgley stood at a podium, poured it over his hands, and sniffed a glass of it for about a minute and told the audience he could do this every day without suffering ill effects. Midgley eventually took a leave of absence from work due to lead poisoning.

The company he worked for chose to create and promote TEL because it was more profitable, as something that could be patented and monopolized, despite Ethanol being a great octane booster and being used with ICEs since their invention. They didn't want to use Ethanol because that would have been a competitive market.

Your boss will happily give himself cancer in the future to save a dime in the now, especially if you get the cancer way way faster than he does. Your boss will do this because his boss will put pressure on him until he does, and because people are stupid and irrational.

This is a pretty interesting rabbit hole, and it seems like if his inventions harmed others at least they harmed him as well!

> in 1944, he was found strangled to death by a device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted. It is often reported that he had been accidentally killed by his own invention, but his death was declared by the coroner to be a suicide.

If actually suicide, perhaps he felt remorse? Elsewhere in the wiki page:

> Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history",[32] and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".[33] Fred Pearce, writing for New Scientist, described Midgley as a "one-man environmental disaster".[34]

What a legacy, hope the patents were worth it.

There is a great ”Behind the Bastards” episode on William Bailey’s involvement in spreading radiation poisoning that also covers the Radium girls [0]

[0] https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

You know, who knows what happened to the investors in US Radium? Where did their funds go, and is there a trail of other problems (or bodies) with their subsequent investments? I'd like to know who I hypothetically should and shouldn't be investing my money with, as I want the world to be a better place.

One of the principals died from complications caused by radiation, according to Wikipedia; am not able to find any significant names via a search. It may have been a somewhat profitable but eventually insignificant company.

Are you saying you want to know if there's a US Radium heir that has a 50% stake in Hostess so you know not to buy Twinkies?

Our entire modern society is built on the blood (and brilliance) of the past. Lessons were learned.

You'll go crazy trying to trace it all.

If you read almost any literature taking place the first half of the 20th century, you'll see that a lot of industries were highly abusive of workers, not just radium industry. I'm sure it's even worse pre-20th century.

For example:

- coal mining (read: "The Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickam) - tons of coal mining injury, death, and chronic illness (black lung). Stakeholders were aware of the causes of black lung but put profit over people.

- horse racing (read: "Seabiscuit" by Laura Hillenbrand) - tons of jockey injury and death (not to mention the pressure jockeys were under to engage in bulimia and other unhealthy practices). Super high jockey suicide rates. Stakeholders were aware but put profit over people.

The textile industry. Dockworkers. Migrant workers (see Cesar Chavez). Youtube content moderators. The list goes on.

> The mysterious deaths were often blamed on syphilis to undermine the womens’ reputations, and many doctors and dentists inexplicably cooperated with the powerful company’s disinformation campaign.

What is wrong with people?!

Money. And the very common belief back then that working people are worse in some way, so they deserve whatever comes their way - if they didn't want to get radium poisoning they could have picked a better industry /s

Unions came up in the middle of the 19th century in the US and 70 years later the women at undark were exploited in the worst kind of ways. Also the regulating bodies were obviously ineffective. Social innovations take a long time to succeed…

The article didn't say whether any of the people involved were prosecuted.

> The report which the company provided to the New Jersey Department of Labor credited Cecil Drinker as the author, however the ominous descriptions of unhealthy conditions were replaced with glowing praise

How did this blatant fraud not automatically prompt the government to come down hard on USR?!

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