Oh well, you know, back the in these days people also wore wristwatches that glew glowed in the dark. because they were made of Radium-226, and also used x-ray machines as a party gimmick. And when you felt a little sick you went to your local drug store and got yourself a bit of Radithor, a wonder medicine sold in a flask containing water enhanced with radioactive radium isotopes to cure your sickness.
You could have lots of fun as an adult too, back in the days. Maybe not the healthiest life decisions possibly, though, in rerospective.
But luckily there's another medicine product from Bayer called Heroin to compensate, or Pervitin to the rescue. Latter is nowadays called Methamphetamine.
A lot of the women who painted the watch hands with radium-226 licked the brushes to get a fine tip on them and ended up getting bone cancer, bone necrosis of the jaw, tooth decay and other unpleasant health problems.
I saw in Illinois one such factory for alarm clocks with the pretty glowing green clock hands. It was superfund clean up site, the building, basement, and all the grounds there are now just a big pit, all buildings in that blocked boarded up.
That was the home of the second batch of radium girls. And having learned about it, it felt like someone went out of their way to spread the radium around that town as much as possible.
Some of them their jaw bones fell off. Most of them were late teens early 20’s It’s a wild story. The radium girls book just skims the surface.
I have a radium clock and just think about the poor girl who painted it.
And let's not forget the white phosphorus, which was used way back in matchsticks, because it was cheaper than the safer red phosphorus. Caused quite a "nice" ailment called phossy jaw...
Bingo. Not sure why the story is suddenly changing, but the ladies were in fact trained to do specifically that, even after the company knew it was dangerous, because it was the best way to get a fine tip.
It’s so fucked. I don’t think any of them received any sort of financial reconciliation. They essentially kept pushing back the trials until the last one died.
Without government regulation, this could easily happen today.
ffs it's 2026 and people still lick envelopes. It's weird to me both that a business would mandate licking a chemical and that employees would even do it. This wasn't the dark ages, mind you, people should have known better.
But this was the early 1900s. The general public didn’t know the dangers of radium. The companies that hired these girls did everything they could to hide how toxic it is, including hiring phony doctors and toxicologists to preform exams.
And envelope glue isn’t toxic. You watch too much Seinfeld.
I know it's not toxic lol my point is that it's a chemical, it tastes weird, and it's unpleasant. I've never licked a radioactive isotope (that I know of) but I can't imagine it tastes like strawberry jam and leaves you with a pleasant mouth feel.
I mean, it's perfectly safe to lick a clean cotton ball, but if my boss told me to do it, I'd tell them where they could shove it.
Your caveat that you never knowingly licked a radioactive isotope is now making me question whether I have accidentally done that. This will haunt me for the rest of my life😮💨
Is that why? I’m not surprised. I used to have periods of stomach issues and bought it in bottles. Those seemed to have disappeared about a decade ago.
I want to make anyone reading this not in jest know that the amount of imodium (loperamide is the name of the medication generic) you have to take to get even a small oxycodone like buzz also causes painful heart arrhythmias (prolonged QT) and severe constipation that can cause an intestinal blockage needing surgery. You do not want to abuse anti diarrheals, please do not do this it gets really ugly.
Back in the 2020s they ate corn sugar and wheat in everything. They drove cars and made electricity by burning coal and oil. They poisoned their crops so they didn't have to deal with weeds. And they dumped chemicals in all major water bodies and then ate the aquatic life and drank the polluted water.
And can you believe they knew about microplastics already and yet they just walked around all day clothed in garments made of woven polyester that shed "lint" (actually plastic fragments) everywhere they went?
Yep, radioactive fluorescent paint was used for a long time beyond that. In clocks and wristwatches you'd find Radium based paints until the 1960s, Tritium based paints even even until the 90s in some places.
Modern clocks may still use gaseous tritium. It's said the latter is safe.
The modern ones are Phosphorescent. They have to be "charged" with light. The old radioactive stuff would still be glowing just the same after spending a year in a dark closet. But once it stopped glowing it was done, no charging it back up.
Glass vials containing a phosphor and tritium gas. Used by a number of watch-makers (Ball Watches being one of the more creative ones when it comes to colors). Same thing for night-sights on firearms. If the vials are broken, the gas dissipates quickly so it’s a better alternative than radium based glow-in-the-dark stuff.
Same way as copper bracelets work: gives you something to do that you can give credit to when you get better because your body naturally fights infections and headaches usually end.
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u/SinoSoul 1d ago edited 1d ago
Real *polonium
plutoniumin toy bomb, real coke in Coca Cola. Kids back then lived their best lives.