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😮💨
2.2k
u/SinoSoul 1d ago edited 1d ago
Real *polonium
plutoniumin toy bomb, real coke in Coca Cola. Kids back then lived their best lives.