0:00 In the early nineteen hundreds, some of the young women hired to paint watch dials even painted their teeth with the luminous material for a radiant smile.0:12 Like the corporate negligence that doomed the General Slocum, Admin, this is another story of a crime that history tried to file away as a simple tragedy.0:25 It begins with a miracle substance, discovered in eighteen ninety-eight by Marie and Pierre Curie: Radium.0:34 The file for this week is thick.0:36 It glows with an energy all its own.0:39 In the nineteen teens and twenties, radium was a sensation.0:44 It was woven into toothpaste and cosmetics, hailed as a cure for cancer.0:50 And for a few young women in America, it was the key to a glamorous, well-paying job.0:57 In nineteen seventeen, factories like the U.S.1:01 Radium Corporation began hiring them to paint the faces of watches and military instruments with glowing, radium-laced paint.1:11 The work was precise.1:12 To get a fine point on their brushes, the women were instructed to use their lips… a technique called "lip-pointing." With every watch dial, they ingested a small dose of poison.1:27 The first clue that something was wrong wasn't sickness.1:32 It was light.1:33 The women’s clothes and hair and skin would literally glow in the dark from the radium dust.1:40 They were nicknamed the "ghost girls." Then, the real ghosts appeared.1:46 The first death was in nineteen twenty-three.1:50 The symptoms were horrific.1:52 Anemia.1:52 Bone fractures.1:54 A grotesque condition the coroners named "radium jaw," where the jawbone would rot and literally fall away.2:02 One of the first victims, a woman named Mollie Maggia, suffered exactly that.2:09 Here is where the tragedy becomes a crime.2:12 The U.S.2:13 Radium Corporation KNEW.2:15 They denied any link between the work and the illnesses.2:19 They commissioned their own studies, using unlicensed doctors, to create a cloud of disinformation and suppress medical data that proved they were liable.2:32 They told the women, their families, and the public that radium was perfectly safe.2:39 It was a calculated lie.2:41 But evidence doesn't stay buried forever.2:44 In nineteen twenty-five, a pathologist named Doctor Harrison Martland developed a test that could measure the radium lodged deep inside the women's bodies.2:57 The science was now conclusive.2:59 The very thing that made them glow, the work that gave them independence, was destroying their skeletons from the inside out.3:10 So what does a crime like this look like, when you lay out the pattern?3:15 A new, exciting technology.3:18 A corporate rush to profit.3:20 And a vulnerable workforce told that the risks are minimal.3:25 It's a pattern we see again and again.3:28 The difference here, the thing that changes the outcome, is what the victims did next.3:35 In nineteen twenty-seven, an attorney named Raymond Berry took their case.3:41 The Radium Girls fought back.3:43 Many were already dying, their bodies failing.3:47 They settled out of court because they didn't have time to see a trial through.3:54 But they refused to be silent.3:56 They knew their days were numbered, but they spoke out to save the colleagues still working with the deadly substance.4:06 Their fight, combined with the later death of a wealthy industrialist from a radium-based tonic, finally forced the government to act.4:17 Their sacrifice is not just a sad story.4:20 It’s a landmark case.4:22 It led directly to new labor laws, occupational safety standards, and the establishment of federal rules for handling radioactive materials.4:33 They pulled the file on their own injustice out of the archives and forced the world to read it.4:41 The crime wasn't just the poisoning.4:44 It was the cover-up.4:46 And the legacy of the Radium Girls is the proof that even when a system is designed to erase you, a fight for the truth can change the rules for everyone who comes after.
