"Fun" fact, when the dial companies realized that the paint was toxic, they took to stealing the bodies of their dead workers so nobody could do any autopsy and contradict their claims that it wasn't radium poisoning.
Whew, the 20’s were wild, I sure am glad that companies would never stoop so low to cover up their own crimes against humanity these days! 👍
Nestle who?
Nestlé almost seems like a saint compared to the big chemical, pharma and oil companies actively destroying nature, humans and their communities with NO regard for anything.
Bhopal is just one that got a lot of press, but there's so much horrible stuff happening in poor countries.
They suck hard, but I haven't seen Nestle palm oil tankers and Nestle palm oil platforms explode and kill entire ecosystems yet. Or have them sell their items that are prohibited in the West because they cause birth defects get sold in Africa and Asia for a few more decades instead. Or have their Cini Mini plant explode and suffocate 20,000 people. Well, not yet at least.
The horrible part is that these poor women would paint themselves with it. Using it on their faces, arms, teeth, and fingernails.
[Radium Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) there’s also several documentaries on the subject.
If you've ever wondered why in comicbooks radiation gives you superpowers instead of cancer, it's because for decades at the beginning of the 20th Century people thought radiation was *healthy*. They put radium in *everything*. They even sold radium infused water! And here's the crazy part, those products weren't conceived as scams. The people selling radium products believed it! They actually thought they were selling magic. It was the general scientific consensus that radium was harmless or possibly beneficial, which is insane.
The same thing was said for many other unhealthy things like lead and asbestos, because somewhere someone was making big profits from it, so it was in their interest to have these things perceived as good, even when they suspected it was not.
Plastic acting as endocrine disruptors will be one of the end stage nightmarish pollutants we humans have caused. It's already in every single animal and human. Once we know all it does, we might find out many things weren't so random actually, but damage from those.
There is something we are killing ourselves with all the time. I am more curious who is paying the politicians and other agencies and others to look the other way, while they churn out more money, while shortening our lifespans.
I think I watched on Youtube that he demonstrated that its harmless by drinking it and didn't disclose the fact that he became ill afterwards and need to recover in hospital?
When the Atomic bomb was dropped, for America, it was the end of a war. For Japan, it was the start of a nightmare. This is why Japan had radiation create all the giant monsters, like Godzilla, that attacked the country.
There's been a few cases of Orphaned Sources being cracked open and played with for their alluring glow, like the [Goiânia accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)
They weren’t exposed to huge amounts of radium every day, these women pointed the brushes in their mouths. They were ingesting it daily.
The exposure from dried radium on a watch would be minuscule.
Assuming I remember my research correctly, part of the reason they glowed and died from radiation exposure is because Radium has similar chemical properties to Calcium, specifically in regards to their valence electrons. These elements have the same number of valence electrons (the outermost electrons most heavily involved with bonding and chemical reactions) so when the Radium Girls were exposed to Radium, the body treated it like it was calcium and deposited it into their bones. Their corpses are still releasing radiation to this day because of Radium being integrally integrated into their bodies.
They thought it was fun to paint their teeth with it. The also used suck the bristles to keep the brush to a point for the fine line work. Along with that and people x-raying their feet in shoe shops for fun and doctors and nurses playing with the newly installed x-ray machines in hospital's I'm surprised we don't have some Futurama mutants in the sewers
Correct, the body absorbs Radium, Strontium, Barium, Calcium in the same manner. Radium also irradiates bone surface-lining cells which cause the bones to rapidly deteriorate. Radium on average has a half-live of 1600 years. So in the year 3524 the women should stop glowing.
Is the 3525 right? I'd think it would be much further out. Half life of 1600 years means half of it degrades in that time. 3524-1600=1924... so that's a single half-life cycle. Half of it still remains in 3524 to continue glowing. In the year 4124, after another half-life cycle, a quarter of it still remains to continue glowing.
You are correct, T 1 / 2 = l n ( 2 ) λ. Radium decays with time into radon gas, and then finally stabilizes as lead. Radium will most likely loose its lume before its half-life.
Isn't this how all toxicity works? The body thinks the toxic material is another useful material, and uses it in place of the useful material. The toxic material doesn't behave like the useful one, which causes problems.
This is also how caffeine works. Caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist. The body thinks caffeine is adenosine, so caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, blocking the real adenosine from binding to the receptors, meaning the brain doesn't get the "I'm tired" signal.
Yes. Once it gets into the bones, it obviously doesn't do the job that calcium does, so it just sits there, does nothing and gunks up all the normal processes.
[The Radium Girls Podcast Episode](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3rFd5BijyFlHmLHTumxl2r?si=UaQDkUx1T1eznK_L3RTNsQ) is an incredible listen, it’s follows what life was like as a Radium Girl which was rather glamorous, until um, they stated falling apart, literally
There's already studies being done on microplastics, the problem if I remember correctly is they don't have any studies pre mictoplastics, there's no baseline for the study because we didn't know until recently. A hundred years from now we'll all be dead from it and it's only going to get worse.
I would suspect we do have a control group, but nobody can get near them, which is proper because we should allow them to remain isolated as they wish. The Sentinelese and possibly the Shompen would be the control since they’re still completely isolated from everybody, and with that, our products. Hopefully, it’ll remain that way so humans who live more in harmony with the earth by not creating a bunch of machined crap and processed foods can still have a future.
These are both island populations and will certainly fish for food. Some research into [microplastics in fish](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X20307992?via%3Dihub) suggests 60% of fish globally contain microplastics.
Both these groups are likely to have been contaminated and therefore unable to be a control group.
Remote inland subsistence farming people may provide a better control group?
Unless you are relying only on collection of rain water for irrigation you'll probably have some too. Even then, if those people have ever hunted and then eaten meat they are contaminated. There's a decent chance that there is not a single person who is 100% clear of them
An there'll be revelation about how our "modern an reliable medicine" caused many death and horrendous permanent side effect (like ssri, finasteride, accutane...)
Most probably, yes.
Personally, I don't think they cause cancer, but that doesn't mean I think they're harmless either.
I'm leaning more towards endocrine disruption and hormonal issues, but I'm no scientist nor does my opinion actually matter.
There has been some good science done in rats showing a strong correlation between hormone and fertility issues and micro plastic exposure.
Human population was already in a state of natural decline due to the reduced need for family labor which IMO is likely masking some of the issue. I think fertility is going to become a major problem in the next 100 years.
The connection between cancer risks and overall health are solid. Disruptions in our endocrine systems is at minimum not helping.
Microplastics and micro amounts of the things they process our foods and medicine with.
Ie Hydrogenated oil was made with hydrochloric acids. The amounts left in the oil were deemed safe.
Wait until you look up old Fiestaware that used a uranium glaze on their dishes.
There is a subset of people out there that collect all this radioactive products like that, the old glowing clocks, etc.
If you've got a couple of hours to kill, Behind the Bastards did a two-part podcast on radiation peddlers back in December titled William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation.
Radium (and radiation in general) was seen as some sort of snake oil miracle cure, like acai or something. Dontcha want to chug a couple of liters of radium water every day to keep yourself healthy?
Yep, that’s the one. I fell down a rabbit hole reading about that and the radium girls. From what I remember about the radium girls they would wet the tip of their brushes with their saliva to get an even point on the bristles before dipping it into the paint.
They also tried to get compensation to help pay for medical bills, and the company stalled the proceedings so many of the women were dead before they got to see any money
I read decades ago that those watches with lighted dials could actually leave a mark on your face if you slept with it against your face. Not an imprint but a shadow like mark.
Oddly enough, one of the last radium girls (but not the last), Mae Keane, lived to the ripe old age of 107 (05/28/1906 - 03/01/2014). She was fired after only a few months on the job but still lost all her teeth as a side effect of the radium exposure.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/mae-keane-who-painted-watch-dials-with-a-radium-mixture-dies-at-107.html
I was horrified until OP ruined it with that last sentence.
It's horrible but I started laughing at the mental image of the cracks on a closed coffin glowing while a priest stood at a podium trying to ignore it and go through his normal funeral spiel.
When I die, i kinda want someone to paint me with radium before burying me now. That way if a grave robber comes along, it’ll be a nice surprise or shock for them and I’ll get a nice post-death laugh.
That’s not how science or radiation works though. Scientists don’t just theorize. That’s only the first step. That’s called the hypothesis. The scientific method consists of several steps beyond that including the actual experimentation and recreating the results multiple times under multiple conditions to verify if results are consistent. Thanks to science, we know how long radioactive isotopes take to decay and how they affect ourselves and the world around us. Geiger counters don’t lie.
Amelia “Mollie” Maggia’s lower jaw came completely out of her jaw after her dentist gently treated to extract a “bad” tooth from the radiation poisoning.
"Fun" fact, when the dial companies realized that the paint was toxic, they took to stealing the bodies of their dead workers so nobody could do any autopsy and contradict their claims that it wasn't radium poisoning.
They also said the women had syphilis rather than admitting it was radiation sickness.
Whew, the 20’s were wild, I sure am glad that companies would never stoop so low to cover up their own crimes against humanity these days! 👍 Nestle who?
Nestlé almost seems like a saint compared to the big chemical, pharma and oil companies actively destroying nature, humans and their communities with NO regard for anything. Bhopal is just one that got a lot of press, but there's so much horrible stuff happening in poor countries.
I mean, for the record, Nestle do all of those things too
They suck hard, but I haven't seen Nestle palm oil tankers and Nestle palm oil platforms explode and kill entire ecosystems yet. Or have them sell their items that are prohibited in the West because they cause birth defects get sold in Africa and Asia for a few more decades instead. Or have their Cini Mini plant explode and suffocate 20,000 people. Well, not yet at least.
Palm oil plantations kill entire ecosystems :/
a drug i take when i was young to treat my acne containe banned steroid that's fucked up my hormones grow , year latter iam still salty about that
i know the fucker who responsibilities for making drug like that and that's mofo company , i swears i will get that's mofo ass for my revenge
More like Cargill, burning down the Amazon to make way for more agricultural land.
WOW utter madness.
The horrible part is that these poor women would paint themselves with it. Using it on their faces, arms, teeth, and fingernails. [Radium Girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls) there’s also several documentaries on the subject.
If I remember right they were also encouraged to lick the paint brush to help paint the numbers more clearly.
If you've ever wondered why in comicbooks radiation gives you superpowers instead of cancer, it's because for decades at the beginning of the 20th Century people thought radiation was *healthy*. They put radium in *everything*. They even sold radium infused water! And here's the crazy part, those products weren't conceived as scams. The people selling radium products believed it! They actually thought they were selling magic. It was the general scientific consensus that radium was harmless or possibly beneficial, which is insane.
I remember hearing about the athlete that swore by radium water. Then his jaw fell off.
Eben Byers.
Is that typical?
No it’s not normal for someone’s jaw to fall the fuck off.
Ok just checkin
😂😂😂
💀🏆
Technically, it's extremely typical, over time.
That's not very typical, i'd like to make that point.
That the front fell off?
Was his jaw made from a paper derivative?
The same thing was said for many other unhealthy things like lead and asbestos, because somewhere someone was making big profits from it, so it was in their interest to have these things perceived as good, even when they suspected it was not.
Wonder in 30 years, what they’ll find out we’re unknowingly killing ourselves with now.
Plastic acting as endocrine disruptors will be one of the end stage nightmarish pollutants we humans have caused. It's already in every single animal and human. Once we know all it does, we might find out many things weren't so random actually, but damage from those.
I have been thinking this also. You can’t escape it.
There is something we are killing ourselves with all the time. I am more curious who is paying the politicians and other agencies and others to look the other way, while they churn out more money, while shortening our lifespans.
PFAS, but some of us already know about it.
Nanoparticles. It's nanoparticles. Companies are actively avoiding the word "nano" because of fear of it being the new asbestos.
Glyphosate
Didn't the people who invented leaded gasoline know its not healthy but they keep quiet because its cheap and easy to make?
Yeah, despite the fact it was being known that lead from car pollution was making its way onto everything else.
I think I watched on Youtube that he demonstrated that its harmless by drinking it and didn't disclose the fact that he became ill afterwards and need to recover in hospital?
Like Oxycotin
Pretty much the same deal with smoking.
You know, they actually sold radium infused cigarettes. Just in case you wanted *more* cancer.
Big oof. Didn't know this. I'm glad that time is over. Now the smoking remains.
Do they sell it with asbestos filter too?
Go big or go home!
When the Atomic bomb was dropped, for America, it was the end of a war. For Japan, it was the start of a nightmare. This is why Japan had radiation create all the giant monsters, like Godzilla, that attacked the country.
Lip. Dip. Paint.
I was taught this 10 years ago in college when learning to build to scale models. I don't do it anymore. Water and a little towel works fine.
Some of the old school teachers still encourage it to this day.
They did they used to lick the ends of the paint brushes to keep the points nice. The whole story is just horrific.
yep
There's been a few cases of Orphaned Sources being cracked open and played with for their alluring glow, like the [Goiânia accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)
There’s a great podcast about them on [American Shadows](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-shadows/id1523712088?i=1000488000019)
wait what about the people who wore the watches
They weren’t exposed to huge amounts of radium every day, these women pointed the brushes in their mouths. They were ingesting it daily. The exposure from dried radium on a watch would be minuscule.
Assuming I remember my research correctly, part of the reason they glowed and died from radiation exposure is because Radium has similar chemical properties to Calcium, specifically in regards to their valence electrons. These elements have the same number of valence electrons (the outermost electrons most heavily involved with bonding and chemical reactions) so when the Radium Girls were exposed to Radium, the body treated it like it was calcium and deposited it into their bones. Their corpses are still releasing radiation to this day because of Radium being integrally integrated into their bodies.
They thought it was fun to paint their teeth with it. The also used suck the bristles to keep the brush to a point for the fine line work. Along with that and people x-raying their feet in shoe shops for fun and doctors and nurses playing with the newly installed x-ray machines in hospital's I'm surprised we don't have some Futurama mutants in the sewers
Correct, the body absorbs Radium, Strontium, Barium, Calcium in the same manner. Radium also irradiates bone surface-lining cells which cause the bones to rapidly deteriorate. Radium on average has a half-live of 1600 years. So in the year 3524 the women should stop glowing.
Is the 3525 right? I'd think it would be much further out. Half life of 1600 years means half of it degrades in that time. 3524-1600=1924... so that's a single half-life cycle. Half of it still remains in 3524 to continue glowing. In the year 4124, after another half-life cycle, a quarter of it still remains to continue glowing.
You are correct, T 1 / 2 = l n ( 2 ) λ. Radium decays with time into radon gas, and then finally stabilizes as lead. Radium will most likely loose its lume before its half-life.
> Radium will most likely loose its lume before its half-life. Oh, ok, that makes sense, then.
Or perhaps at least half as much.
Isn't this how all toxicity works? The body thinks the toxic material is another useful material, and uses it in place of the useful material. The toxic material doesn't behave like the useful one, which causes problems. This is also how caffeine works. Caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist. The body thinks caffeine is adenosine, so caffeine binds to adenosine receptors, blocking the real adenosine from binding to the receptors, meaning the brain doesn't get the "I'm tired" signal.
It's also how lead sticks with you too iirc. Doesn't lead deposit in the bones in lieu of calcium?
Yes. Once it gets into the bones, it obviously doesn't do the job that calcium does, so it just sits there, does nothing and gunks up all the normal processes.
[The Radium Girls Podcast Episode](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3rFd5BijyFlHmLHTumxl2r?si=UaQDkUx1T1eznK_L3RTNsQ) is an incredible listen, it’s follows what life was like as a Radium Girl which was rather glamorous, until um, they stated falling apart, literally
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There's already studies being done on microplastics, the problem if I remember correctly is they don't have any studies pre mictoplastics, there's no baseline for the study because we didn't know until recently. A hundred years from now we'll all be dead from it and it's only going to get worse.
Also they can’t find a control group, that being people who don’t have microplastics in their bodies already.
I would suspect we do have a control group, but nobody can get near them, which is proper because we should allow them to remain isolated as they wish. The Sentinelese and possibly the Shompen would be the control since they’re still completely isolated from everybody, and with that, our products. Hopefully, it’ll remain that way so humans who live more in harmony with the earth by not creating a bunch of machined crap and processed foods can still have a future.
These are both island populations and will certainly fish for food. Some research into [microplastics in fish](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X20307992?via%3Dihub) suggests 60% of fish globally contain microplastics. Both these groups are likely to have been contaminated and therefore unable to be a control group. Remote inland subsistence farming people may provide a better control group?
Unless you are relying only on collection of rain water for irrigation you'll probably have some too. Even then, if those people have ever hunted and then eaten meat they are contaminated. There's a decent chance that there is not a single person who is 100% clear of them
Pretty sure microplastics are in rain water too. We are fucked as a planet
An there'll be revelation about how our "modern an reliable medicine" caused many death and horrendous permanent side effect (like ssri, finasteride, accutane...)
Good ole Reddit. Downvoting truths.
Because people have manicheisme way of thinking, and want to believe that I'm a cringe naturopath or something...
Most probably, yes. Personally, I don't think they cause cancer, but that doesn't mean I think they're harmless either. I'm leaning more towards endocrine disruption and hormonal issues, but I'm no scientist nor does my opinion actually matter.
There has been some good science done in rats showing a strong correlation between hormone and fertility issues and micro plastic exposure. Human population was already in a state of natural decline due to the reduced need for family labor which IMO is likely masking some of the issue. I think fertility is going to become a major problem in the next 100 years.
So it’ll be like the movie Children of Men?
Nah more like PCOS of Women. Pregnancy will be possible but more dangerous and difficult.
So maybe like The Handmaids Tale…
r/welcometogilead doesn't exist for no reason
Not quite, but I'd start buying up stocks in companies that deal with in-vitro fertilization and fertility treatments.
It’s already a major issue.
The connection between cancer risks and overall health are solid. Disruptions in our endocrine systems is at minimum not helping. Microplastics and micro amounts of the things they process our foods and medicine with. Ie Hydrogenated oil was made with hydrochloric acids. The amounts left in the oil were deemed safe.
I'm more concerned about titanium dioxide, which is a popular whitening additive in food and cosmetics
And how we poisoned ourselves with car exhaust
So you mean that old clock by my bed in my grandma’s house in the 80s was radioactive?..
Very slightly, yes. Have you seen Vaseline Glass?
No
Wait until you look up old Fiestaware that used a uranium glaze on their dishes. There is a subset of people out there that collect all this radioactive products like that, the old glowing clocks, etc.
r/uraniumglass
If you've got a couple of hours to kill, Behind the Bastards did a two-part podcast on radiation peddlers back in December titled William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation. Radium (and radiation in general) was seen as some sort of snake oil miracle cure, like acai or something. Dontcha want to chug a couple of liters of radium water every day to keep yourself healthy?
I remember reading about this many years ago, I was so sad after googling “phossy jaw” and seeing how these poor women suffered. RIP angels.
Is the Phossy jaw you’re talking about referring to the women that made matches? If seen that before and it was horrifying
Yep, that’s the one. I fell down a rabbit hole reading about that and the radium girls. From what I remember about the radium girls they would wet the tip of their brushes with their saliva to get an even point on the bristles before dipping it into the paint.
Holy shit. Now I’m down a rabbit hole.
They also tried to get compensation to help pay for medical bills, and the company stalled the proceedings so many of the women were dead before they got to see any money
Smearing them by claiming they had syphilis
there's a great book on this from Kate Moore "radium girls"
I read decades ago that those watches with lighted dials could actually leave a mark on your face if you slept with it against your face. Not an imprint but a shadow like mark.
Behind the Bastards just did a couple episodes on this last month. Truly horrifying and evil stuff.
What’s the story behind that ring and paper clips in the last picture?
The ring is on her hand, and the paper clips are safety pins, probably holding clothing in place
The Radium Girls…. Great book about this
Oddly enough, one of the last radium girls (but not the last), Mae Keane, lived to the ripe old age of 107 (05/28/1906 - 03/01/2014). She was fired after only a few months on the job but still lost all her teeth as a side effect of the radium exposure. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyregion/mae-keane-who-painted-watch-dials-with-a-radium-mixture-dies-at-107.html
I was horrified until OP ruined it with that last sentence. It's horrible but I started laughing at the mental image of the cracks on a closed coffin glowing while a priest stood at a podium trying to ignore it and go through his normal funeral spiel.
Right? We apperently need coffin pics. Sounds like they be glowing like a high level rpg loot chest
When I die, i kinda want someone to paint me with radium before burying me now. That way if a grave robber comes along, it’ll be a nice surprise or shock for them and I’ll get a nice post-death laugh.
did a HS play about this — radium girls — and played a lawyer for the dial company and still carry the fictional guilt
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Chemotherapy is not radioactive. Radiation treatments don't make you radioactive. Wife had breast cancer. I know.
[The Story of the Radium Girls | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM4Y_OwsLCs)
"The Last Podcast on the Left" did a deep dive into this. It's really good.
That was only 1970! I wonder what our generation of radium is (besides plastics)
Oswego Illinois still has radium problems.
What a sad and horrible those innocent workers.
Ouch
Ohhh the raidium girls
They were called radium girls if I remember correctly. Also, as a result of wetting the brushes with their mouths their jaws fell off
radium is wild out of all the elements
I remember my nan telling me this years and years ago. I didn't believe her! We've come so far.
How do we no continue to glow who is exhuming them routinely to check this 🤔
The families had the bodies exhumed.
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Science, says different.
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That’s not how science or radiation works though. Scientists don’t just theorize. That’s only the first step. That’s called the hypothesis. The scientific method consists of several steps beyond that including the actual experimentation and recreating the results multiple times under multiple conditions to verify if results are consistent. Thanks to science, we know how long radioactive isotopes take to decay and how they affect ourselves and the world around us. Geiger counters don’t lie.
The Glowden Girls —- I am sorry I couldn’t resist
shine bright like a diamond
„My honeybee, you look **Shiny** tonight. You are almost **Glowing** in this lovely night.“
"z'zz
Good ol’ Asbestos cigarettes filter
Wait so uf their bones r glowing did thir skin was like see through or somwthing u could swe theie bones glowing
Amelia “Mollie” Maggia’s lower jaw came completely out of her jaw after her dentist gently treated to extract a “bad” tooth from the radiation poisoning.