Futility Closet

In 1917, a New Jersey company began hiring young women to paint luminous marks on the faces of watches and clocks. As time went on, they began to exhibit alarming symptoms, and a struggle ensued to establish the cause. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Radium Girls, a landmark case in labor safety. We'll also consider some resurrected yeast and puzzle over a posthumous journey. Intro: Joseph Underwood was posting phony appeals for money in 1833. The earliest known written reference to baseball appeared in England. Sources for our feature on the Radium Girls: Claudia Clark, Radium Girls : Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, 1997. Ross M. Mullner, Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy, 1999. Robert R. Johnson, Romancing the Atom: Nuclear Infatuation From the Radium Girls to Fukushima, 2012. Dolly Setton, "The Radium Girls: The Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark," Natural History 129:1 (December 2020/January 2021)