ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 เม.ย. 2015
- The Radium Girls were the first people who worked, for years, with one of the world’s most radioactive substances -- and suffered the consequences.
Hosted by: Hank Green
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Today's President of Space:
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Sources:
www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/nyr...
www.popsci.com/scitech/article...
blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscienc...
www.npr.org/2014/12/28/3735100...
www.nytimes.com/1998/10/06/sci...
www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuc...
www.wired.com/2009/12/1221curi...
www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/pod...
helium.imascientist.org.au/201...
webcache.googleusercontent.com...
I think you skipped over the fact that OSHA exists because of these brave women. These factory workers were dying painful, agonising deaths as their bodies began decomposing. Even in the face of death they were fighting the very companies who made them sick to prevent more deaths.
How right you are, Jenni!
LOADS of incidents CAUSED the formation of OSHA. 'Black Lung' from unprotected coal mining for example!
Absolutely, these women are heroes. Staring death in the face, they still worked tirelessly to improve workplace safety all across the United States, and to ensure that this tragedy never happens again.
"Radium Girls" sounds like something straight out of Fallout.
They're the hot new band in fallout 4.
Hunter Ecto It was before the nukes tho
Our high school used our physics teacher's old radioluminescent watch as a radiation source- it was more radioactive than all the alpha, beta and gamma teaching sources and was kept in a thick lead box within the thick lead radiation sources storage box. It would rarely be out for over a minute. Image having that on your arm for years, never mind dealing with that paint without protection daily.
Colin Whiteside I'm somewhat doubtful wearing the watch would meaningfully harm you. Sounds more an over-cautious thing. People don't want to be irradiating students at all after all.
But feel free to sources.
My old high school had asbestos insulation about the physics classroom, and the sinks had had mercury poured down them in years past.
The interesting thing is that it's the phosphor that breaks down in these watches, so if you put a new coat of phosphor on, they'd light up again.
seigeengine My teacher has a wristwatch with radioactive glow in the dark bits but he says that there is so little radioactive material that its like two times background tops
HerraNV .EI This is more or less what I figured. Not only is it a tiny amount, but you have the body of the watch between it and you. Plus with the emphasis on them having ingested the paint..... and never having heard any mention of the watches themselves being dangerous, I figure they're probably essentially not.
The really cool thing about those old watches is that the most common isotope of radium has a half-life of 1600 years, so the radium paint will continue being effective basically forever as long as you refresh the phosphors.
Radioluminescent watches these days use tiny vials of tritium that last more in the 10-20 year range. In this case it's not the phosphor that breaks down, but that tritium has a far shorter half-life,
They're really cool.
An alternative is modern glow in the dark materials. The good stuff can stay bright for an entire night and beyond.
HerraNV .EI 2 times background radiation is nothing. In a plane its about 30 times background radiation(they freaked out because i forgot to mute the geiger counter sound) :P
Colin Whiteside and in your body too!
The first thing that came to my mind when he said "radium soda" was Nuka-Cola Quantum.
o0VicSoh0o And for good reason. A lot of Fallout's "zeerust" technology and shockingly unhealthy practices are based on early 20th century quackery, "miracle cures" and fads. That time period has a history of very real frightening devices and chemicals of this fashion, like a shoe-fitting x-ray machine and even some mercury-rich medicines. Nuka Cola Quantum is sort of a catch-all parody of that.
Malidictus Thanks for the info! That nuclear "mania" in Fallout makes so much more sense after reading it!
o0VicSoh0o Fallout was a thought that remained at the front of my mind through this entire episode! Lol.
VicSoh I did too.
it all makes sense now
Thanks for the should out Hank, my first act as President of Space is to remind everyone to not forget to be awesome, and maybe avoid licking radium coated paint brushes.
"Radium Girls"... There is a band name there
Well guess what? My science teacher has one of those watches. Her giger jumped really high! She showed it to us and described how gruesome of a death they died.
Kyle Simmons Radium Boys, new band name, I call it.
Ben Aaron Please don't erase any more important contributions made by women to the world. It has been done enough. Keep it as girls or don't use it at all.
What about, "Radium Gurlz"?
Ben Aaron I fully, wholeheartedly approve :D
This instance happened around the area where I go to University. In fact, our theatre dept did a play based on the study.
Avonelle Davis Don't do plays
CRAFT
Drama teachers eh. 'Be a tree.' 'But I'm not a tree.' 'Well, pretend.'
***** if you mean what think you mean. Keep being yourself.
Avonelle Davis Was it 'These Shining Lives'? My university did that play back in 2010!
Was it Radium Girls? I was in that!
107, it's crazy. She was born in 1907 and died in 2014, but if I lived to be 107, I'd live to see 2107. 200 years of difference. I could've met this woman.
TheBcoolGuy Chances are if you are healthy, you will live past 107 :P
VintageLJ It is one of the exciting things about living in the 21st Century. I'm about a month away from my 20th birthday, and the knowledge that with genetic anti-ageing treatments and general improvements in living conditions, human lifespans are expected to increase dramatically in the next few decades...ah. I love advanced technology! :D
x
LogicOwl Let's Plays Am I the only one who would want to die past 70 or 80? I had a grand grandmother who was 94 and she barely walked, barely heard, confused my mother with my aunt and took the bathroom for half an hour. That sounds completely horrible. So in other words, want to live until my body becomes crippled, then I am ready to die. And it defintely will cripple before 100.
Frank Sang You have to redmember that people that 90 have been born and lived mostly before many groundbreaking changes in medicine and to mention new ones comming to us in the future. Some things can't be fixed if they are already heavily damaged.
My school performed a play called "Radium Girls," it covered this topic, it was a great play but it was such a horrible thing.
Mine did too. I am the assistant director. We were told to do research 2 months ago and this would have been so helpful! It was such a tragic thing that happened
It really hits you in the heart
+Madison Swartzendruber It's a heartbreaking story, but that script is pure shit.
Madison Swartzendruber my school is doing the play noe
My school is doing the play next year! I can’t wait!
Scishow, I have been Type 1 Diabetic for 21 years now. The other day I was in the ER for an unrelated issue but my blood sugar was also pretty high. They treated the situation differently that usual to avoid Ketoacidosis. Being the first time the had dealt with it differently I got me to thinking; What else have I just accepted and never thought much more about?
I would love to see an episode on Type 1 Diabetes. I enjoy SciShows point of view on subjects and at the very least, you guys always point me in an interesting direction to learn more about any given subject. There's so much you guys could cover, from cures and new treatments in the works to ideas on how it and other autoimmune diseases happen in the first place.
(Note: Just to clarify, I, and I'm sure many others already understand Diabetes quite well already. I'm just interested in SciShows point of view here as it is not only entertaining but somewhat different while still accurate. And there is always more to learn as I just had in my most recent hospital visit.)
"The Radium Girls remain Radioactive'' ..... hmm, sounds like a nice caption for a new SciFi movie. :)
They are dead and yet radioactive. AH
RADIOACTIVE RADIOACTIVE OOOOOOOH
hey you predicted the movie
Imagine Dragons should go on tour with the Radium Girls
Too bad they're all dead
Nah, man, they released an album last February
Gabriel Laureano You really hate them that much? (question valid both ways)
***** well played
Gabriel Laureano every time "Breathing in the Chemicals!" and I am by a customer I will remark "I would hope so Oxygen is a chemical" and have recived many replies of "no it is not" with the last word or two traling off in a way that make them sound more like "wait yeah it is I am just,.. wow we use the term chemicals poorly" and yes we do.
I was in the Play Radium Girls. I played Grace Fryer, a real girl who worked in the New Jersey Radium Factory. She suffered terribly and later died. The Radium Girl's tragic story deserves much more recognition, as I hadn't even heard of it until the play.
i played markley
I love this! I taught this to my students in the fall of 2014 because they are from the town in NJ where the USRC was. We used it to talk about how groups/families have similar properties on the periodic table.
I was in a play called, "These Shining Lives" by Melanie Marnich. It's a beautiful play that follows the four women who stood up and sued the company.
lol
A friend of mine was driving through Canada and when they came back into the US he was stopped at the border because their sensors were picking up large amounts of radiation coming from a WWII compass he had with him. The levels were in the 'back away, do not handle' range and they ended up letting him through anyways with the compass (they wanted nothing to do with it) but told him to never bring it through the border again.
I played with luminous paint when I was a kid. We found it in a house we moved into back in the 60's and it had been there for heaven knows how long.
do you have superpowers now?
Oh no.
If you ever have the opportunity, see the play "These Shining Lives". I saw a production of it at Washington and Jefferson College last fall and it was a powerful play. It really brings out the human stories of these poor women.
The sad thing is... Radium's not even the *most* radioactive substance in the world. It is very radioactive, but not as radioactive as Oganesson, element 118, formerly known as Ununoctium. However, amongst elements that stick around longer than a fraction of a millisecond, Polonium is often cited as the most radioactive element.
Thanks for covering this subject when you guys did. Since then i have seen other channels trying to cash in on your research.
This reminds me of a documentary we had to watch in high school called Radium City. It's all about this exact thing, except more specifically about Westclox in Ottawa, IL.
I believe the documentary can be found online for free if anyone is interested.
***** you may find this interesting: www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCZR1P_the-most-radioactive-town-in-america?guid=449f79b5-8e8f-4b22-97e8-7d7b35e6ace9
: [ > -
***** YVW.
I've heard of the shoe fitting fluoroscopes. Thankfully, I never stuck my foot in one. I thought they were long gone until I looked at that wiki article you shared. Even though the long-term risks from chronic exposure to radiation were known since the 20's, those things were in operation until ... the 1970's! WTF? And people wonder why I'm so damned skeptical.
TC : [ > -
For anyone interested is a more in depth version of the story audible has a book called "Radium Girls" and it is really good.
"I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones *dun* *dun*...." you know the song...
I always learn the coolest things from watching this channel.
THIS IS SUCH PERFECT TIMING! My school is putting on a production of "Radium Girls" that opens on may 1st (At chantilly hs in northern virginia)I am playing one of the girls who gets radium poisoning and dies/gets worse throughout the play. Ill be sure to show this to my cast!
I love this story. It took place in NJ where I used to live. I first read about it in Weird N.J.
Still less cancerous than my teammates on league
Fucking win man. Gg
Bonfire Your comment wins. XD
reported
Bonfire 10/10
Bonfire *clicks tab* Mute VayneMain69
Oh my gosh, My school just decided to do "Radium Girls" by DW Gregory for our spring play! it's so awesome to have this background knowledge!
I remember doing such extensive research on this (all because I wondered what they used on watches now a days ) that I could have sworn you already did an episode on it lol
What happened to all those old shoe store machines that showed your bones inside of the new shoes - to see if they really fit? I used to walk by a shoe store on my way home from school and spent lots of time watching my toes wiggle. Just stick your feet in, push the button, and keep standing while you moved your toes. This was in the 1945-50's and I believe it was Buster Brown shoes. Could be why we don't have Buster Brown shoes anymore or see his dog Tyke, either. By the way, no cancer yet, but my feet have always hurt in shoes with no explanation ever determined.
wow I've never heard of those. Sounds aweseome
Hobostarr180 it’s dangerous that’s why it was stopped
I just finished this novel and it was the most profound story I have ever read and it has changed me forever. There's so many astounding things about the story that I couldn't even begin to tell them all. Hopefully history has learned from their story, sadly that's not the case.
Well presented. The U.S. Radium Corporation plant in Orange, New Jersey (the caption pic) was a disastrous superfund site that caused all nearby structures to be razed and soil removed. The site is now a park! Original pics can be found on the Library of Congress website. (free to copy)
Anyone else hear the phone ringing in the background around 3:30 to 3:40
tehs3raph1m dam you must have good headphones, had to listen 3-4 times to hear it at all. one hell of a catch!
Quite true. I actually heard it first time but didn't compute.
Gabriel Rangel It's actually there throughout the whole video. It's just not as easy to make out until that point.
tehs3raph1m I was taking off my headphones because I thought that phone rings in other room. But then I just thought it's phantom ringing, you know like phantom vibrations.
tehs3raph1m I didn't hear anything at all
this has more information than my last two years of chemistry
Discovering those rocks must have been crazy. Like, this hunk of stone gives off energy and makes tumors disappear. I probably would have started believing in magic if I had been in that time.
I rent studio space in one of the old timex factories in Connecticut, on occasion we still have people that come in and check the radiation around the building
The radium girls is such a good name for a band.
Radium dial painting continued until the 1970s, but as a result of this case proper safety measures were taken to protect workers from exposure and shaping brushes by lip was stopped. Plus there was a lot more awareness of the dangers.
Hank your voice makes me so happy. I love your voice.
Thank you very informative video!
I have a question: Why do we itch, i.e. just out of the blue have an itchy cheek or nose or shoulder? Is it caused by those tiny face mites that were talked about in another video or something else?
This is so professional!
There's a GREAT play written about the radium girls called These Shining Lives, I'm not sure if it's on TH-cam but if it is you should check it out!
"the needle will jump". A nice precise technical term.
Also in the news ~4000 luminescent cadavers rise from their graves each night to seek out and feast on the flesh of the living.
Uriel238 Glowing ones. ;D
***** fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Glowing_one
Eat me, bitch.
Good on the person who turned a scishow episode into a movie.
Love the haircut, Hank!
There's a play about this called "Radium Girls" I saw it a couple months ago and it was pretty good. I didn't realize that it was historically accurate though. Very interesting
FASCINATING
Your body starts self-destructing because your bones are crumbling from the honeycomb effect, your jaw swells up to the size of a soccer ball and falls right out, and your face turns into a nightmare from a horror movie. Ghastly and gruesome! Death would be a mercy!
omg my highschool did a production all about the Radium Girls last year it was aactually a very intresting story
My high school is putting on the play “Radium Girls,” so I’ve been researching all about it.
OMG I was just in the Radium Girls play at my high school! We ended up winning RI Dramafest! Really amazing story.
What is the half-life of radium, BTW?
Desmaad Of its 33 isotopes, the most stable is Radium-226 at 1600 years.
Desmaad "Radium-226, the most common isotope, is an alpha emitter, with accompanying gamma radiation, and has a half-life of about 1600 years. Radium-228, is principally a beta emitter and has a half-life of 5.76 years. Radium-224, an alpha emitter, has a half life of 3.66 days. Radium decays to form isotopes of the radioactive gas radon, which is not chemically reactive. Stable lead is the final product of this lengthy radioactive decay series"
Source: www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/radium.html
Desmaad The other answers are more useful buuut in case you're curious Hydrogen-7 has a half life of 0.000000000000000000000021 seconds (21*10^-24). And now you know.
Oh and in that time light would be able to pass by only 3 protons or 1/10000000 the way across the width of the atom that is decaying.
Desmaad lmgtfy.com/?q=half+life+radium
It has a half life of 3 confirmed
When I was little I had a teddy bear that glowed in the dark, and my grandad would tell me how when he was a little boy glow in the dark toys made you really sick. He had to stop when I started to have nightmares, though.
Did it have radium tho?
Kawaii MintiiKitii no it didn’t, it was a toy manufactured in the 90s lmao
@@Steela100 ok
While I appreciate any attention given the memory of the Radium Girls, this video glazes over the true issues here--- that young (poor) women were subjected to a very harmful substance. If you investigate the Radium Girls, it's a much sadder story than represented here. The burgeoning of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was carried on the radioactive, honey-combed, weakened bones of women trying to do the best for country and family.
When the women began experiencing horrific side effects, they were often written off with attacks against the women's credibility--- in fact, many of the symptoms were blamed on syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease.
I find this video more than a bit callous.
AND- a lot of them were fired as soon as they started showing signs of decline- so they then had less money for medical treatment.
ALSO- he never named the victims
Sir, this is McDonalds
oof
capitalismmmmmmmm
Totally off topic but that shirt is awesome! Blood red is my favorite and even then venous blood is better than arterial or capillary blood
I'm digging the new haircut Hank!
This was so interesting
Radium Springs. A blue water spring near Albany, Ga. where many of us swam as kids. None of
glowed in the dark or had cancer.
but the cold water did cause our privates to shrink albeit only tillwe warmed back up.
I read it in one day, riveting and so sad. Everyone should read this book and see how dangerous radium is.
Hope there will be film maker filming this phenomena
Is there any other way besides being a patron that we could support sci-show?
They should make a movie about these girls
the data of the doses these girls received helped develop the sievert metric for radiation doses. linking radiation dose to likelihood of death within 15yrs.
There is an academic paper (by Rentetzi) asserting that the workplace functioned as a laboratory, and that the lack of protection and encouragement of ingesting radium were intentional, so exactly this kind of data could be gathered. When people are poor, or mentally ill, or black, or prisoners (insert any group of 'undesirables' here) they can become unwilling test subjects.
You guys should do a video on Radon and what it is and how harmful it is if at all!
Is it wrong that I think the Radium Girls would make a great band name?
televisionblitz z No,definitely not.
Only if you put YOUR SORRY ASS in their position. Then chose to sing to its name rather than let you feel the agony of your jaws rotting out of your head. your family came to your radioactive grave site. Their communities and governments did nothing.... much like.... well.... you.
It might be rather distasteful.
Great name for a band.
I have a large collection of radium painted clocks and uranium glassware.
I did an entire chemistry project on this earlier this year
They're...
They're....
They're....
AH I CANNOT HELP MYSELF
They're, RADIOACTIVE, RADIOACTIVE
Radioactive Radioactive!
Wooooooho, Woooooho, radioactive, radioactive
I hope you'll eventually cover the medical examiner who tested some of the Radium Girls, Alexander Gettler in Great Minds. Gettler is considered the founder of modern toxicology and forensics.
i remember reading somewhere about a boy who tried to make a nuke in his garage using smoke detector parts and the radium-laced paint off old alarm clocks. it didnt work but he did give his whole neighborhood way too much radiation exposure.
+arowanafishing yeah his shed was highly radioactive and the area is still radioactive to this day
He tried to make a fission reactor. In the end he made more like a radiothermoelectric generator.
arowanafishing This happened in Pontiac, MI. His name is David Hahn. He is dangerously obsessed with radiation and if you look up pictures of him, his face is seriously messed up from it.
This actually reminded me the TV Series "The Knick", were the first season ends by showing heroine being used as a legit treatment back then. Great series if you ask me, undervalued also i think.
Anyway, there are a lot of examples out there really. We progress if we learn out of them and not do the same mistakes agian. Yet, we jump to the technology wagon again and again without too much thinking unfortunately. We want to sell but not to care about the effects something may have eventually. I hope we get more and more sceptic. I think that would be a social evolution, the "growth" of sceptism.
There was an article in weird nj magazine that covered the sad story of the women, factory & the legal battles in depth.
I am amazed that they used radium in toothpastes and even water! OMG
I guess you could say they felt it in their bones
The radium girls didn't stop in New Jersey. After the dangers of Radium were made public Radium Dial moved it's industry to a town called Ottawa, Illinois which is know as Radium City. The town is just now taking care of the last Radium hot spot. There is a story of a radium girl whose grave was exhumed and her corpse looked like she had just died despite the fact it was exhumed years after her death. The radiation she had been exposed to had killed the micro organisms that cause decomposition.
This is terrifying
My school did the play "Radium Girls" recently.
I saw this in Dark Matter: Twisted but true.
So, can we get a Kickstarter going on "Radium-Jawed Angels" the sequel to "Iron-Jawed Angels?"
I find that last bit pretty crazy. Still radioactive after all those years... I wonder how much of radium did they injest? Or do you not need that much to spike a meter.
Arcadis Torias Well, it's more that radium decays relatively slowly. Fast enough to suck, slow enough to stick around and suck for a long long time.
Hank with a fresh cut.
Dear Mr. Hank Green/ SciShow crew,
Why couldn't you make this video two months ago when my entire class had to do research on everything you covered?
Oh well. Thanks for another great video.
This is just another perfect example of why we need government over site and regulations. Their scientists were careful to always handle the radium from behind a lead shield but the workers were not given that luxury or even informed of the detrimental affects it has on health.
You missed the fact that without these young women OSHA would not exist! Please make an addendum.
We are doing the radium girls play at my school!!
Those glowing paint guys of the early 20th century should've just waited till LEDs and LED strips existed so then they could create their RGB watches tbh
Chilling...
I wonder if the Raduim Girls might do a cover of 'Radioactive'.
4:10
IM WAKIN UP
TO ASH AND DUST
what a great band name, though
What's that feeling when your stomach "drops", like when you see something shocking
Welcome to the power of antioxidants! ;)
Very good Commentator
Moreso than a curiosity, the radium girls should be yet another cautionary tale against ingesting things which haven't existed as food until the last 150 years and that science hasn't definitively absolved as healthy. Prepare for unforeseen consequences, Mr. Freeman.
***** You're totally right. Nobody ingests toxic sludge, so we're not really sure of the consequences. Let's add it to your food for a year, since somebody has to eat it. For science!
9Mystere9 We know it's toxic for a reason.
I have a WWII-era Chelsea Clock M2 Message Center clock hanging on my bedroom wall, which has all the markings and hands painted with radium paint (clue: no matter how many hours the lights have been out, the dial glows; modern phosphorescent paints go dark after only a few minutes). I wonder whether I could borrow an old CD V-700 or CD V-715 radiation survey meter from someplace, and see how many roentgens an hour it's kicking out?
Perfectly, thanks. I took radiation monitor training in the 60s. That's why I'd really look for a CD V-700.
jmcosmos Get something more modern, like a Ludlum w\ a pancake probe. I doubt you'll afford it to just stash it somewhere, but for a rent it's fine.